NBR Sponsorship of the Arts Awards 2010

Premier Award 2010: James Wallace and the Wallace Arts Trust

The TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre in Mt Roskill, Auckland represents a major new cultural destination for New Zealanders. On its first day open, August 15, it welcomed more than 5000 visitors. This event was the culmination of more than a year’s planning between the Wallace Arts Trust and Auckland City Council.

The centre is a unique combination of philanthropic, civic and commercial interests in furthering the arts and creating an institution of wide cultural, tourist and social benefit.

The centre provides Auckland with a gallery predominantly focused on New Zealand contemporary art and will also be a venue for touring shows not accommodated by other arts institutions.

Auckland City Council, with support from TSB Bank, paid for the restoration of the Pah Homestead and, in turn, The Wallace Arts Trust provided more than $500,000 to fit out the homestead. The trust is responsible for the running costs and administration of the arts centre, providing free entry to the public to exhibitions curated from the Wallace Arts Trust Collection.

Since the opening the centre has had more than 30,000 visitors and is currently displaying its third major exhibition.

Mr Wallace gives full credit to former mayor John Banks for enabling the Pah Homestead lease, as part of a farsighted vision for the building.

Mr Banks not only came up with the idea but also secured a commitment from the TSB Bank for support.

The partnership has created a significant cultural attraction for the city and has ensured the historic homestead remains accessible to the public.

The park and homestead have a rich and colourful history. The original 162ha property was bought from Maori by early Auckland settler and land dealer William Hart in 1843. James Williamson built the Pah Homestead between 1877 and 1879. It was the largest house in the Auckland province at the time. The park today has one of the finest collections of large and rare exotic trees in Auckland.

The Wallace collection is the largest and most important private collection in New Zealand.

The Wallace Arts Trust also has a partnership with Otago University sponsoring an artist-in-residence in a separate apartment at the homestead.

TSB Bank as the naming rights sponsor also contributes to the support of the gallery as a way of securing visibility in the Auckland market.

The value of the Wallace sponsorship is $500,000 plus.

Other awards

Five-Star Winner 2010: Pacific Blue

Over the past three years the last national New Zealand Symphony orchestra tour in each calendar year has become known as the Pacific Blue Tour.

The tours to seven cities have featured major overseas soloists; in 2009 the tour of Scandinavian soprano, Solveig Kringelborn, conducted by Leif Segerstam was sponsored.

Each domestic tour attracts an audience of approximately 8000 and includes opportunities for hospitality with customers, business clients and prospects.

In 2007, Pacific Blue and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra entered a significant four-year partnership. The NZSO offered Pacific Blue the opportunity to become official airline and a principal sponsor of the NZSO.

The NZSO is the only arts body in the country with a major national and international perspective and responsibility. It is also a major user of domestic air travel.

For each year of the agreement the NZSO has made best endeavours to provide all possible airfare business to Pacific Blue. In addition, Pacific Blue received naming rights each year to a national tour and a principal sponsor benefit package. These benefits have included branding, client entertainment opportunities, advertising/direct marketing and the exclusive benefits of Pacific Blue-branded compact disks and a private sponsor concert.

As a new brand in the marketplace, this provided Pacific Blue with an opportunity to secure new business and increase brand visibility, while supporting one of the country’s iconic cultural brands.

The opportunity to tap into the NZSO’s audience to drive new business was another key element. Direct access to target audiences through advertising opportunities in concert programmes has allowed Pacific Blue to reach the 40 plus target age group.

As part of the sponsorship deal the NZSO was to receive, in the third year of the sponsorship (2010), contra international return flights for the full orchestra (105 people) to tour to Europe.

The concerts in Asia and Europe, which took place over the past few weeks, were very successful with sellout shows and international critical acclaim.

This ability to perform regularly in Europe, Asia and the US to an international standard has been seen as fundamental to the NZSO’s continued growth and development.

Pacific Blue obtained approximately $600,000 in NZSO domestic airline business and gained extensive brands awareness as well as attracting orchestra supporters. Strengthened client relationships and networking objectives were met through hosting and built the cultural credibility of the Pacific Blue brand.

It met corporate citizen responsibility objectives by passing through sponsor benefits to its nominated charity, Variety,

The value of its sponsorship is more than $100,000 a year in addition to flights for the full orchestra and operations team (105 people) to tour to Europe, along with contra international freight for the instrument transportation required.

