There was a bit of a storm in a beer mug back in July when DB was given the rights to use the generic term Radler as a brand name. Corporate bullying, some indie brewers cried. Cutting off your nose to spite your face and making consumers dislike you for no good reason, others shrieked. Mwahahahah, DB laughed. So when The Boundary Road Brewery launched its Lawn Ranger brew recently it claimed it was ‘Radler-style’ and put up a cheeky billboard saying ‘Fine, we won’t call it Radler then’. Now DB has set its lawyers Simpson Grierson on the case, saying the term ‘radler style’ is off limits and telling BRB to lay off the allusions. 

DrafFCB’s had a pretty good year on the awards front. Hell, it even helped to halt inflation with its ‘What’s My Number’ campaign for the Electricity Authority. And that campaign has won Yahoo!’s Q3 Digital Strategy award, following on from a win earlier in the year for its BMW Summer Sale campaign.

Invivo has launched an outdoor poster campaign across New Zealand this month with hundreds of Invivo posters being placed around busy street locations in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.   To design the poster Invivo appointed creative Tristan O’Shannessy.

Yahoo! NZ and PriceMe are combining forces this Christmas to launch a new comparison shopping service. The co-branded Yahoo! PriceMe site goes live on December 1 and can be accessed at deals.yahoo.co.nz or via Yahoo! NZ.

Strategy Design and Advertising and the Christchurch City Council’s Share an Idea campaign, which involved the community piping up about the redevelopment of the Central City following the earthquakes, was the unanimous overall winner of this year’s Co-Creation Award—and it’s the first time the Netherlands-based Co-Creation Association has given it to a campaign from outside Europe. 

Each year in the lead-up to Christmas, comparison shopping site PriceMe tracks what products are searched for the most, and what are trending up or down. So, for the people in your life who’ve behaved themselves all year round, here’s the definitive list of what’s hot, and what’s not.

The problem with disasters—either man-made or natural—is that those not directly affected by them and the media reporting on them when they happened often tend to forget about the ongoing struggle to recover. That certainly seems to be the case two years on from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and Fraser Grant, an expat Kiwi working in Switzerland, and his Swiss partner Gabriel Mauron have created a cool heat-sensitive postcard for the Gulf Restoration Network based in New Orleans in an effort to get a few more hands on deck. 

Eight of New Zealand’s top advertising photographers are revealing a little of themselves to the public. Renowned for their world-class commercial work, this group of internationally awarded photographers is showcasing personal work in an exhibition to launch 1 December. 

Ah the swings and roundabouts of local branding with multinational companies.  Johnson & Jonson Pacific Ltd has been quietly reviewing its New Zealand organisational structure in light of changing business conditions in the local industry, and the entire marketing department is the first casualty.

Editor of The New Zealand Herald for the past ten years Tim Murphy has been promoted to the new position of editor-in-chief of Herald titles.

Collaborations between musicians and artists have brought us some of the most memorable pop culture images of the last 50 years. Think iconic images such as the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen, or The Velvet Underground and Andy Warholʼs famous collaboration. And now Beck’s is looking do the same by revamping a series of limited edition labels with the help of local talent.

For the first time in IBM’s C-suite surveys, chief marketing officers were included in the mix. And the results show many of them feel unprepared to deal with the volume and complexity of information available through social platforms. 

Much like DraftFCB and The National Bank, the industry has been waiting patiently to see what Colenso and Westpac would come up with after the account shifted from Saatchi & Saatchi last year. It’s already created the Impulse Saver app and a home loan spot and, while the new animated ad explaining the financial perils of the modern world that launched last night isn’t being seen as the big reveal, it is the first time the bank’s new tagline ‘help is what we do’ has been seen in the wild. 

Companies are having a creative dig at themselves in their bid to win $250,000 worth of business software and services in Greentree’s Game On competition.

Orcon has appointed M&C Saatchi as its advertising agency. Taryn Hamilton, general manager retail at Orcon, says M&C Saatchi was chosen on the merit of the team’s creative thinking and strong team focus.

The online realm is a rather fluid and exciting space at the moment. Companies large and small are chopping, changing and innovating in the quest to find the most effective model and close the gap between eyeball numbers and ad dollars. And MSN, with its parent company ninemsn, is set to embark on some big changes, with a new corporate umbrella brand called Mi9 that will encompass all of its brands, new ad exchange technology that basically creates a stock-market for online inventory, an increased focus on behaviourial targeting and a renewed effort to bump up online news numbers with a portal overhaul. 

Businesses are wasting time and money trying to reach people online without realising many resent brands invading their social space. This is according to findings from TNS’s Digital Life study, the most comprehensive view of online consumer behaviour available today, surveying more than 72,000 consumers in 60 countries, including over a thousand New Zealanders.

Christmas is fast approaching and The Warehouse, Noel Leemimg, Farmers, Whitcoulls and DTR all jump on the red and green Christmas bandwagon.  Already red, The Labour Party solicits themselves.  Gin Wigmore and Hayley Westenra sing their own praises, and dog whisperer Cesar Milan wants to show us how to be the leader of the pack.