Put the over-achieving founder of digital agency AKQA Ajaz Ahmed and the vice president of digital sport at Nike Stefan Olander in a room to talk about the possibilities—and challenges—of the digital realm and you end up with Velocity: Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital. We’ve got one copy to give away, and all you have to do is tell us what we might be doing, how we might be doing it and what we might be doing it with in the future. As John Elfreth Watkins showed, though the suggestions may sound wacky at the time, they often have a habit of coming true.

Toyota has held onto its number spot in the 2012 rankings of Interbrand’s second Best Global Green Brands report, but Johnson & Johnson isn’t far behind and Danone (#9), Ford (#15), and Starbucks (#36) are rising fast, with tech and automotive brands dominating.

She’s been behind some of the country’s most creative—and creatively awarded—marketing campaigns, but after four years with the embattled Yellow Pages Group, business transformation director and former marketing director Kellie Nathan has decided it’s time for a change.

Haystac has been selected as Tourism Victoria’s New Zealand PR agency after a rigorous competitive pitch process that began in March. Expressions of interest from over 30 agencies resulted in 11 tender submissions, six shortlisted hopefuls and finally, three pitch presentations.

Using your phone as a payment device is something that’s been talked about for years but rapidly increasing smartphone uptake means it is now starting to come to fruition in New Zealand. ASB and TSB have recently come out with updated mobile payment technology, and plenty of other companies like Swipe HQ, Google and MasterCard have their own iterations hoping to render the wallet an anachronism. Now ANZ has upped its activity in this space as well with a Facebook campaign by Tequila\ that aims to drive new registrations for its goMoney iPhone app.

Swipe HQ, a Kiwi offering with echoes of US payment technology Square, is on track to hit the market in August. But founder Manas Kumar, chief executive of local tech company Optimizer HQ, which listed on the German stock exchange this year, says it’s more than just a transactional technology. It’s an “end to end” business solution.

When it comes to brand advocacy, it doesn’t get much more fervent than the love humans seem to have for Queenstown’s Fergburger. Pretty much every day, 21 hours a day, the line stretches up Shotover St and feasting upon one of its sizable delights is firmly etched onto most visitors’ to-do lists, to the point where, according to untrustworthy local Queenstown experts, it now has the second highest turnover of any business in Queenstown. International rugby players are certainly not immune from its culinary charms either, as evidenced by Irish captain Brian O’Driscoll, who, when asked in his post-match interview if he would be returning to visit said maybe, if the burger joint was calling.

Of all the NZ Olympic sponsors, Moa is perhaps the most unlikely, given its oft-controversial approach to marketing and the fact that it’s, well, beer, a substance not particularly well-renowned for improving athletic performance. But even though the NZOC is an organisation renowned for taking things pretty seriously, Moa, which celebrated a solid medal haul of its own recently, has still been able to have a bit of fun with its sponsorship activity.

ZenithOptimedia has once again gazed into its crystal ball and released its global adspend forecasts, including predictions for the New Zealand media marketplace. And both the global and local trends make for interesting reading.

Sugar is on the receiving end of some extra attention at the moment for its supposed effects on health and, as this very interesting piece in The Guardian shows, the finger is being pointed at the food we eat and drink we swallow for leading to an average 19kg increase in weight since the mid-’60s. But hey, at least the ad campaigns for these sugary elixirs are cool. Right? Anyway, the next instalment of V’s Motion Project has gone live, with “technology experts, motion graphic artists, dancers, Burundi drummers, guitarists, marching bands and the vocal talent of Brandon Black from The Wyld” banding together to create the track, ‘Can’t Help Myself’. Pull your hoody up, let your pants hang low and download it here.

Earlier this week we pointed out a billboard for the new True Blood series on Prime. And the folks at DraftFCB and Phantom have sent us even more billboard fodder confirming the adult-orientated humour of the campaign. Sally Willis, Prime’s account director at DraftFCB, says the aim was to shake any teenage preconceptions people held about the show, differentiating it instead as a “raunchy, intense and gritty raw drama”. And as these latest examples from the campaign show, there’s more raunchy humour than you could stab a stake at.

Last year, we wrote a story about SodaStream’s The Cage, a global PR campaign that aimed to draw attention to the effects of packaged soft drinks on the environment. But the campaign has earned the ire of one of its targets, Coca-Cola, with the South African outpost issuing a cease and desist letter to SodaStream demanding its bottles be removed from The Cage at the Johannesburg airport because it claims to own the used bottles.

Fresh from being named as New Zealand’s best online bank by Canstar, and following on from the world’s first virtual Facebook branch in late 2010, ASB has taken the next logical step, with users soon able to make payments directly to their Facebook friends.

Just as Braniff airways shook up the fairly dull US airline sector in the ’60s by painting its planes bright colours and putting its hostesses in bright uniforms, Air New Zealand changed the way everyone looked at inflight safety videos by making them entertaining and, with its previous agency .99, it basically created a whole new—and quite powerful—media channel. So far we’ve seen painted bodies, All Blacks, lycra-clad, OTT aerobics instructors and puerile puppets. And for the first time the airline has decided to take an animated approach, with a new ’hand-drawn’ safety video featuring the voice talent of Kiwi-born actress Melanie Lynskey and Modern Family’s Ed O’Neill, as well as a range of “cameo appearances”.

Vampires have been a part of fictionalised culture for some time now. From Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, to the fuzzier Count von Count in Sesame Street, and heroine Buffy the Vampire Slayer, humans seem endeared with the idea of blood sucking creatures roaming the earth. But popular culture seems to now, more than ever, be entranced by the mythology of these fanged creatures. There’s The Vampire Diaries, movie series Twilight and you may have been unfortunate enough to catch the movie preview for, wait for it, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Which is why the folks at DraftFCB are keen to make sure their billboard for the new series of Prime’s True Blood differentiates the show from the rest of the teen-vampire genre.