Author StopPress Team

How do you promote the wonder of hydrogen-fuelled car? Create a water brand that sells its exhaust, of course.

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

Most print ads just sit there, doing nothing, hoping to be noticed and generally helping no-one but the advertiser. But print ads can sometimes be quite helpful, so here are two recent examples of paper being used to extremely good effect.

Increasingly, the worlds of art and technology—and commerce and technology—are colliding. Digital Art Live, a collaboration between CoLab and The Edge, is bringing that fusion into the real world and its upcoming exhibition Cut and Paste features a collaboration between digital artist Jenna Gavin and the Auckland Writers Festival.

Whether it’s online, in the skies, on TV or in real life, quizzes are universally popular. And travel company Adventure World has tapped into that interest with its biggest ever online campaign, Extraordinary World Trivia.

When Coke comes to you and says “we want to do something with a drone” it better be awesome. Ogilvy & Mather Singapore did not disappoint with a clever little collaboration with a non-profit, the Singapore Kindness Movement recently titled “Happiness from the skies”.

The digital world is moving at lightning speed, so by the time you’ve launched your redesigned website, it’s almost out of date. But that hasn’t stopped the LA Times from unveiling a completely reinvented site that is “as bold and compelling as our journalism and as fast moving as the world you live in”.

Trickery, bribery and other methods of incentivisation are all important aspects of good parenting (our favourite is the Christmas extortion, often starting around the middle of the year, in which parents threaten a no-show from Santa if they don’t behave). And, like a paper version of ‘Roses by You’, Hallmark and Naked have embraced those principles in Australia to promote its Hallmark Card Matchmaker service by luring a bunch of unsuspecting teens to an American Authors concert and then forcing them to write a heartfelt message to their mothers in order to get in.

It is truly amazing what advertisers can do with outdoor. Voyages-sncf.com recent campaign shows that there is still plenty of life in the world’s oldest advertising medium.

It’s been a big month for the Kiwi comedy scene, with the International Comedy Festival running room 24 April to 18 May and Seven Days recently celebrating its 150th episode. And throughout this period, MediaWorks has gotten behind the talent on its various shows via a series of promotional pushes. Central to TV3’s campaign are a collection of idents that have been released as part of the ‘Your home of comedy’ campaign that is currently running on the channel.

Apple recently filed a patent for a holographic display, leading to much speculation about the technology being included in future models. And Mike Ko, who has created a whole heap of very cool animations for very big companies, has tried to visualise that.

For many, cardboard is something that belongs in recycling bins. But for ‘cardboard engineer/packaging ninja’ Mat Bogust, it’s something to be messed with, as he did recently as part of Beck’s NZ Music Month sponsorship. Plus: the rise of cardboard casket business Rest in Pets.

Qantas has found a slightly different use for their inflight sick bags by encouraging passengers to utilize them as a canvas for a very unique type of art. Passengers are then encouraged to share there new masterpiece with the hashtag #QantasBlankCanvas.

Recently, Beck’s and Shine launched a series of playable posters for New Zealand Music Month, following on from its playable bottles last year. If only Beck’s sponsored New Zealand Wood Month, because then it could take some inspiration from Bartholomäus Traubeck, who modified a record player to play slices of wood and released a ten-track album called Years.

At 15, an age when most teens are experimenting with pimple-popping techniques, Brendan Jarvis had already entered the digital agency world. And this early foray set the foundation that would eventually lead him to the position of running The Space In Between, an agency with eight staff and a growing market in the education sector and the US.

You might think the 11 herbs and spices used by Colonel Sanders is a simple calculation of the ingredients required to create the world-famous deep-fried bird. But, according to consultant Greg Rowland from The Semiotics Alliance, you’d be wrong, because in the world of numerical symbolism, 11 supposedly has mystical powers. So which attributes do we ascribe to other numbers? And why?

Although content marketing has become one of the latest buzz phrases uttered at conferences, it has actually been around since 1895, when John Deere started Furrow magazine, a publication dedicated to information for American farmers. Following this in 1932, after seeing value in being associated with well crafted content, Procter and Gamble sponsored a radio programme via one of its soap brands, adding the term soap opera to the vernacular. It’s from this historical standpoint that a Getty Images video recently published on YouTube discusses how content marketing has evolved over the years to eventually give us a range of modern applications that that not only contribute to branding but also entertain viewers.

As the design proponents keep saying, good packaging can make a difference and change the way consumers react to products. And artist Paddy Mergui has proven that by adding some luxury to the quotidian in an exhibition called Wheat is Wheat is Wheat.

With 150 writers and more than 120 events over five days in and around Auckland’s Aotea Centre, the Auckland Writers Festival offers something for anyone interested in books, stories and ideas. We’ve got three double passes to three different events—Adrian Kinnaird’s ‘From Earth’s End’, Peter Alsop’s ‘An entrepreneurial tale’ and ‘Michael Leunig: exploring the creative process’—to give away, so post a link to some good writing, we’ll print it out, insert it into our prose-judging robot and give the tickets to those who offer up the best suggestions.

Paper? Pffff. Why doodle in 2D on dead trees when you could do it in 3D in the real world with the Lix pen, “the world’s smallest 3D printing pen”.