Author StopPress Team

After worming its way into the pockets of well over one million New Zealanders, 2degrees has been focusing on adding the more lucrative business and post-pay customers to its ledger in recent months, with its latest campaign featuring endorsements from Geoff Ross, Dion Nash, Al Brown and Kate Sylvester. But in keeping with the other major telcos and their various marketing partnerships, 2degrees has struck up a deal with Google Play and its long-serving mascot Rhys Darby is promoting it through the wonder of dad dancing.

Earlier this year, Bruce ‘Pic’ Picot’s one-millionth jar of peanut butter came off the production line in Nelson, serving as statistical proof of the love the Kiwis have for his product. And since good news travels, it comes as little surprise that the Aussie supermarkets have signed a deal with Picot to stock his product on their shelves. We chat to the purveyor of nutty goodness about expanding his empire, combining poems with peanut butter and being a Kiwi success story.

​​Google’s Chrome experiments are generally cause for nerdish celebration as they push the browser to strange and creative places. And now, as The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies gets sets for launch, it’s updated the interactive map of Middle-Earth it launched around one year ago with a host of new tricks.

If you believe the headlines, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But if you believe some of the data (or Bill Gates), things have never been better, with fewer wars, more wealth and better health. Auckland University talked to New Zealand secondary school students about a range of things in 2001, 2007 and 2012 and here’s how their behaviour is changing.

From Drawing Dicks on the Herald Sun to the Mars Rover to GPS Art, the comedy value of phallic art seems to know no bounds. So if you’re stumped for a Christmas gift for your more immature friends and family members, have we got the site for you.

Since the first days of the internet, those online have experimented in creating behavioural chain reactions. Most often, these early attempts involved little more than sending out an email that contained a promise of all types of misfortune if the message wasn’t forwarded. And invariably, there would always be a few recipients who found the electronic promise of impending doom as sufficient impetus to send the message on. And while this achieved little more than cluttering the embryonic email accounts of early adopters, the principle underpinning these chain letters is still relevant in today’s social media age in the sense that if you give people a good enough reason to share something, then they will pass it on. StopPress looks at how muesli brand Hubbards has been trying to create a chain reaction of its own through a campaign called ‘Keep the good going’, which encourages Kiwis to participate in random acts of goodness.

Following on from the social storm caused by Too Many Cooks, Adult Swim has now released another of its faux infomercials that introduces the Smart Pipe, a drainage pipe that analyses the stool and anuses of toilet users. Oh, and it’s also the only technology to be a registered sex offender.

While Facebook has largely taken over from postcards as the favoured means of making people jealous of your holiday, you can’t eat a humblebrag. Enter Cookie Time’s Postcard Cookies. Plus: more postcard-related innovation with New Zealand Post’s Ad Card.

There’s no shortage of anthropomorphised animals in advertising (Speight’s latest ad, for example), but Asus has taken it to the next level to promote its Transformer Book T100 by punning hard on the word ‘fly’ and enlisting a very digitally savvy, very productive avian mascot.

Visual communications company Getty Images has release a desktop version of its Stream app, which makes it easier for consumers to “to access, curate and share” its vast range of imagery.

Air New Zealand’s latest Hobbit-themed safety video topped YouTube’s most-watch list for the month of October. The clip, which was only posted 22 October racked up a total of 11.6 million views over the final nine days of the month.

Digital outdoor advertising again made its way into the media this week with the announcement that a gigantic billboard—the length of a football field and eight storeys tall—was about to be installed at New York City’s Times Square. The story was picked up by various mainstream publications across the world and once again served as a reminder of how hot digital screens are right now. Here in New Zealand, the adoption of digital screens has been slower, but APN Outdoor and Westpac recently added a few more glowing rectangles to Auckland.

Auckland has seen an influx of digital outdoor advertising over the course of the last year, and the nation’s brands are queuing in order to get their messaging on these glowing rectangles. And while APN Outdoor’s billboard on Queen Street certainly isn’t diminutive with a height of 3×9 metres, it is but a tinny when compared to the advertising battleship that is about to be steered into New York City’s Times Square.

The Auckland Art Gallery is well known for its focus on the aesthetic, with both its branding and its building winning a number of awards. And it’s continued that trend with a campaign via Special Group to promote its latest exhibition, Light Show.

As Whitney so rightly sang, the children are our future. And the ad children from two of the bigger schools are getting set show off the year’s work in the hope of securing gainful employment, with AUT holding a function tonight and Media Design School holding its portfolio event next Tuesday (and using the ‘reaction faces’ of local creative juggernauts to help promote it).

Earlier this month, the team at Wellington Airport added a third giant, Tolkien-inspired character to its collection of statues that currently greet tourists. Joining Gollum and the Great Eagles is Smaug the Magnificent, considered to be the last of the great dragons in Middle Earth.

After two delightfully insane adverts that illustrated that retail advertising doesn’t always involve the same tropes, the New World marketing team has reeled it in bit for its Christmas campaign, which features a mild-mannered employee named Noel, who may or may not be Santa in an admittedly average disguise.

Chief executives as the front-person in ad campaigns have been a long-held staple in the advertising space, but the majority are often boring and overused, with voiceovers set to a kitschy hipster montage or “walk-n-talk’s” directly addressing the consumer (shout to to Chanui). But here are a few that over-the-top/down right dangerous stunts that don’t fall into that trap.

When marketing a wine region to prospective travellers, you could show a few shots of beautiful vines, happy couples clinking glasses and the odd landscape. Or you could just show off a bunch of dirt. Yes, dirt.