Author Erin McKenzie

After Craig Herbison was appointed as BNZ’s chief marketing officer in 2011, his first big act was to launch the new brand platform in the form of a polarising, existential teaser campaign that asked whether money was good or bad (answer: neither, it’s what you make of it that counts). Since then he’s made ‘Be Good with Money’ a central pillar of the business and around one year ago, he was promoted to director of retail banking and marketing. So, after saying goodbye to the Airpoints scheme and launching another confronting campaign about the perils of not planning ahead, are the marketing efforts paying dividends?

In response to continued problem of victim blaming in cases of rape cases, the Crown Prosecution Service in the United Kingdom has released an online clip that uses a simile that will resonate with every Briton – a cup of tea.

Given this eternal struggle of finding a shirt that exposes just enough chest hair, men’s shirt brand Johnnie-O has released a hilarious spot that provides a guide of what’s just the right amount to show.

Contact Energy, Parkinson’s New Zealand and Craigs Investment win this week’s round.

Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.

Everyone loves a good .gif. There are even awards to celebrate the art form. And now gif hunting site Giphy has created a fairly mad ad that riffs on classic cooking programmes to show people how to make one.

BurgerFuel currently has 82 stores strewn across six countries, and there isn’t a single agency lucky enough to officially call it a full-time client. Damien Venuto sits down with the company’s marketing manager Alexis Lam to find out why he keeps most of the work in-house.

Following on from our last round-up, no-one seems to have been able to avoid the excitement over the recent arrival of Back to the Future’s date. News broadcasters talked to people with DeLoreans and discussed what the film got right. And, as cultural parasites, brands tired to get a piece of the action too. Herewith, a few more examples.

In the lead up to Halloween, Cadbury has quirky video that positions humans (or at least their disembodied hands) as the villains. The short clip shows a solitary chocolate block walking through a Halloween-themed world, all the while stalked by a great big human hand. And then, as the hand snatches the block, the clip orchestrates a classic horror film twist ending and shows a host of chocolate blocks watching a film at the big screen.

In a bid to persuade Finns that vanilla ice cream isn’t the most boring flavour available, Stockholm-based creative agency Perfect Fools recruited none other than 90s rapper Vanilla Ice to appear in a somewhat bizarre campaign for Consumo. But rather than flying the rapper to Finland and having him appear in person, the agency instead just video called him through the internet. What follows after this is a strange video in which a quartet of Finns engage in a range of games with the rapper.

Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.

In an effort to hold politicians accountable to their promises, a cheeky Canadian tattoo parlour called MTL has launched a campaign offering a free tattoo to politicians willing to ink their campaign promises to their flesh.

Whether it’s ‘natural’, ‘supports’, ‘may’, ‘favourite’, ‘leading’ or ‘from’, the wording in ads is often suitably vague, makes claims that can’t really be disproven and regularly embraces the art of omission. Guaranteed is generally not a word placed in that category, so we couldn’t help but notice a fairly bold claim in a Vodafone ad in the business section of today’s Herald that talked up the benefits of getting a new phone.

Australian fast food chain Chicken Treat has handed its social media account to an actual chicken named Betty. But this isn’t the usual automated tweet approach. Instead, Chicken Treat has put a keyboard in a chicken’s coop and allows the chicken to peck away at whatever keys it chooses. And from the absolute gibberish that has been tweeted thus far, it’s evident that this chicken is not gifted in the literary arts.

To draw attention to the tech underpinning the headlights of its new A4 model, Audi has launched an innovative piece of outdoor advertising that picks up on pedestrians and illuminates them while they are crossing the road. In addition to illustrating the mobility of the lights in the system, the activation also serves make those crossing the road more visible when the streets are dark.