Author Ben Fahy

Drones are often associated with remote-controlled killing and maiming in war zones, but they’re starting to find a more peaceful, playful place in the real world, whether it’s taking a selfie with a difference, delivering a pizza or, potentially, dropping off your online purchases. And to announce its arrival in the Auckland market, Energy Online has put one to good use to get punters chatting about a mysterious UFO.

Since Marissa Mayer took over as chief executive at Yahoo, it’s acquired a whole heap of businesses (largely in the social and mobile space), started creating more of its own content and launched a new, less cluttered homepage in early 2013. And, after a bit of wait, New Zealand consumers and advertisers will get the benefit of that development with the rollout of the ‘new’ homepage in June.

Y&R New Zealand’s Friday night drinks trolley will be well-stocked from now on because it’s picked up another new piece of business in the form of nationwide liquor retail chain The Mill. Plus: more account move news.

Creative types are restless and often entrepreneurial souls so, once they’ve finished harnessing their powers to sell more baked beans, they often head home to focus on their own projects. Here are three we’ve noticed recently from Cleve Cameron, Chris Williams and Jacqui Lockington.

Black, “an international fashion, beauty, arts and culture magazine published from New Zealand for the people of the world”, has long featured beautiful people in its pages. And after launching a new responsive website and digital magazine, it can now do justice to those beautiful people online.

Andrew Hawley won his first piece of business—Telecom’s youth-focused mobile brand Pulsate—in 1999 when he was still at design school at Massey University in Wellington. 15 years on and the executive creative director and managing director at 72-strong “digital experience agency” Touchcast is still working with his foundation client, albeit in a much larger capacity, as well as with a number of other big Kiwi companies that have been drawn to its attractive combination of speed and quality. He tells us how that panned out and what makes the full service digital agency tick.

The first rule of speech club is to insert an inspirational quote at the start. The second rule of speech club is to show a whole lot of case study videos. Giles Tuck, head of Google’s inhouse agency The Zoo-APAC, failed on the former in his presentation about social creativity—the first Champion Speakers event for the recently rejigged CAANZ PR, Experiential and Social Media Committee (PREScom)—but he embraced the second. And the main outtake for the 150-strong crowd of gathered marcomms folk was that you can’t just do social, you’ve got to be social.

In recent years, The University of Otago has been trying to move away from what it sees as the negative student stereotypes of binge drinking, couch-burning and filthy flats. Of course, those elements of the student culture tend to be quite a drawcard for many Kiwi young’uns hoping to embark on a journey of mind expansion/erosion and a major reason a large number of them fly over a range of other institutions of learning to live and learn in Dunedin. And Godfrey Hirst and Feltex carpets have embraced some those stereotypes with an experiment that aims show off the qualities of its ‘student proof carpet’.