2009: Watching James Cook
June 21, 2025
By AHNZ
Tasti are a heritage New Zealand food manufacturer with roots going back to 1932. To sling snack bars in c.2009 they commissioned their first TV commercial with Contagion advertising agency.
Their ‘Not Quite Kiwi’ campaign featured Ohakune Carrot, Gore Trout, D.E.K.A sign, Paeroa L&P bottle, Phar Lap riding a whale, red socks, pavlova, Opo the Dolphin, Maui taming the sun, policemen blowing on pies, Taihape Gumboot. and much more. For example, we see Auckland City and the Tirau sheep and dog in the scene.
The entire catalogue of iconic Kiwi memes is in the credits which you can view at the end of Tasti’s 2013 Youtube video below.
It’s a beautiful and clever advert and nothing in the 2020s comes remotely close.
I’d say that’s down to the changed media market where all the advertising revenue has been sucked out of TV and gone online. This observation applies equally quality of journalism today compared to what it used to be: Nothing comes close. Poor mainstream news, where could it turn? To Government. Journalism was for sale and propaganda was the only one buying. COVID PSAs must have been the biggest client. And then there were direct cash injections to improve the quality of journalism
Propaganda takes over
So the only thing we’ve seen as good as this old free market advert has been Rachel House’s Hollywood voice-overs to animated frogs telling us our water stinks and we need Labour 6.0 to nationalise it and call it ‘Three Waters’.
“In the midst of the Great Depression, two friends, Oswald Lawless and Victor Watson started making and selling crystallised ginger. Their ambitions were modest: they needed to create jobs for themselves so they could feed their families. They started in 1932 with a factory in Auckland’s Gillies Ave and in 1935 moved to a bigger factory in Enfield St, Mt Eden, now the site of the Horse and Trap Pub.” – Tasti.co.nz/history
“…a cliche-filled online and print campaign in September last year. A few months back it took the next logical step down that path, launching its first ever TVC with a very colloquial remix of OMC’s How Bizarre and some completely over the top, almost ironic patriotism. And while some in adland didn’t seem too keen on it, consumers seem to be, because the ad has taken out the August instalment of Colmar Brunton’s Ad Impact Award..The animation was done by Watermark.” – Gratuitous Kiwiana wins the day as Tasti and Contagion take Colmar Brunton’s August Ad Impact Award, stoppress.co.nz (2013)
“Let’s be honest it was a damn good ad from a time when mocking ourselves was the norm, before cancel culture.over blown racism ,radicalized politicians etc.” – Darryl Sullivan to AHNZ (2023)
The Savage Coloniser
Garrick Tremain created a similar scene in 2023 with his Watching James Cook cartoon (left.) It shows Cook being deingrated as food by yet another Woke White Liberal woman with a tiki around her neck. The cooking fire is fueled by Arts Grants and Arts Awards. It has become mainstream and normal to tear down New Zealand’s former great heros. And, to be paid by the government to do so.
How’s your appetite? Does it make you want a Tasti bar?
One of the most famous examples was Tusiata Avia, a part-Samoan New Zealander who attacked Cook’s legacy in her poem The Savage Coloniser (2023.) “James, I heard someone shoved a knife right up into the gap between your white ribs at Kealakekua Bay. I’m gonna go there make a big Makahiki luau cook a white pig feed it to the dogs and F… YOU UP, BITCH.” Ref. “Tusiata Avia is one of the very best” The Spinoff (2023)
As Tremain predicted and observed: “In 2005, Avia was awarded the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency at the University of Hawaii and was the artist-in-residence at the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury. In 2006, she won the Emerging Pacific Artist award at the Creative New Zealand Arts Pasifika Awards and was shortlisted for the Prize in Modern Letters in 2006.” – Wiki
In an earlier phase of New Zealand’s history cycle I think making fun of James Cook was not malicious. It’s the sort of thing Billy T James and Peter Rowley did in the 1980s without cruelty or with a political agenda. Ref. The Billy T James Collection, NZ on Screen
In an Unravelling Phase of our culture we become polarised and start to view everything depending on which of 2 sides someone is on. A man like James Cook becomes a powerful symbol again who is either too important to slander or too important not to. If you take no position then the hierarchical clobbering machine will sort you into one or the other faction anyway. Firms that rely on reputation and good publicity join in and bring their advertising spending to multiply the effect. Even government agencies, even the police, become political in the Red Queen Race to remain liked and popular in their public relations. Ref. Political Policemen, NZB3
So, I don’t think Tasti in 2009 were caught up in the polarity because it was yet to come. They could afford to be careless and irreverent with Cook and his legacy was not yet in grave danger. However, since about 2016 we have had to be mindful of a little civil war taking place where the fabric of our national identity is being re-written. So far James Cook has been energetically written out of that script.
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Image ref. Watching James Cook, Tremain (10 April, 2023)
Ref. Now (2025) a dead link. https://watermarkcreative.co/portfolio-item/tasti-nz-not-quite-kiwi-campaign (accessed 2023)
Ref. Sean reacts to the Media Councils ruling on ‘Savage Coloniser’, The Platform, Youtube (2023)
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