M2 Magazine: 200 Issues In Review
Every now and again we hit milestones in life prompting us to pause for a moment to see where we’ve been. It’s at this time we really see how we have evolved, as brands, products, and people. M2 has been tooting the horn of those making it big since 2005, and now in 2024 we’re celebrating our 200th issue, and maybe just tooting our own horn for a bit. Indulge us for a minute. It’s been one hell of a trip so far and we see no sign of slowing down just yet, even if the rest of NZ’s media landscape is taking one hell of a beating.
2005
The year is 2005 and Clint Eastwood has just pulled his Oscar for Million Dollar Baby. The Airbus A380 has just been unveiled as the largest commercial jet in the world and Youtube is making it’s first staggering steps into the world like a newborn fawn. Tony Blair and George W bush are in power double teaming Iraq for all those weapons of mass destruction they totally have (trust me bro) and in Helen Clark’s New Zealand it’s the perfect time to release a new magazine. M2 puts out its first issue with Clint Eastwood as their cover man using a picture that looks like it had been taken 30 years prior.
Rock & Roll
2006 was a legendary year for Rock & Roll. The Rolling Stones performed at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for an audience of over 1.5 million people, one of the biggest audiences of all time. This was the year they also released the favourably received A Bigger Bang Album. The accompanying tour would go on to become the highest-grossing tour of all time by its completion two years later.
2006
In 2006 George Clooney was sitting pretty with his Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Syriana alongside Matt Damon and Chris Cooper.
In our second year of print Enron former Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling and founder Kenneth Lay went to trial and were found guilty of conspiracy and fraud. Tragedy also rocked australasia and the rest of the world when we lost Steve Irwin.
2007
Roger Federer had a gangbuster year in 2007, at the peak of his game it was an epic moment in Tennis history as he almost swept all four Major finals, winning all but one of them.
In the states Nancy Pelosi become the first Female Speaker of the house. Consequently this was around the time her Husband began an illustrious career in stock trading. 2007 also marked the year J.K. Rowling finished writing, the year before Twitter was created, which would provide her hours of entertainment later in life. At the beginning of 2007 Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, forever changing how we interact with the online world, as well as print.
2010
2010 marked the start of the Arab Spring which kicked off after vegetable vender immolated himself. A wave of pro-democracy anti-corruption revolts spread across the Arab world. At home we were busy being stoked for our rugby team, which sounds a lot less important when framed with other world events. Either way Dan Carter was our man of the year and also became the highest point scorer of all time, tussling for the title against England’s Jonny Wilkinson. This year we were pretty proud of ourselves for finally making the jump to digital via this new fangled “Google Android”. The mobile operating system got off the ground in very late 2007 and it had hit a stage of maturity by the time we entered the market in 2010. This was the year Steve Jobs also announced the first iPad, which was a revolutionary new way for people to muck around online.
2012
In 2012 Robert Downey Jr was hotter than hot coming off the back of two Ironman movies that would define the rest of his career for the next decade. To keep himself occupied he starred in the perfectly average Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes flick.
2013
Three years after we had entered the market on Android we also jumped onto the iPad, with our Jeff Ross issue being our first trial run at interactive magazines.
Jeff Ross had completely turned the alcohol business upside down with the introduction of his 42Below Vodka. He had started small working out of his own garage before growing the business to a point where Bacardi Ltd was interested enough in what he had built to make him worth 35 million. Overseas 42Below was a fashion piece. This made Ross our Lexus M2 Man of the Year in 2013.
2015
Issue 116 was to be the first of many times Taika Waititi would grace the cover of our magazine, shooting right to the top as Man of the Year. The now legendary director was hot off the back of the mocumentary, What We Do In The Shadows for this issue. The movie would go on to spawn multiple critically acclaimed TV shows. He already had Eagle Vs Shark and Boy under his belt at this point and we could see this guy going places. We had no idea quite how right we would be.
