Author StopPress Team

For decades, pink has been for girls and blue has been for boys. This arbitrary assignation of colour to gender has for generations dictated the colour of children’s rooms, clothes, stationery and toys. And these constraints that omnipotently decide ‘this is for boys’ and ‘this is for girls’ have also extended into other areas of children’s lives, often limiting what they feel they are permitted to participate in. However, these notions that have until now been cast in plasticine GI Joes action figures and Barbie dolls are starting to melt together, blurring gender lines and giving children the ability to determine how they want to represent their personal identities.

UK-based creative DLKW Lowe has shown the power of home-cooked flavours in a heart-wrenching spot for Knorr that features a mother bringing a meal to her daughter all the way in the Arctic. The ad is based on the premise of a Knorr study in which 82 percent of respondents said that some foods remind them of childhood, while 77 percent said that food is always part of life’s most meaningful moments.

Like most other media outlets, we’re flagrantly tapping into cricket fervour and trying to shoehorn anything cricket-related onto the site. Thankfully, the Wellington data/cricket nerds from Dot have come to the party and, rather appropriately given the agency’s name, it has been tracking every dot ball in the Cricket World Cup. Here are some of the interesting discoveries.

Wellington’s wide array of promotional activities have helped to greatly increase visitor numbers to the capital, both domestically and from Australia. Now it’s trying to get some of our neighbours to think about staying for longer with the Wellington Works digital campaign.

Approximately one million NFC-enabled smartphones are in use in New Zealand and as more and more humans become accustomed to paying via contactless terminals, those two technologies are edging ever closer. Semble, a joint venture between banks and telcos (and supported by Samsung), announced its arrival last year (and is holding a special event on Tuesday), and there are plenty of other ways to pay without using notes or coins. Now the country’s biggest bank is joining the fun with its own solution: an update to its goMoney app that will turn your phone into a mobile wallet.

Despite a rocky start and questions over commercial influence on the government, the $10 million strategic marketing partnership between Warner Bros and Tourism New Zealand (with Air New Zealand also along for the ride) seems to have done the business, with The Hobbit trilogy—and the Lord of the Rings movies before it—getting the country into the minds of numerous foreign moviegoers and helping to increase the number of visitors to our shores. But we could always do with a few more, so it’s released the third and final instalment of its ‘Home of Middle-earth’ series.

As the .GIFYs, Buzzfeed and Reddit show, looping images are extremely appealing to modern day humans. And, in celebration of International Happiness Day last Friday, Google, Pharrell Williams and the UN foundation invited folks from all over the globe to create their own dancing GIF and spread a bit of happiness for climate action.

American bank BancFirst embraced Steven Adams’ colloquialisms in an ad called ‘Speaking Kiwi with Steven Adams’. And here’s part two.

After the Blackcaps play in the Cricket World Cup final on Sunday, you can be sure there will be a host of print ads congratulating or commiserating the team the following day, as there was when the All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup in 2011. But Ford has got in early with a full-page ad featuring in today’s Herald celebrating the glorious victory over the South Africans and warning Melburnian Mrs Mavis Madrigal to cover her gnomes and azaleas to protect them from flying round objects.

The One Percent Collective, which aims to create “a seismic shift in charitable giving in Aotearoa”, has already chalked up a few celebrity endorsements, with Dai Henwood, Conrad Smith, Kimbra and many others contributing to its first magazine, The Generosity Journal. And now ‘local craplebrity’ Guy Williams is helping out by imploring punters to do something good for a change and apply for the newly created chief digital storyteller role. PLUS: six more charities set to be added to the flock.

The joy of prediction is that no-one tends to remember the incorrect guesses. But whether it’s Arthur C Clarke, Nostradamus or Minority Report, they’ll often cling to the correct guesses as proof of some remarkable soothsaying ability. And, with the help of Weta Workshop, Magic Leap, a fairly mysterious “cinematic reality” startup that received US$542 million of funding last year, posted a video of what it sees as the future of gaming a few days ago.

The rise of social media has given humans an opportunity to communicate directly with brands. That seems to have led to more gimme gimme gimme than positive endorsement, but Toyota has decided the risk is worth it and is soliciting questions from New Zealanders and attempting to answer them in an entertaining fashion as part of its Armchair Test Drive campaign.

We’ve all seen the rolling hills, smiling faces, water sports scenes, kiwi birds and rustic charm that have populated the nation’s tourism video canon over the years. And while these representations sure do help to sell the flights that drive one of New Zealand’s biggest industries, everyone that lives here knows that they aren’t 100 percent true most of the time.

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

As part of a SXSW stunt for American mobile battery case company ​Mophie, St Bernard rescue dogs have been given smartphone battery packs instead of brandy barrels, giving some of those who tweeted the company detailing their lack of juice a much-needed charge for its Stay Powerful campaign.

Virtual reality is something Facebook bet big on with its acquisition of Oculus Rift for $2 billion. Google has also entered the fray with its very clever, low-cost solution Cardboard. And Samsung is also onboard with its Gear VR, which it’s showing off with a clip showing a dad experiencing the birth of his third child from afar and a bunch of Aussies diving with sharks in an unexpected location.

Subscription video on-demand is often compared to linear television as a superior alternative that gives users the freedom to watch what they want when they want to, without the annoyance of advertising. Yet, despite these advantages, Kiwi SVOD provider Lightbox still sees value in using the reach of traditional television to spread the news about its offering and has just released a new, somewhat crazy, campaign for Vikings.

Buzzfeed got a group of people together and made a video of them sampling chocolate from five different countries. The aim was that the participants had to guess the chocolate’s origin according to the taste. And yes, you’d be pleased to know, Pineapple Lumps got a well-deserved mention.

Everyone becomes a little bit Irish on St Patrick’s Day. And plenty of brands do too. Here’s a rundown of some of the best efforts from here and around the world.