Author StopPress Team

Just as the campaign to start a national debate on flag kicked off, the country went batty for Prince Harry. And, following on from his unscheduled stop at a pub quiz in Stewart Island, Tui reckons he might be keen for another tipple when he makes it up to Auckland. And, as the everyman prankster prince, Tui would surely be an appropriate brew. We look forward to seeing the international media take that out of context too.

For better or worse, modern lives revolve around screens. Big screens on the wall, small screens in your jeans, medium sized screens on your lap. And there is a growing acceptance that this addiction to screentime isn’t particularly healthy and may be affecting our mental state. And a new short film called ‘All Your Favorite Shows’ from production studio Ornana and Danny Madden that fuses fiction with reality to show the potential danger.

Last year, when Air New Zealand took its safety video franchise to the beaches of the Cook Islands, the move was slammed by some quarters of the online community for perpetuating gender stereotypes by featuring Sports Illustrated swimsuit models in their bikinis. The airline has now returned to the beach for its latest safety video. But this time the clip focuses on athletes—both men and women—who are shown weaving and carving their way along the curling waves of Piha, Raglan, Malibu and the Gold Coast.

Pick-up games of football are pretty common Barcelona, where friends—and sometimes enemies—often meet up to kick the frustrations of the day away at one of the many five-a-side pitches strewn throughout the city. And for the launch of its new global campaign, Pepsi took this experience so familiar to everyone in the city and flipped it on its head by introducing a drone and a spectacular light show.

British tabloid newspaper The Sun ran an eye-catching campaign during the high profile British election to encourage people to vote with the tagline “Helping Britain win the election”. The campaign was created by Grey London and promoted The Sun’s straight-talking political reportage and its free-to-access SunNation portal.

You might be wondering why Justin Timberlake is dressed up as a giant lime in a recent commercial. Well, it’s because he has founded his own tequila blend in partnership with Sauza Tequila called Sauza 901 and subsequently stars in an E True Hollywood story-styled mockumentary about the sad state of limes after the triple distilled liquor hits the shelves.

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

New products fail more than they succeed. But that doesn’t seem to stop brands from continually ‘innovating’ and making more of them, no matter how impractical they might be. And Rhodes and Rose has riffed on that with a great promo for the Flextrek 37,000,000,000,000.

A year ago, Angus Richardson introduced the first .kiwi URLS through his company Dot Kiwi. And since then, thousands of Kiwis have signed up to give their website—whether business or personal—a more Kiwi flavour. Included among these are the Mad Butcher, Porter Novelli, the Vodafone Warriors, Kiwibank (via a subrand), Tennis NZ and Rowing NZ. We look at some of the funny URLs registered thus far and chat to Richardson about how the business is going.

Google is always looking for creative and enticing ways to get people using its services, and its latest initiative is to give amateur paranormal investigators the power of Google Maps to search for the Loch Ness monster from the comfort of their homes.

Ever since Spark unveiled its new brand, it has worked hard to redefine itself as an innovative and nimble organisation capable of appealing to Kiwis across all demographics. And given that many within its target market are shifting their media consumption to the digital space, this has seen Spark follow the audience by releasing some major digital plays over the last year. And Kate Thomas, a senior communications manager at the telco, says this is only the start of the journey.

There’s nothing more satisfying that than a good graph that shows trends over time and Bloomberg, one of the many media organisations focusing more on data journalism, has knocked it out of the park with a recent infographic that tracked the pace of social change in the US by looking at how long it took for inter-racial marriage, prohibition, women’s suffrage, abortion, same-sex marriage and marijuana tobe legalised.

Orcon has also taken a few shots at its competitors by pointing out that they throttle customers’ broadband speeds. This criticism was first introduced via an Orcon TVC released last year that introduced Kiwis to Raoul, a revolutionary figure clad in purple military fatigues who seems determined to bringing to what he sees as ISP injustices. And this colourful character—with his oscillating accent—has returned in a new spot that is even more bizarre than those that came before.

There are many creative uses for bodily fluids, like semen being used for secret messages, religious icons being soaked in urine for art, or Whybin\TBWA adding the claret of some All Blacks to an Adidas poster (and going on to win a whole heap of awards). Now Saatchi & Saatchi Switzerland and Austrian progressive men’s magazine Vangardist have taken that idea even further by adding HIV positive blood to its ink and trying to end the social stigma surrounding the virus.

A regal curtsey for ANZ, Fly Buys, The Salvation Army and Air New Zealand this week.

After an eight-year partnership, Spark has parted ways with its direct marketing agency Rapp and appointed Clemenger-owned Proximity to the account “following a review of agency requirements”. PLUS: ASB general manager of marketing Ana Curzon to start her new role as Spark’s general manager of digital first on 18 May. UPDATE: Air New Zealand Airpoints has appointed Rapp to its account following a competitve pitch.

The city of Cape Town has launched a new campaign designed to encourage South Africans not to give small change to those on the street, because it does little more than keep them there.

Justin Bieber said he was going to repeatedly do it on people in his track Boyfriend; Jay Z claimed to have invented it; journalists have predicted the death of it since 1982; it has made it onto various lists of words that should die immediately; and now Spark has added the word swag—derived from swagger—to its marketing vocabulary via an ongoing campaign that now includes two new spots.

ANZ has launched a new cross-Tasman brand ad by Whybin\TBWA that gives a nod to the pioneering human spirit by featuring a series of snippets from innovators in their respective fields.