2017
We always like to celebrate excellence in the field, whether it’s in the director’s chair or in the boardroom. In Peter Burling’s case it was excellence in the ocean when he became the youngest winning helmsman in the history of the America’s Cup. He brought home the cup for the 35th America’s cup alongside the rest of the crew and engineers behind Emirates Team New Zealand.
The Art of the chin hold
2018 and 2019 saw a flurry of face holding on the covers. This is due to a bad case of weak neck going around at the time. Most people forgot about it because it was immediately overshadowed by Covid-19, but just prior celebrities everywhere were walking around with bobble heads.
2018
We got to hang out with Israel Adesanya for a day of photoshoots and interviews. This man is a loose cannon and gets himself in hot water a lot with his public comments, but you know what, that’s just the sort of person who gets TKOs in the ring. During the photoshoot we were also using it as a chance to do a style shoot. Our editor was terrified during the butterfly kick shots that we’d be returning the clothes with a split crotch, but they held up admirably. No loose tackle during the shoot. This time.
Peter Beck Keeps On winning
Peter Beck is THE face of New Zealand’s space initiatives, putting our little country on the map on the road to the stars. We were so impressed with what he’s been able to achieve since starting the company that we named him Man of the Year twice in a row in both 2018 and 2019. Rocket Lab was founded in 2006, and by 2009 had become the first ever private company in the southern hemisphere to reach space.
Along the way it hasn’t been without its controversies but the impact of the company has been undeniable. In 2018 they conducted their first mission for NASA and they also began to develop reusable first-stage tech.
Amusingly in 2018 we also played into how bad the year was for everyone. Little did we know 2020 was just around the corner.
2020
Our Beauden Barrett issue was midway through the pandemic and had cover lines like “How to Manage Stress in 2020”, “Lessons In Resilience” and “Continuing Business Through a Pandemic”.
It was a stressful time for everyone, and many of our competitors didn’t make it to the other side.
We had done our first live Success Summit had in 2019 and we were keen to get back into it, but in-person meetings were proving to be out of vogue this year.
One of the crew here at M2 optimisticly said “the pandemic will be over in a few months eh.”
The rest of us were ready with buckets of water.
“It’ll take years.”
2021
In 2021 we turned 16 in the middle of Covid weirdness but by this point the country had settled into a rhythm of knowing how to use Slack and Zoom, and the magazine was smoothly getting made remotely from home every time we were shepherded back there after an outbreak.
Throughout all this there were entrepreneurs doing amazing things even during an uphill battle. Tim Brown from Allbirds is a great example of kiwi ingenuity, taking renewable materials and making them into something great. In this case a pair of wool runners alongside Joey Zwillinger, the brains. It’s become such an iconic product that in 2018 Jacinda Ardern gifted a pair to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull when he was in power for what felt like 3 seconds.
2023
We’re skipping 2022 because the only thing interesting that happened was the nuclear clock ticking a couple seconds closer to midnight when Russia tried an all out assault into Ukraine. 2023 didn’t improve much when things kicked off between Israel and the Gaza Strip. In other news Labour’s term finished and Chris Luxon picked up the reigns while the two kids in the backseat, David Seymour and Winston Peters, fought over the toys.
2024
Anybody who’s anybody lives in 2024 right now. The magazine is now old enough to drink, so suffice to say our biggest mistakes and triumphs are lying ahead of us. Alongside our sister publication we have two live events running bringing together the best and brightest the country has to offer to discuss growth, success, and what the future might hold in store. At the moment the answer to that last one appears to be the use of the word “AI” a lot. Chat-GPT exploded the world a few years ago and it’s abilities have only grown since. We’re now living on the cusp of entirely generated video content. But I think no matter how far robots go, it’s still going to take the talent of someone like Waititi to wrangle it into a beautiful shape. Or someone as smart as any of the thought leaders we’ve talked to, to truly push the technology to its full potential.