Despite their genuinely significant role in shaping which startups do and don’t succeed in NZ, Venture Capital firms have been by and large relegated to a line item in stories about capital raises. Within the industry, Icehouse Ventures had been widely recognised as the country’s most active and important VC group, but not amongst the wider public.

Over the course of the past three years, we have engaged in an active campaign to grow Icehouse Ventures’ voice on the most important topics facing the innovation ecosystem in New Zealand. We have leveraged the existing big ideas of the firm’s partners, sophisticated data sets on portfolio companies, and more narrative-driven articles about their investments, to accurately reflect Icehouse Ventures’ outsized role in New Zealand tech.

Results
3x the S.O.V. of the next VC firm in NZ in 2024
15+ Icehouse Ventures brand stories in 2024
60 stories about Icehouse supported startups
3x monthly reactive media opp's per month
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As an early employee and investor of some of NZ’s best known startups, Rowan Simpson has long been known and respected in the business world. But part of that reputation was also based on his express goal to avoid the limelight. With a new book detailing his years of grafting and the lessons he'd learned along the way, we needed to find a way to tell Rowan's story to the broad swathe of New Zealanders.

Despite being self-published, which is apparently a red flag amongst certain camps, Rowan's memoir was a rare contribution to NZ's threadbare business lit landscape. Our strategy involved mining the book for excerpts, click-worthy stories, and other details that would be of interest to the various media sources and creating highly targeted interviews and stories. Within the first week, sales were close to exceeding 1,000 books, and Rowan was in every media outlet throughout NZ.

Results
9 x online feature stories
4 x national radio interviews
5 x Podcast features
Prime Time TVNZ Q and A Interview
Nearly 2k books sold
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As a world leading airline, it’s sometimes hard to stop and smell the roses. But 20 years operating in New Zealand was a cause for celebration. While anniversaries can be a hard sell, we took a different approach and made this media celebration of an industry-defining airline one to remember.

We took a two tiered approach, a classical media event in both the North and South Island, as well as this we sent NZ Herald's aviation editor to Dubai to get a feeling from the central hub. The result was a wonderful recap of the incredible aviation milestones Emirates has been a part of for New Zealand.

Results
20+ feature stories online and in print
NZ’s 20 year PR rollout will now form the template for future anniversary campaigns globally
1 x industry milestone celebrated by the entire aviation community
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Fusion energy, if solved, poses the ultimate answer to the world's largest climate concerns. OpenStar believes they can solve this atomic riddle from Wellington, in a classic case of world-shaking kiwi ingenuity. This story needed to be told in a way that underlined the importance of the technology, and put the NZ public on a crash course in nuclear physics.

We had told the incredible OpenStar story locally, to great success. However, when one of the most exciting companies in New Zealand was set for its biggest announcement to date - the achievement of its first nuclear plasma reaction - we knew this story needed to be told on the global stage.

Results
Features in CNN, Financial Times, IEEE Spectrum, Cosmos Magazine
21x Premium online news features
7x Live broadcast interviews
Over 225 million global reach
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K Road is an Auckland street famous for its nightlife, colourful characters, and stylish businesses. A combination of road works and the pandemic meant foot traffic was down though, and they needed a fresh spike in ‘hype’ for the infamous stretch of road.

Alongside ad agency Motion Sickness, we developed a perfume which smells of NZ’s most beloved and maligned street. The resulting high fashion advertisements grabbed headlines all over the country, had tweens and grown men lining up outside stores for a chance to buy the perfume, and generated significant buzz for the street.

Results
2x TV broadcast features
7x Radio broadcast features
1x Radio live-to-air interview
18x Online mainstream stories (Stuff, RNZ, Newshub, etc.)
1x Print feature in Viva
4x Social media stories (TVNZ Re:, Newstalk ZB, Viva)
50+ additional syndications
1x road full of businesses back on their feet
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By 2021, startup accelerator Ministry of Awesome had been doing incredible work for years, but were all but unknown outside of Christchurch. To achieve larger contracts and affect the change they wanted to see, they needed to make a name for themselves on the national stage.

Our process of putting the Ministry of Awesome on the map was a simple exercise in effective storytelling. Over the course of two years, we leaned on the startup community MoA had already built, using their individual successes to tell the broader story of Christchurch’s fast growing startup hub. The strategic campaign transformed the accelerator from relative obscurity to become a nationally significant organisation.

Results
‍15+ broadcast interviews on TV, online and print
Ongoing column on NZ’s largest news site
40+ stories on MoA and its various programmes
Major Government & private grants
Sold-out national conferences and programmes
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The New Zealand Herpes Foundation had being fighting the stubborn stigma around herpes since being created, to no real avail. But what better way to normalise something than to hear it from your favourite heroes? Recruiting the likes of Sir Graeme Henry and Buck Shelford, Motion Sickness embarked on a mission to make NZ the best place in the world to have herpes.

The campaign spread far and wide, from television interviews on ABC Breakfast in Australia to major features across all NZ national media. Each flying the flag of anti-stigma and acceptance. By the end of the campaign New Zealand had become the best place in the world to have herpes.

Results
10x broadcast interviews
20x pieces of influencer social coverage
47x stories totally 10’s of millions of impressions
Gold for Charity PR at 2025 Axis Awards

Businesses doing the same good work year after year don’t always make for stand out profile stories. For Unleashed software, already a global industry leader in inventory management, we recognised what separated their voice wasn’t fancy business stories, but the insights they can contribute to the wider independent manufacturing industry.

Leaning on Unleashed’s sophisticated customer data sets, we built a global Unleashed Manufacturing Report that looked into what we coined the 'overstocking crisis'. The campaign, with releases broken out between industry rags and mainstream news, grabbed headlines in more than 30 media outlets. The success of the initial campaign has seen things evolve into a quarterly campaign, giving up to date insights to manufacturers across the UK and ANZ.

Results
4x broadcast features
37x trade stories
7x Print stories
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