Covid 19 coronavirus: the government launches a new summer advertising campaign

The government has launched a new $ 2.5 million ad campaign aimed at encouraging New Zealanders to continue using its Covid-19 tracking app over the summer.

It’s called the “Make Summer Unstoppable” campaign and it debuted on the ad break during the Black Caps test in Wellington this afternoon.

Speaking to the media in Basin, the Minister responsible for Covid-19, Chris Hipkins, said that New Zealand should really be proud of its Covid-19 prevention efforts.

“We are one of the few countries in the world that may be doing this,” he said, pointing to the crowd watching the game.

“But we can’t take anything for granted. If we want to maintain that freedom over the summer, if we want the summer to be unstoppable, we all have to keep doing the right thing.”

This summer, four ads will play on Kiwi’s television screens and social media, all following the same theme: encouraging people to search.

In one, a man and his partner enter a pool party, but they are all frozen in time.

“Summer, it stopped,” says the man, and asks his partner if she had scanned the Covid-19 tracking app.

As soon as you return and scan, the party continues as normal.

Hipkins said the ads were “a little lighter” than other Covid-19 ad campaigns the government had run in the past.

“But it’s a reminder to all of us that we are actually very, very lucky compared to the rest of the world, we want to keep that life.”

Data from the Covid-19 tracking app shows New Zealanders have scanned less and less in recent months.

Hipkins said that people tend to relax when things are going well.

The ads, he said, are reminders that “we make our own luck.”

“Look at the United States and on Thanksgiving, for example, they saw a massive increase in the number of cases they were treating as people were so much more mobile.”

He said New Zealanders tended to be much more mobile during the summer, so the ad was designed to help remind people not to be complacent.

The campaign costs $ 2.5 million, but Hipkins said it was “a fraction” of the cost of another outbreak.