Mimi Gilmour’s restaurant chains Burger Burger and the newly opened Fish Fish have adopted the no-reservations policy increasingly used overseas. But as queues form, she is planning technology to take the agro out of waiting for a table.
A new app from UK luxury car brand Bentley lets drivers design their own vehicle according to their emotions. Well, kinda.
When former Saatchi & Saatchi boss and ICG executive director Mike Hutcheson decided to do a master’s thesis on New Zealand creativity, he didn’t want to produce an unreadable 60,000-word treatise. Instead he used interviews with four senior New Zealand business leaders – former Saatchi colleague Kevin Roberts, Les Mills International chief executive Phillip Mills, Hobbiton director and ex-Tourism NZ head George Hickton, and Innovation Council chief executive Louise Webster – to put together a 30-minute video examining the paradox that New Zealanders come up with great ideas and largely fail to commercialise them. But the attitude that creates the problem may also be part of its solution, he says.
Business speakers are often stimulating, sometimes boring. Often entertaining, sometimes worthy. Rarely is a speaker overwhelming. But listening to Silicon Valley strategist and entrepreneur Salim Ismail is just that. And he believes many companies are woefully incapable of adapting to a world where almost unimaginable growth trajectories are becoming the norm.
ANZ has released a (very) short movie commissioned from award-winning filmmaker Jane Campion to coincide with the launch of the bank’s Wise Women website and #equalfuture social media campaign, which aims to highlight the dismal stats around the male/female pay gap and the average woman’s woeful lack of preparedness for retirement.
Paul Blomfield, better-known for his work in public relations with the fashion industry, has teamed up with an IT specialist in start-up Jucebox, a company they hope will become a lynch-pin in the fast-growing Internet of Things (IoT).
Ben Polkinghorne had an odd hobby: burritos. When he wasn’t writing copy and winning various awards at Colenso BBDO, he sought them out, reviewed them, experimented with new varieties. Then last year he met a guy with another odd passion: sausages. And the burrito-flavoured sausage was born. Now the entrepreneur has quit his day job to take the Bangerrito to the world —and, in a nice send off, he also won IdealogLive’s Pitch Circus last night.
Despite approaching his 80th birthday, contemporary pop artist Billy Apple (something of a human brand) hasn’t lost the desire to create. And now, in collaboration with Saatchi’s design director Derek Lockwood, he has released a Billy Apple-branded cider.
What do you get when you combine two guys with a passion for ski racing—one an urban planner with a PhD and the other an art photographer and fashion designer? The unlikely answer is a start-up company with a mission to develop sexy (and dry) underwear for the incontinence market—and a penchant for doing lots of research.
Old, fat, black, female, gay, disabled. Coming to a marketing campaign (quite) near you. And if the guys from Getty Images are right, your customers will love the diversity.
Freedom Furniture has given consumers the ability to see what a new piece of furniture would look like in their house with a brand new app.
With all the inane questions, like farming and ‘brain teasers’ posted on social media, many brands seem to think their customers are absolute morons. But as ASB’s well-awarded Like Loan showed, social media can occasionally serve a useful commercial purpose, with all the likes the app received giving the bank the details of almost 18,000 potential customers and delivering a solid business result. That campaign was a bespoke app, but a similar philosophy applies to Kiwi social auction company BuddyBid, which is currently raising some cash to take the idea overseas.