Author StopPress Team

Clearly drug testing is not a priority at Berlin ad agency Storz & Escherich, because the company produced this ad for pre-owned Minis.

Looking for that special something for the ad man/woman that has everything? Then you can’t go past Creative Miscellaneous Materials, a website that offers a vast array of remarkable products to help those working in the persuasive arts.

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

Marmite has been a huge topic of interest in New Zealand over the past few years, with the closure of Sanitarium’s Christchurch factory after the earthquake leading to ‘Marmageddon’. But the Marmite brand has a different problem in the UK: people keep forgetting to use it. So it’s spoofed the current crop of animal welfare reality shows with an ad showing some horrible cases of yeast-based neglect.

Richard Branson wasn’t always the suave, successful mogul he is today. In its latest ad, Virgin Mobile shows Branson’s life story in exactly one minute and three seconds. And yes, he always sported that beard, even at two years old.

Is it just us, or is $379 not that much money to spend for an action figure that looks just like you?

There’s been a lot of talk about football rights in New Zealand recently, with online offering Coliseum unexpectedly snatching that trophy off Sky and Sky then raining on its parade slightly by signing deals directly with four English major clubs to show delayed coverage of their games. But as newspapers embrace video, and as humans embrace mobile, it’s not just broadcasters looking for content anymore, as evidenced by this great ad for Sun+ Goals that features football fans watching when they shouldn’t be.

Creative types can be a bit precious about their image. But not Mumford & Sons. The beardy folk rockers aren’t above taking the piss out of themselves and, with the help of four funny men—Ed Helms, Jason Sudeikis, Jason Bateman, and Will Forte—the band has created what Buzzfeed calls the best music video of the year.

Dr Who nerds have been all aflutter this week after Peter Capaldi was named as the new 1000-year-old time-traveller. He’s renowned for his role as the potty-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the brilliant show The Thick of It. And this guy has decided to combine the two roles and create a trailer that gives fans a glimpse at what the upcoming series might be like (block your ears children, salty language ahoy).

EY, which until recently was Ernst & Young, has announced the finalists of this year’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards.

Brands tend to inflate their importance in people’s lives. And The Onion has showed this phenomenon in its inimitable fashion with a clip featuring “fans from all over the country flocking to see all of their favourite brands” at the Lollapalooza music festival.

After a brief but rewarding fling with StopPress and Idealog, tech reporter/photographer/regional man of mystery Sim Ahmed finished up yesterday and is off to work for POS start-up Vend HQ. But we’re not letting him get away without mentioning a bit of copyright hilarity he was involved in on Twitter last week.

Snapper chief executive Miki Szikszai noticed an awkward ad placement on the New Zealand Herald’s website this morning.

The Luddites among us may remember the pre-mobile age as a wonderful time when you didn’t feel obliged to check your work email before you went to bed and phubbing wasn’t a threat to the very fabric of society. Telco beast Qualcomm sees things a bit differently and, in an entertaining, pratfall-heavy online film that’s clocked up 2.3 million views in a few weeks, it’s attempted to show what the world would be like without mobile. Answer: violent and crazy.

Kiwi ‘post-punk revival’ band The Naked and Famous have recently been holed up in Los Angeles studio trying their best to overcome That Difficult Second Album Syndrome for In Rolling Waves (by the way, That Difficult Second Album would be a great name for a debut album). And the band has once again called on Special Problems to direct the music video for its new single ‘Hearts Like Ours’.

As this news report shows, being able to read an entire newspaper—aside from ‘the pictures, ads or comics’—on a computer was a giant technological leap back in 1981. While this development has certainly been good for the readers, it hasn’t been too beneficial for newspapers. And you can see where it started to go wrong. As David Cole from the San Francisco Examiner says in the clip: “This is an experiment … We’re not in it to make money.” Some might say the same strategy holds true 34 years later.

The ’80s were a time of big hair, bright clothes and bold claims. And they don’t get much bolder than the ones uttered in a rich velvety voice in this glorious piece of automotive advertising for the very advanced 1984 Chevrolet Corvette. Look at those wonderous LCD displays, listen to those epic synths and sound effects and take a trip into the future.

Men, show your dedication for your significant others by using DB Breweries Facebook app to let them know – with a video.

There’s been a whole heap of industry chatter about the proposed merger of Publicis and Omnicom, a merger that would create the biggest holding company in all the world (but would still pale in comparison to Google). And, in true modern style, there’s already a parody Twitter account (‘This is a parody. But then again, isn’t the ad industry’) that’s skewering the combined entity.