Two titans of advertising in Aotearoa appear to have joined forces. Alex Casey tries to get to the bottom of what on earth is going on.

It will come as a surprise to precisely no-one that Briscoes advertised a sale over the weekend. On the New Zealand Herald site, plonked above a story about a man trying to clear his name after being accused of murdering his wife, stood our beloved Tammy Wells, resplendent in cornflower blue, with some slightly more uplifting news. “SUNDAY ONE DAY SALE” the yellow text hollered. Suddenly, the frame of the gif changed. “DOORBUSTER DEALS” the text silently screamed. Another woman appeared on Tammy’s left, arms open like Christ the Redeemer. 

The gif changed again. The luminous Christ-like figure turned to look at me. It was a prettier Jesus. It was Suzanne Paul. 

Two timeless titans of the advertising world, combining their powers at long last? No wonder the doors are busted. Aside from a brief departure for Briscoes in 2019, Wells has consistently been the beaming face of the homeware behemoth since 1989. Over three decades she has draped herself over sentient couches, been blown to smithereens by a giant Christmas cracker and been imprisoned in a tomb full of presents. All the while, Suzanne Paul was busy hawking Natural Glow, squashing eggs with Bambillos, and lifting up trucks with vacuum cleaners. 

But never in all those years did these two women ever appear in the same room. This is a paradigm shift. A cultural reset. An advertising swing even more shocking than when Lily from Big Save stopped shouting and sat down on a bean bag. I immediately got to work figuring out what the hell was happening. Which is to say, I Googled Suzanne Paul + Briscoes and found a small yet distressed community on Reddit, before searching Suzanne Paul on the Briscoes site and finding two “Paul Wood” clocks on sale for $35.00. The chat bot wasn’t much help either. 

How could something so significant, so earth-shattering, have happened without so much as a press release? I reached out to both Suzanne Paul and Tammy Wells. I contacted the Briscoes call centre multiple times, and was repeatedly assured that someone would come back to me “shortly”. I passed on my details at Stanley Street, the creative agency behind the Briscoes ads, and heard nothing back either. This was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a giant Christmas cracker set to explode at any moment. 

Desperate, I turned to Hayden Donnell. The Spinoff contributor and host of RNZ’s Mediawatch is among the country’s leading Suzanne Paul enthusiasts, having once attempted to get the infomercial queen exhibited in our national museum in his show Get It To Te Papa. Hurtling through Auckland’s CBD on an e-scooter, Donnell breathlessly exclaimed over the phone that he could not make sense of the ad. “It feels like crossing the streams of the universe, it’s odd” he wheezed. “It’s like in sports, when two superstars end up on the same team, and it just becomes a super team.”

When asked what Suzanne Paul could bring to the Briscoes multiverse, Donnell praised the “psychic energy” of the woman who brought us the Blue Monkey. “She’s such an unusual artefact, because she’s a force of unbridled and quite public and effusive positivity. In many ways, that clashes with stereotypical New Zealand culture, but she brought something new to our shores and exposed us to a different style of being.” But then why oh why pair her with Wells, New Zealand’s other most valuable natural resource of endless enthusiasm, smiles and sales?

Donnell agreed that there is “a bit of duplication” of energies happening in the Briscoes ad, musing that the combination might even be “too powerful” for our small island nation to handle. “You’ve got two of the most powerful sales forces in New Zealand, or possibly the world’s, history. They are selling stuff which is always 50% off anyway – are their staff going to be able to keep up? Will they have to import more?” He concluded that Briscoes may have “bitten off more than they can chew” and that their stores might soon look like “barren, post-apocalyptic caves”. 

Bodo Lang, professor in marketing at Massey University, was not riding an e-scooter when I called, but did echo some of Donnell’s concerns about the combination of powerhouses. “It is definitely a bit weird and disorienting having both of them there,” he said. One theory he proposed was that this might be “advertising wear out” in action. “Maybe market research has shown that the effectiveness of the Briscoes lady has declined or decreased somehow, and people aren’t responding to the advertising quite as positively as they used to,” he said. 