Gold sponsor

Five-Star Winner 2010: New Zealand Post

New Zealand Post has sponsored the New Zealand International Arts Festival since 1994 and has been a gold sponsor for the past six festivals. In 2010 it had naming rights to the New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week.

The festival sold 103,000 tickets issued for the 237 ticketed performances. NZ Post had branding on all ticket wallets and across all generic festival marketing and key event materials. Close to 15,000 tickets were sold to the Writers and Readers Week events.

The NZ Post Writers and Readers featured 45 New Zealand and international writers at 42 events. The authors included Simon Schama and Richard Dawkins.

New Zealand Post also sponsored two shows: The Nina Simone Tribute and Once Upon a Deadline.

NZ Post’s business objective for this sponsorship was to demonstrate that the company is a leading New Zealand corporate and that it is creative, world-class and innovative. The company used the festival to build customer, media and stakeholder relationships. It also sought to build brand profile and awareness among consumers (predominantly in Wellington) and festival attendees about NZ Post’s sponsorships, demonstrating innovation and creativity.

NZ Post estimated that the value of the media spend in which it was represented was about $700,000 – ($188,000 radio), ($173,639 print), ($317,000 TV) ($33,568 magazines).

There was a high level of public engagement with 83,287 unique visitors viewing the festival website 147,000 times. Of these, Writers and Readers attracted 24,500 page views (3.72% of total and fourth most popular page after home/theatre/music).

The company built customer, media and stakeholder relationships with four major events including the hosting of the festival’s premier show – Sing the Truth – The Music of Nina Simone and the gala opening of Writers and Readers Week.

The relationship between the festival and NZ Post allowed for complementary leveraging activity, which assisted greatly with promoting New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week which included Wellington bus signage, postcards, outdoor magnetic poetry sites, environmental cubes.

The company also provided postage and courier services to the festival as well as assistance with practical items of branding and marketing collateral – such as ticket wallets, lanyards, postcards competition.

Survey figures show the festival has wide recognition, with 72% of New Zealanders and 94% of Wellingtonians knowing about the festival and 21% of the population associating NZ Post with the festival. The value of sponsorship is in excess of $100,000.

Wind sculptures

Five-Star Winner 2010: Meridian Energy

Akau Tangi by Phil Dadson was formally launched by Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand earlier this year, the fifth of a series of sculptures sponsored by Meridian Energy. This final work completes a collection of wind-motivated sculptures celebrating Wellington’s wind, dynamism and creativity. Akau Tangi complements four other sculptures in the Meridian Walkway Series: Kon Dimopoulos’s Pacific Grass, Andrew Drummond’s Tower of Light, Leon van den Eijkel’s Urban Forest and Phil Price’s Zephyrometer.

The idea of a wind sculpture series was proposed by a former Wellington Sculpture Trust member, novelist Lloyd Jones.

Meridian recognised the synergy between kinetic art powered by wind,and the wind-powered electricity generation emerging as a focus for Meridian.

The shared vision for this partnership was to combine public art with a celebration of Wellington’s best-known natural characteristic, the wind, bringing together notions of wind power in New Zealand’s energy future and the creative use of the wind.

As well as the wind turbine in the hills above Wellington the company, through its West Wind project on the Wellington South coast, has successfully commissioned 62 turbines.

The series also challenged the creative and engineering abilities of the artists, given the requirements of kinetic art, weather conditions and the large scale of the sites.

Wellington Sculpture Trust has commissioned a number of sculptures in the city since 1982, and has been associated with 24 sculptures in Wellington city.

A key objective for Meridian as sponsor partner was to encourage Wellingtonians to think differently about the wind, that is, as a motivating force for art forms, and ultimately as a source of clean, renewable energy.

The wind sculpture sponsorship played a part in helping Meridian strengthen positive working relationships with the council, a key stakeholder in the consenting process for West Wind and other development projects in the Wellington region, as well as providing a positive perception of Meridian by Wellingtonians.

The value of the sponsorship was upward of $750,000 over 10 years.

Lindsay McElroy (TSB Bank), Nicholas Butler (Wallace Arts Trust), Kevin Murphy (Managing Director, TSB Bank), Paula Thornburrow (Wallace Arts Trust) and Auckland mayor Len Brown