As Brancott Estate rolls out a contemporary new look across its entire wine range, it’s also releasing a new app bringing together the worlds of wine and entertainment via QR code.

Lucky seven, God’s in heaven, one little crutch, a David Beckham, one hockey stick, a slice of heaven. There, 7 ways to say seven, with out mentioning dwarves once. Why? Well seven’s obviously the lucky number for Spark PR & Activate, as they start the New Year with a seventh brand new client, Weight Watchers NZ. The win tops off a hugely successful 2011 for the Auckland-based agency. In recent months, Spark PR & Activate has also been appointed as PR agency for Electrolux Cookware and Laundry, Dermalogica NZ, boutique stationery store Red Letter Day and Mambo apparel.

Design and communications agency The Church has created a new direction for the New Zealand International Arts Festival. Targeted at first time festival goers the concept is about adding an ‘extraordinary’ experience to your every day life – be it catching a bus, or walking to work. Creative director Chris Waind says the opportunity to work on such an iconic event was too good to miss. “We’ve been able to bring all our experience with the NZSO and our creative conference We Can Create to bear and that’s injected the energy and effectiveness we think the brand needed”.

Judging by this expensive-looking new epic for the launch of the Subaru XV, the Australian arm of the business isn’t afraid to spend money on big ads. And while it’s fair to assume New Zealand doesn’t have access to those sort of budgets, it does have Barnes, Catmur & Friends on its side, and, just like its contextual number celebrating the Great Auckland Snow last year, this smart print ad showcasing the reversing cameras that now come as standard in the Legacy and Outback models also hits the spot.

Lemonade Design is by no means a newbie to the design game with several prominent clients including Eden Park, Jucy Rentals and Burger Fuel on the roster. And now the agency has turned its hand to new premium ice cream brand Holy Moly.

Mobile devices are basically seen as a necessity these days and, like a dog without its bone, there’s almost nothing more depressing than seeing a modern human try to function without its phone. For marketers, these devices offer some very exciting creative possibilities, and MediaWorks has jumped on the ‘social TV’ bandwagon and released what it believes is a world-first smartphone app called Pluk that uses audio recognition technology to deliver content from the TV straight to the user’s phone.

It’s not just Whitcoulls, with its very public financial struggle and consequent sale in mid-last year, that is being affected by the slow sales of books in New Zealand. With literacy levels dropping year on year, the lack of trading is also keeping our country’s authors downtrodden and many of our stories untold. But the New Zealand Book Council, just like other separate entities like NZ Book Month, which won the not-for-profit gong at the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards last year for trying to put a book in the hands of every Kiwi, is out to change this. And it’s latest ad, which was made by Colenso BBDO and follows up from the haunting and very well-awarded Going West with some more engaging paper artistry, aims to show the printed word can shape and inspire. 

If you believe the digital doomsayers, free-to-air TV is currently experiencing death by a thousand cuts. But in New Zealand, it seems as though TV is slowly clawing its way back to the good old days after data released by industry body ThinkTV showed a two percent or $11 million rise in total ad revenue to $618 million for 2011, up from $607 million in 2010 and $569 million in 2009.

Barnes, Catmur & Friends won the Tourism Fiji account in mid-2009 and set out on its mission to grow New Zealand visitor arrivals from 100,000 per year to 120,000 by 2011. Since it took over, and despite the ongoing political uncertainty, arrivals have gone up 18 percent on the back of some good creative comms, including an enticing TVC, a billboard that showed how hot it was in Fiji during the New Zealand winter and a well-received Adshel promotion that ‘Fiji’ed’ a few hundred locals. But, despite these local results, Tourism Fiji has decided the best approach to “ensure the best possible return on the Fiji Government’s significant annual investment in marketing Fiji to the world and to effectively position Fiji competitively into the future” is to find a lead global advertising agency to develop and implement a new global masterbrand strategy. 

Plastic is bad, mmmkay. And SodaStream NZ, with the help of the PR Shop, is following in the footsteps of overseas markets and using shock and awe tactics to show it, with a large travelling cage filled with 2,000 empty cans and bottles that aims to visually represent the average amount used by a Kiwi household in a three-year period, educate the locals about the world’s recycling problem and, of course, show that SodaStream is a better, eco-friendly option. 

As everyone knows, Telecom’s Abstain campaign died a horrible death before it was even born and it was a regular inclusion in the ‘least favourite’ campaign category in our Year in Reviews. Vaughn Davis managed to pin down the former head of marketing Kieren Cooney for a chat about the campaign, the thinking behind it and its unfortunate leakage for Idealog before he headed off to Australia and we’re pretty sure you markety types will be interested in what he had to say. So put your finger on this. 

With the huge—some might say completely OTT—number of courses available in New Zealand, education is a very competitive sector. And, as is usually the case over summer, a range of academic institutions are currently ramping up their marketing activity in an effort to get more students to sign up. The last phase of Unitec’s year-long docu-ad series went live recently, AUT is pushing its interesting new campaign, and many smaller, more specialised schools are also advertising. But two new ads caught our attention this week: one featuring the inspiring ‘and not but’ message for the Open Polytechnic, which was created by Ogilvy Wellington and follows up from the very successful ‘Open World’ campaign, and the other a nice animated spot for the Manukau Institute of Technology, which was created by BCG2 and Cirkus. 

An interesting bit of biz news in from the States today, which has some relevance for this end of town. Namely that this year in the States, for the very first time, internet ad spending is set to eclipse total spending on all print media. But this has been long predicted. What is surprising is the e-marketer.com chart showing that online ad spending is set to overtake TV in the States by 2016.