Another option is that Tammy Wells wants a cup of tea and a lie down after 34 years of grinning at towels. “For whatever commercial or personal reasons, perhaps she’s decided not to continue with the role,” said Lang. “If that’s the case, they need a bit of an overlap period, where they have both of them in the ads so people get used to it. My sense is that this is a transition phase, we could be witnessing them literally passing on the baton from the Briscoes Lady to Suzanne Paul.” It is worth noting that although the are both ageless, Suzanne Paul is roughly six years older than Tammy Wells. 

Given that New Zealanders are feeling the financial pinch at the moment, I pitched to Lang that perhaps this is a last resort to get people shopping at Briscoes again. “Maybe there is something to that, because Suzanne Paul is immediately linked in my mind with infomercials,” he said. “And infomercials have a raft of associations, but the main one is inexpensive. New Zealand is experiencing a cost of living crisis, there’s no two ways about it. So if you wanted to signal that your brand is inexpensive, Suzanne Paul is probably a good person to do that.”

Although she is a powerful sales force, Lang noted that the addition of Suzanne Paul isn’t the most groundbreaking in terms of representation. “It’s 2023, maybe it is time to think hey, maybe we could use somebody else, perhaps a Māori woman or a Pacific woman,” he said, noting that the spokesperson would still probably have to be a woman to reflect the target market. “What would a 20 year-old Indian woman living in Auckland know of Suzanne Paul? Not a lot, probably, so I think her appeal to younger audiences is also probably a little bit more limited.” 

Of course, this is all just speculation. Briscoes, Paul and Wells are yet to comment on the situation, but what we know for sure is that at least one Suzanne Paul fan out there is delighted to see her back on the tools again. “I’m pleased for her and I’m pleased for New Zealand, because I do think something died in this country when her infomercials went off air,” said Donnell. For a man who spent most of 2018 unsuccessfully attempting to encase Suzanne Paul behind glass and put her in our national museum, this is the next best form of preservation. 

“The Briscoes ads give people this mythical, timeless quality, so putting Suzanne Paul there might in fact keep her away from the ravages of time. And that, really, is all I want.”

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Everything that happened at Coachella also happened on the livestream. Until one headliner decided they wanted no part of it.

Benee revved things up in her Green Honda. The Chemical Brothers danced with clowns. Wet Leg made everyone scream. Charli XCX played like the pop powerhouse she’s become. Bad Bunny beefed with Harry Styles then had technical difficulties. Reclusive singer Jai Paul performed for the first time ever. Calvin Harris did whatever it is that Calvin Harris does. Blink-182 needed better jokes. Rosalía completely and utterly owned everyone. Blackpink slayed.

Then there was Mark Rebillet. In an afternoon set so stupidly entertaining I’ve seen the whole thing three times, the French-American producer – think dubstep Andrew WK – seemed to think he was in a WWF wrestling ring, stripping down to a pair of tight togs before throwing tables and chairs, smashing his laptop and punching a hole in the wall so hard he appeared to break his finger. Behind him on the big screen, giant chickens ran across burning city scapes.

Rebillet yelled, raged, hollered and screamed. At one point, he growled: “I’m off my meds … I’m fucking pissed!” then mixed his words into a song. At another he jumped into the crowd, twerked, then got lost trying to get back on stage with a blow-up banana. Between the increasingly borderline cancellable moments, he sometimes played some damned fine impromptu electronica too. “Just making shit up up here,” he deadpanned at the end. 

Unless you were in Palm Springs yourself, the best time you could have over the weekend was with the Coachella festival livestream. It’s done this for several years now, but this was the first time all six of the packed Palm Springs festival’s stages were beamed around the world via YouTube. It gave viewers the chance to catch the action and skip around performers without the stress of using music festival toilets and dealing with the smell and sweat of 125,000 punters.

(Clearly, with expanded online coverage that includes streaming Coachella’s second upcoming weekend – also a first – organisers are gearing up to turn the online event into a stream of another kind, one that delivers more revenue. Next year, expect to be charged single or multi-day fees.)

