A satirical billboard with a cartoon of Jesus’ crucifixion was stolen from outside St Luke’s Presbyterian Church in Auckland on Thursday, the day before Christians remembered the death of Jesus.

While we all tucked into hot cross buns over the long weekend, around the world people enjoyed the Easter tradition in a variety of food forms.

Easter made its annual round last weekend, which saw many of us, young and old, stuffing ourselves with chocolate in various shapes, forms and sizes, as well as letting loose some unsightly puns (sorry). Here’s a rundown on the brands that hopped on the holiday’s bandwagon.

Forget ad blocking, Birmingham website Paradise Circus is levelling the score by creating a content blocker.

Finding commercial partners is a cost-effective way to reach a wider, or desired audience. When a brand pairing works well, it can garner great results and high engagement. But what makes a good partnership? One brand that has paired wisely and has the results to show for it is Spark. Spark’s general manager of marketing Clive Ormerod talks us through some of the thinking behind its brand alignments.

Is it quicker to take a life, or save one? That’s the question raised by the Polish Red Cross in its latest campaign, which challenges the moral code of its audience as convicted murderers learn to save lives.

Music plays an important role in advertising. Songs can be inspiring, mood lifting, and according to the ‘Mozart effect’ may also improve memory. Everyone remembers ‘that song from that ad’, and in some cases more than they remember the actual ad. We caught up with Franklin Rd director Jonathan Hughes about the process of securing music rights, which allows brands to pump out catchy tunes that arrest the attention of their audience.

At Previously Unavailable’s breakfast event this week, Air New Zealand’s head of innovation Scott Bishop spoke about the difference between companies with an offensive mindset (like, unsurprisingly, Air New Zealand, or Tesla, which took its patents open-source and backed itself to stay ahead of the competition) and companies with a defensive mindset. The defensive companies generally fail because they’re trying to protect a legacy and tend to force customers to adapt to their business model, rather than looking at what their customers actually want and solving their problems. While we’re not deluded enough to place ourselves in the same category as Air New Zealand or Tesla, the same binary choice applies to us: try to create the new, or try to maintain the old. So, after much chin-stroking, spreadsheet-staring, brow-furrowing and distance-gazing over the past few months, we’ve decided to take the offensive.

It’s ‘War of the Worlds’ job edition and as this cheat sheet explains, in the face of robots we should embrace our human nature.

Twitter turned 10 on Monday and while it celebrated with a #LoveTwitter hashtag, Hotwire decided to see how much love the platform was really getting and whether or not it will last another 10.

Last week agency Stem Creative topped off its transition to Wrestler by opening the doors of its office-turned-gallery, a place where creatives can boost their ingenuity by painting, cycling and dancing. Oh, and there is always a beer in the fridge. Here’s the story behind the move and a look at the new space.

The dynamic duo that is Jono and Ben can be found everywhere in the media these days. When they’re not on their own show, they’re in the news for attempting to ride a banana boat across the Cook Strait, or some other such shenanigan. We caught up with the pair to find out what media they consume when they’re not in it.

NZTA, BP and FedEx deserve a pat on the back this week.

Apple has long been considered a design genius, associated with powerful yet simple product and packaging design, innovation, and of course for drawing ridiculously long queues after every new iPhone launch. As part of Idealog’s AUT Alumni Profiles, Jonathan Cotton caught up with one of the people responsible, Apple creative director Andrew McKechnie, to talk about his past at Y&R and DDB in New York, to ending up in charge of a 60-strong team.

Hyundai has brought back its ‘Power off, Family on’ campaign—and with it Kayla, the star of its polarising ‘Get lost’ spot from a few months back.

A Lush massage bar is causing plants to sprout in people’s plugholes.

Advertising has long been inspired by the arts. And the creative community will no doubt appreciate the artistry in the latest music ‘video’ for Pacific Heights, which Sam Peacocke produced without the use of a single camera. Here’s a look at how it was done.

Domino’s Pizza has reveled its newest team member, a pizza delivering robot called DRU.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has created an innovative way to correct collective memory errors surrounding the second world war.

Idealog’s Henry Oliver talks to Spotify’s global creative director Alex Bodman on how the music streaming service is relying less on the old marketing rule book and turning to data to connect with its audience in a more authentic way.

Contagion’s Tom Bates shares key trends coming out of SXSW including social messaging as the new brand frontier, the search for uniqueness and realness in an age of mass content production and of course, virtual reality.

AUT’s Colab and Spark Ventures have joined forces to solve real life problems with the innovative solutions of creative minds.

Dove’s long-running ‘Real Beauty’ campaign has jumped on the data bandwagon in a partnership with Twitter to end negative talk among women about appearance.

The Otago Daily Times (ODT) will take the leap and put its content behind a paywall in April, following the lead of the Ashburton Guardian, the Gisborne Herald and the National Business Review in charging readers to view content. We chat to the publication’s editor Barry Stewart about the thinking behind this move.

It’s that time of year again, the annual gathering of beer drinkers, and pretend beer drinkers, as cities around the world turned green to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. O’Hagan’s bar at Auckland’s Viaduct opened at 7am while Father Ted’s Original Irish Pub was expecting up to 2000 people through the doors. Not wanting to miss out on the fun, liquor brands and stores joined in, hoping to make the most of the shenanigans.

Contagion’s Tom Bates had a chat with Jucy’s Zoe Macfarlane who has been driving the company’s marketing and business management in LA.