ASB has built a new app for businesses, seeing as much demand for convenient mobile commerce among businesses as among consumers.

A couple of months back, Heineken challenged unsuspecting travellers at New York’s John F Kennedy Airport to ditch their travel plans for a destination of the roulette board’s choosing. Now the stunt’s had a cleverly crafted sequel by the brand’s agency Wieden and Kennedy. Heineken tracked down people who tweeted saying they’d drop everything for a spontaneous trip and rolled in the roulette board to test their mettle.

The interweb is chock full of creative ways people have left their jobs with fanfare. Now journalism graduate Marina Shifrin’s effort, a dance video, has scored more than a million views.

Kiwi tech companies remain strongly export-focused, but there’s room for improvement in how they sell and promote themselves, according to this year’s Market Measures Survey.

Former Interest.co.nz managing editor Bernard Hickey is banking on subscriptions as the route to growth for his new politics and economics news website and email service hivenews.co.nz.

There’s a growing movement in food around provenance, as seen by US restaurant chain Chipotle’s recent campaigns. And there’s a growing, but still unfortunately fairly niche movement in business around ethics, as evidenced by the creation of organisations like The B Team and the real steps being taken by big companies like Puma. All Good Organics has tapped into both of these trends, first with bananas and recently with its drinks range, and co-founder Simon Coley recently put down the crayons at Powershop and, along with Matt Morrison, headed to the jungles of Sierra Leone to see how the kola nut farmers it works with have benefitted.

There’s been a buzz of interest, judging by the comments, on this Trade Me auction that gives the less pure-minded among us an alternative to New World’s Little Shop collectables.

A new ad with some very angry cartoon characters – made by BBH Mumbai for Skoda India – makes us glad New Zealand doesn’t have external fire hydrants.

New Destination Rotorua Marketing TVCs aim to win the hearts of Kiwi travellers, especially Aucklanders.

A cute kitten and a hero firefighter add up to a winning formula for an ad. The original video of firefighter Cory Kalanick reviving the kitten was apparently shot on the HD Hero3 Camera by Go Pro, so the company’s seized on the footage for a tear jerking ad.

New Zealand is one of highest users per capita of Facebook, but many Kiwi brands have been slow to make the most of it. Catalyst90 CEO Tom Reidy has a few ideas about how you can get your Facebook page working harder for your brand.

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

There are plenty of blogs devoted to strange and cringeworthy stock imagery. But what about stock video? It’s also ripe for the prodding. And as the very funny Getty Critics blog proves, adding sound makes these generic scenes way better.

An APN Outdoor digital billboard scored highly for recall on a test by walkers in central Auckland bombarded by ad messages.

Dancing chickens beat dancing babies any day, as this kooky ad to promote Mercedes’ stability control shows.

Whether it be Ches and Dale, the great Crunchie train robbery or John Rowles singing about roofs, many of the country’s most memorable ads feature jingles. Despite their propensity to burn themselves into human brains, they’ve largely gone out of fashion now, but Cadbury and DDB are trying to give the nation another dose of ‘song rash’ by giving a classic Roses ad a modern twist.

The recently merged creative agency Verdict/MEA Mobile is a finalist in this year’s Australian Mobile Awards for its campaign promoting Rip Curl’s 51st annual Pro Surf competition.

Radio streaming service Pandora may be a music company, but it’s also a business built on data.
At the heart of that data is the Music Genome Project. Twelve years in the making, it’s a big part of how the company decides how it will serve up your next song.

It’s a simple question. And one that very few of the Apple fanatics lining up to get their hands on the new iPhones could answer.

Using facial recognition tools, BNZ has launched EmotionScan, an online experience developed by BNZ in partnership with psychologist Stuart Carr and Swiss emotion recognition software company nViso, to help customers figure out how they feel about money.

We’re increasingly using online and mobile banking, but it’s not going to make human customer service go away. In fact Westpac’s new banking platform is designed as much to get in touch with real people as it is to do more services for ourselves away from branches.

Humans seem to have an innate fascination with slo-mo, as evidenced by the eight million or so clips on YouTube. And, judging by the photo booth tomfoolery at various awards evenings, they’re also quite narcissistic, so Dunedin-based design and production shop Motion Sickness Studio has combined those two things and set its slo-mo station loose on the nation.

If you don’t want your company to be the socially awkward kid in new world of communication between brands and consumers, make sure you look after your two-and-a-half percent, says Kiwi marketing guru Sarah O’Hagan.