After the first two days, I would have happily paid good money for the experience. For those who can’t afford to be there, Coachella’s free stream is a chance for music lovers to catch up on exactly what’s happening out there in festival land after three stalled years. Some themes quickly emerged: Mad Max-inspired retro-futurism rules, according to Benee, who proved her new rave-pop direction is working for her thanks to her hot new single ‘Green Honda,’ and Ashnikko, a recent Aotearoa visitor who raged like the lovechild of Nine Inch Nails and Gwen Stefani.

Add into the mix Charli XCX’s studious pop bangers, Blackpink’s brand of genre-mashing perfectionism, Latto’s R18, Missy Elliott-indebted showcases, and a set from the Spanish singer Rosalía that was so stunningly choreographed it resembled a one-hour music video, and it’s clear Coachella is doing its best to keep the mostly-male festival line-ups of old well in the past. 

Another trend I’m less happy to report: superstar DJs are here to stay. Coachella was full of pounding oonst-oonst delivered with the kind of monster stage production that can quickly give you a headache. I hated every second that I saw of Fisher, Chris Lake and Calvin Harris, but the antidote, if you needed one, were the more thoughtful, throbbing sets by veterans Underworld and The Chemical Brothers.

Emo in all its forms, whether it was Dominic Fike’s bleeding heart balladeering to the bleak rap vibes of $uicideboy$ and Yung Lean, also got a major showcase. For my money – of which I paid none – those that invited their friends up on stage with them had the better time. Labrinth’s space-age set with just the heads visible of his backing singers was a thing of beauty, while Metro Boomin’s set featured guest spots from The Weeknd and Diddy and rivalled Rebillet’s for maxed-out OTT intensity.

Even better was Kenny Beats, the hip-hop producer who delivered one of the most joyous hours of music I think I’ve seen. Anyone who can mix Nirvana, Kylie Minogue, Kendrick Lamar, M.I.A and Basement Jaxx into a delicious sunny groove gets my approval. If there’s any more storm, Covid or political strife coming, or just another two weeks of school holidays to survive, YouTube replays of Beats’ beats will from now on be my permanent happy place. 

For two days, the Coachella stream provided brilliant, unmissable, addictive, compelling content. Then came day three. The night’s mysterious headliner Frank Ocean hasn’t played live since 2017, and his performance has been hyped since 2020, when he was due to headline but couldn’t because of Covid cancellations. Fans were pumped and YouTube advertised its “Frankchella” livestream for weeks. A frenzy emerged, building towards exactly the kind of closing performance a festival like Coachella needs.

And then … Ocean’s stream disappeared. Along with Björk, another reclusive and mysterious Sunday performer, Ocean’s name suddenly disappeared from the main stage livestream guide, replaced instead by a replay of that bonkers Mark Rebillet show. Online, fans seethed, stomped and raged. Photos of Rebillet smashing his stage and yelling, “I’m fucking pissed!” were turned into memes about Frank Ocean fans. His name soon started trending on Twitter. “I’m going to bed,” reported one former fan.

What happened is still being investigated. Unconfirmed rumours suggest Ocean had major stage production plans, including an ice rink and hockey players, but pulled the plug on that, and the livestream, at the last minute. He made it on stage an hour late (one report says this is so the rink’s ice had time to melt), and shaky crowd footage doing the rounds on TikTok and Twitter shows long gaps between songs, the crowd being asked to do much of the singing, many of his biggest songs being remixed into oblivion and the inclusion of a six-song DJ set of bangers. A midnight curfew cut Ocean’s set short.

Rolling Stone reports Ocean broke his ankle earlier in the week in an on-site bike mishap, perhaps why he was wearing slippers. Whatever happened, his performance has left those that were there bewildered, and those at home bereft. After that shambles, Coachella organisers are probably on the phone to The Weeknd right now, asking if he can step in (again) to replace Ocean for weekend two. You can see how it all shakes down in a few days when Coachella’s livestream once again and, possibly for the last time, streams for free.