Banks are increasingly cottoning onto the importance of the customer experience, and Westpac’s signature store at 79 Queen Street (which opened late last year) is a prime example.

The government’s $1.5 billion Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) network is now in reach of 135,000 end users, but less than 4,000 New Zealanders have connected so far, according to ICT minister Amy Adams, and without Telecom and Vodafone to market the benefits, it’s unlikely to go mainstream in the near future.

Tourism New Zealand’s newzealand.com had its highest traffic in history this January, bringing in 1.5 million visitors to what is for many their first contact with New Zealand.

Key marketing professionals are set to receive a boost to their own bottom lines in 2013, according to the latest global salary survey from specialist recruitment consultancy Robert Walters.

Telecom wants New Zealanders to be savvier with their technology, starting with viewers of One News. The country’s largest telco is launching a series of new TV spots called Tech in a Sec, to help Kiwis figure out their damn-fangled devices.

Hundreds of jobs at Telecom are being cut, as the company posts a half year profit to December 2012 of $163 million, up by around 58 percent from the previous year.

Derek Handley’s Snakk Media to list on NZAX in March, and he says more NZ tech startups should do the same

Today we launch the latest addition to the StopPress media empire: Didge. Now let us tell you about why we think the digital world is important enough for its own coveted space on StopPress.

Google’s Glass project makes us go “wow!” and “whoa!”, but could augmented reality also make us go “wtf?” in the future.

This industry isn’t renowned for its institutional memory and, when looking for candidates for the Back Then section in NZ Marketing, it’s a surprisingly common occurrence to hear back from agencies and brands who aren’t able to find any of their early advertising work. Online repositories are certainly helping to remedy that situation, and a good example of that is the nostalgia section on the new website of Wellington creative consultancy Doublefish, which is worth a gander for anyone with a passing interest in the craft of advertising—or local popular culture.

There’s been plenty of news about hacking in recent weeks, from local examples like Telecom and Yahoo’s email debacle, to the takeover of Burger King and Jeep’s Twitter accounts, to break-ins to Twitter, Apple and Facebook. It’s a fairly common occurrence these days, and while we might add in an exclamation mark instead of a 1 to our password and feel a bit more secure about our data, a fairly terrifying Wired article from late last year that looked into the world of online security shows that “no matter how complex, no matter how unique, your passwords can no longer protect you.”

Auction giant Trade Me says more than a third of its visitors use the site on a mobile device, almost double what it was this time last year.

Sorted’s ‘Think, Shrink and Grow’ money management cycle, which was intended to up the engagement and become the financial equivalent of ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’, kicked off in March last year. And now the circle is complete, with the last phase of the campaign showing its animated spokesmouse encouraging Kiwis to ‘grow’ their money.

Parliament has announced today it’s introducing plain packaging requirements for cigarettes and other tobacco products, making New Zealand only the second country in the world to do so. Rachel Ramsay looks at both sides of the plain packaging argument, asking if where there is smoke , there is liars.

Latest figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Insight report shows digital creatives will be having many more “client lunches” in 2013, following a bonanza year in 2012.

Partnership between New Zealand’s two biggest telcos, and Australia’s Telstra, will added almost 300 times our current internet capacity by 2014.

The lure of toasters, knives or coffee is fairly compelling for many Kiwis, and, according to the results of an independent study commissioned by Muffin Break that investigated the habits of shoppers and their interest in frequent purchasing programmes, 42 percent of those surveyed said they would return to a store where the service had dropped if the loyalty programme on offer was good.

Memery is a fickle mistress. One day you’re hot, one day you’re supplanted by people tipping milk over their heads for no apparent reason. And, generally speaking, you know a meme is close to death’s door when people in offices start partaking (or, in the case of flash mobs, when companies implement them as the experiential aspect of a campaign). Given there’s a website dedicated to agencies around the world that have embraced what the kids are calling the Harlem Shake, and given practically every media outlet in the world has collected some of the best efforts, it’s quite possibly in its last throes, but we couldn’t resist the pull of the thrust, so here’s our obligatory post showing local business folk indulging in weird, bacchanalian behaviour.

Sim Ahmed captured the goodness of Air New Zealand’s social media breakfast last week with a liveblog. But if you hate words, then you’ll be overjoyed to learn that the airline has put together a video highlights reel for aspiring social media gurus who missed out.