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

The Warehouse Group outdoor gear online seller Torpedo7 has made a suitably adventurous foray into mainstream TV advertising, thanks to new creative partner, fellow Hamiltonians Bettle and Associates. The ad is all about inspiring Kiwis to get into the great outdoors.

ASB is on another crusade for Facebook likes, this time with a competition to push up the value of a True Rewards dollar prize pool and give it away. It’s the reverse of the bank’s earlier Facebook app that pushed home loan rates down.

bcg2, which already holds the Yates Australia account, has now also added Yates New Zealand to its growing portfolio of clients. This win, which comes as the result of a successful creative pitch, is the third trans-Tasman account the agency has penned into the books in 2013.

Auckland City Mission has revisited its 2010 and 2011 ‘Become Someone’s Angel’ campaign with a new 30-second TVC that aims to pull at the heartstrings of Aucklanders over the month of December. But rather than following the previous trend of including a depressing case study, this year’s commercial has instead opted for a subtle approach that shows the difference that a donation can make to people who are closer than you think.

Craft brewers have a penchant for experimentation and, judging by the growth of the sector, that seems to be working out pretty well for a few of them. But Wellington-based ParrotDog is one of the few to have applied that philosophy to the audio-visual realm and it has once again gone loco in its newest ad.

New Zealand Cricket’s overhauled blackcaps.co.nz site is designed to satisfy the appetites of fans who can’t resist a peek at the score on their mobile behind a restaurant menu, or who leave the action running on a small browser window at work. The demand to view live scoring is at the heart of the revamp.

Ikon, which recently added the 2degrees account to a client portfolio that includes the likes of Coca-Cola New Zealand, Kiwi Bank, L&P, Mercury Energy and Trademe, announced that it has decided to restructure its offering, and as a result both managing partner roles have been made redundant.

Ellen DeGeneres has removed all the cigarettes from Mad Men to draw attention to the Great American Smokeout, an annual anti-smoking campaign arranged by the American Cancer Society that encourages nicotine puffers to stop for a day on the third Thursday of November.

With sledging cricketers grabbing headlines this week, it’s timely to put the spotlight on tuning out hardcore abuse. One NBA superstar’s solution is a poker face and a set of Beats By Dr Dre headphones.

Hell Pizza has enlisted trans-Tasman digital marketers One Fat Sheep and Wellington’s Inject Design to make its pizza boxes the passage to an augmented reality world full of zombies. But it’s as much about loyalty and sales as fun and games.

New Zealand’s own version of a global online spendup has achieved strong sales and traffic numbers for the nearly 70 retailers that took part. The organisers say a proven international business model and the competitive nature of retail were big contributors to the results.

McDonald’s New Zealand has just launched the ‘Our food, Your Questions’ campaign, which allows members of the public to send in questions on any topics related to the food on the menu. The fast-food juggernaut hopes that this will help to dispel some of the myths related to way its meals are produced.

Want to pimp your office with a new mascot? How about this moa, once an exhibition prop at Auckland Museum that’s now surplus to requirements?

The promotion for Anchorman 2: the Legend Continues has become a multi-faceted advertising stunt that makes it seem as though Will Ferrell has actually morphed into the gaffe-prone news anchor from the film. Now, after two trailers and cross-promotion with Dodge Durango, Ron Burgundy and his crew have decided to educate the world.

Google seems to be making a habit of making us get all emotional. In a recent effort in India, it told the story of how search can bring about a touching reunion, now it’s showcasing a French boffin’s labour of aircraft love.

A collaboration between product design and development company Blender Design and miniature video camera provider Teknique to create a camera in a cube has hit Kickstarter with a funding target of US$100,000.

2degrees’ entertaining duplication and BMW’s New Zealand excursion bring joy to the hearts of all this week.

There’s been a fair bit of carnage in the local business and trade press in recent years, with The Independent closing, Fairfax flicking on a few of its titles and moving Unlimited online, and Mediaweb seemingly hanging on for dear life at present. But Vincent Heeringa, publisher of Idealog and NZ Marketing, is hoping to fill what he thinks is fairly large information void with The Briefing, a membership-style media offering aimed at leaders from the C-Suite “who share the determination to transform their business in a world of radical change”.

Every year, Doritos, the tortilla chip producer owned by PepsiCo, hosts a competition that gives fans the chance to create an advert that will appear during the brand-loaded Superbowl. Previously, this competition was only open to entrants in the United States, but this year the restrictions were lifted, thereby giving a team of Kiwis the chance to enter.

Auckland, Wellington and Rotorua have had a bit of tourism work done recently. And Tourism Bay of Plenty is following suit with a campaign that hopes to lure visitors to the region and get them to open their wallets over the peak summer season.

As Voice Brand Agency recently learned, publishing a magazine is hard graft, even with the resources of a creative agency behind it. Creative director Jonathan Sagar explains why whacking stuff on Facebook won’t cut it anymore and why chasing perfection is futile.

The creative use of statistics is fairly common in this industry, from the recent misleading Dove ad claiming 90 percent of New Zealand women would recommend it, to a current spot for Head & Shoulders that claims you’ll be “up to 100 percent dandruff free forever”, whatever the hell that means, to any number of other ASA complaints. So we appreciate a bit of truthiness from time to time, and Lipton (which is owned by Unilever, a company well-versed in the art of sneaky number usage) has taken the proverbial out of tenuous marketing claims with its latest campaign for sparkling iced tea. Plus: one of our favourite campaigns of the year shows why honesty is the best policy.

Michel Gondry, the French director best known for his work on the ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, animated his conversation with Noam Chomsky for a new documentary titled ‘Is the Man who is Tall Happy?’. And the result is a colourful reimagining of information viewers would normally find boring.

David Bell, ex-creative director at Media Design School’s creative advertising course and the recipient of the 2011 lifetime achievement award at Axis, has been on a mission to get his book The Dog Hunters in front of as many people as possible since it was published in July. Sales are building slowly as word spreads, he says, and so far he’s been spreading it via social media and at shows like Armageddon. And now he’s harnessing the power of Kickstarter to help fund an illustrated version.