New Zealand Herald Turns Its Own Press Into a 150-Year Story
The New Zealand Herald's '150 Years' campaign, created by DraftFCB Auckland and production company Assembly in September 2012, is a film advertisement in which a complete animation was printed frame-by-frame on a giant roll of newsprint and brought to life by running it through the newspaper's own NZ$50 million printing press in a single live take.
The campaign arrived at a pivotal moment for the Herald. As reported by assemblyltd.com and corroborated by clapboard.com, the advertisement was produced to mark the paper's move from broadsheet to compact weekday format on 10 September 2012, a structural reinvention that demanded a creative statement equal in scale to the occasion. Rather than producing a conventional television commercial or digital announcement, DraftFCB Auckland chose to make the newspaper's own industrial infrastructure the medium of expression. The printing press, the very machine responsible for 150 years of daily editions reaching New Zealand readers, became the camera, the projector, and the protagonist simultaneously.
In the New Zealand market, where the Herald stands as the country's most widely circulated daily newspaper, the campaign needed to do more than announce a redesign. It had to reaffirm the paper's identity as a national institution while signalling creative ambition and modernity. The concept united heritage and innovation without contradiction, using an entirely analogue mechanism — newsprint on a press — to produce something that had never been attempted before anywhere in the world, according to clapboard.com. The result carries a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100, reflecting its technical originality and the clarity of its strategic premise within the New Zealand media landscape.
New Zealand newspaper advertising revenue fell from NZ$582 million in 2011 to NZ$540 million in 2012, a decline of 7.2 percent, according to Comcom Govt Nz. That contraction placed every major print title in the country under renewed pressure to justify its relevance to both readers and advertisers, and the New Zealand Herald was not exempt from that pressure.
Online advertising revenue across New Zealand grew from NZ$328 million in 2011 to NZ$366 million in 2012, an increase of 11.6 percent, according to comcom.govt.nz. The direction of travel was unmistakable. Digital-native news platforms and aggregators were absorbing audience time and advertiser spend that had previously belonged to print. Competitors including Stuff, operated by Fairfax Media New Zealand, were accelerating their digital investment, placing additional competitive weight on the Herald to demonstrate that print could still command cultural authority and reader loyalty in the New Zealand market.
DraftFCB Auckland's strategic response was to avoid the defensive posture common to legacy media relaunches. Rather than arguing that print remained viable by citing circulation data or editorial quality, the agency chose to dramatise the physical reality of the printing process itself. The insight was precise: the same industrial machinery that had produced the Herald for generations was, in the right creative hands, capable of producing something extraordinary and entirely new. That reframe transformed a potential liability — the paper's deep roots in analogue production — into the campaign's central asset. In a New Zealand media environment increasingly defined by screens, the '150 Years' campaign made the press itself the most compelling screen of all.
Director Jonny Kofoed led the production for Assembly, with the creative team at DraftFCB Auckland comprising Group Executive Creative Director James Mok, Executive Creative Director Regan Grafton, Senior Art Director Kelly Lovelock, and Senior Copywriter Peter Vegas, as documented by clapboard.com and adsoftheworld.com.
The technical challenge the team set themselves was formidable. According to clapboard.com, the final animation roll weighed one tonne and contained 3,000 individual frames, each printed in sequence on giant rolls of newsprint. The entire film was then captured in a single live take, with an infrared detector used to synchronise the frame rate of the camera with the speed of the press. Type Director Len Cheeseman handled the typographic execution, ensuring that the lettering and imagery survived the physical demands of high-speed newsprint printing without losing legibility or visual coherence. Technical Director Rhys Dippie managed the synchronisation infrastructure that made the live capture possible, as credited by clapboard.com.
Executive Producer Amanda Chambers oversaw production logistics for Assembly, while Head of TV Esther Watkins and TV Producer Sascha Mortimer managed the broadcast delivery pipeline from the DraftFCB Auckland side. The music for the film was composed and produced to sit in sync with the mechanical rhythm of the press, reinforcing the sense that every element of the advertisement — sound, image, and motion — emerged from the same physical source. The production achieved something that advertising production in New Zealand had not previously attempted: using a newspaper's own industrial process as a filmmaking apparatus, resulting in a piece of work that is inseparable from the machinery and the institution that created it.
No verified performance data for the '150 Years' campaign is publicly available in terms of viewership figures, earned media reach, or measurable audience response metrics. The campaign does not appear in publicly accessible award show results from major New Zealand advertising industry bodies. Assessment therefore rests on structural and contextual analysis.
The campaign's core effectiveness lies in its strategic coherence. The mechanism — printing a film on newsprint and animating it through the Herald's own press — is not a stylistic choice applied to a separate idea. It is the idea. That unity of concept and execution eliminates the gap between message and medium that weakens many institutional anniversary campaigns. For a newspaper asserting its continuing relevance in a New Zealand market where print advertising revenue was contracting, as documented by comcom.govt.nz, the choice to make the press itself the hero was structurally sound.
The world-first production claim, as reported by clapboard.com, provides genuine differentiation in a category where legacy media brands risk producing self-congratulatory content that fails to engage audiences beyond their existing readership. The single live take, the one-tonne animation roll, and the infrared synchronisation system each represent commitments of craft that signal seriousness of intent. In the New Zealand media and entertainment category, campaigns of this technical ambition from a domestic newspaper title remain rare. The Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes a genuinely original idea with precision, while acknowledging that without documented performance outcomes, its full impact on audience perception and commercial results for the Herald cannot be confirmed.
The '150 Years' campaign was a 2012 film advertisement created by DraftFCB Auckland to mark the New Zealand Herald's relaunch as a compact weekday format. The ad was produced by printing a 3,000-frame animation on newsprint and running it through the Herald's NZ$50 million printing press in a single live take, according to clapboard.com.
DraftFCB Auckland created the '150 Years' campaign for the New Zealand Herald in September 2012. The creative team was led by Group Executive Creative Director James Mok and Executive Creative Director Regan Grafton, with production handled by Assembly and directed by Jonny Kofoed, as documented by clapboard.com and adsoftheworld.com.
The New Zealand Herald moved from broadsheet to compact weekday format on 10 September 2012, according to assemblyltd.com. The campaign marked this structural reinvention while asserting the paper's historical authority. New Zealand newspaper advertising revenue had declined 7.2 percent year-on-year in 2012, according to comcom.govt.nz, making a bold creative statement strategically necessary.
The '150 Years' advertisement was the first film produced by printing every frame onto a giant newsprint roll and animating it through a live newspaper printing press, according to clapboard.com. The one-tonne, 3,000-frame roll was captured in a single take using an infrared detector to synchronise camera and press speed.
The New Zealand Herald '150 Years' campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's genuine technical originality and strategic coherence in the New Zealand media market, while noting that no publicly verified performance data exists to confirm its measurable commercial impact for the Herald.
Jonny Kofoed directed the '150 Years' film for production company Assembly, as credited by clapboard.com and adsoftheworld.com. Technical Director Rhys Dippie managed the synchronisation system enabling live capture, Type Director Len Cheeseman handled typographic execution, and Executive Producer Amanda Chambers oversaw logistics for the New Zealand production.
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