Naked has hired Simon Bird as one of the key personnel in its New Zealand operation. Management duties will be shared by Bird and Matt O’Sullivan, who left Carat after just nine weeks a few months back to set up the New Zealand arm of the international media agency.

The StopPress towers have been inundated with new bottles of stuff recently. Which got us to thinking: what is New Zealand’s best looking bottle? Or New Zealand’s best looking label?

The 2009 finalists for the Art of the Envelope awards have been announced and a panel headed up by TBWA\Whybin’s Andy Blood will announce the winners on Thursday night.

L’Oréal New Zealand and ZenithOptimedia are set to part ways after three years together.

Tanning kits, kettles and wine have now joined political scandals, gruesome homicides and pictures of crocodiles being attacked by hippos on nzherald.co.nz after its new shopping section was released this week. And it’s just in time for Chrissy!

Photo: gotcha.co.nz

Hell Pizza love a bit of advertising-related controversy. And it created some more after releasing a couple of mobile billboards headlined ‘greed’ that featured head and shoulders photos of the founders of Hanover Finance, Mark Hotchin and Eric Watson.

Allan Scott Family winemakers have come to the Christmas party and are generously giving away a few bottles of sweet, sweet Marlborough nectar to two lucky StopPress readers.

A few weeks back, DraftFCB took the fairly unusual step – for an advertising agency, at least – of sponsoring Mad Men on Prime TV. But they’ve upped the weirdness quotient even further and fashioned a few promotional Don Draper dolls.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) have spoken. And the digerati they are most pleased.

Beauty has a habit of capturing attention and, as ads since the dawn of time have claimed, improving self-esteem. And Look Good Feel Better, a not-for-profit cancer-related charity, is embracing this combination for its soon-to-be-released ad campaign.

Fly Buys celebrated the handing out of five million reward redemptions in fine awkward style at Wellington Airport last week by gathering together an array of gift-bearing strangers, tromboners (!), middle-aged dancers, cartwheelers, humans in animal suits and a range of other carnies to surprise the winners of the …

StopPress has decided to take the sage advice of Duncan Stuart and just chillax. Friday afternoon is no time for heated debates about the pros and cons of advertorial. But it’s the perfect time to bring your attention to some of the best thinkers in New Zealand rugby.

For anyone unfortunate enough to be interviewed by the NZ Herald’s John Drinnan, the feeling will be depressingly familiar: our prompt and polite responses to an email query from him resulted in a selective, confusing and potentially damaging report in this morning’s NZ Herald.

In his weekly column …

Cadbury’s decision to add a glass-and-a-half of palm oil to its shrinking Dairy Milk chocolate blocks was, as everyone has seen, a big mistake. The brand suffered, sales dropped and competitors took the opportunity to stick the boot in.  

Another day, another massive list of new, exciting things to report.

Here’s a conundrum for Icebreaker: does it leverage the publicity of having one of its garments featured on the cover of a major US magazine, or risk being associated with an Alaskan “whack job” (more commentary, here) who seems to love nothing more than slaughtering beasts, raping the land …

Monteith’s is sure to set a few e-tongues a-waggin’ with today’s ‘soft-launch’ of its Worth Talking Over website.

Last week, our dear leader turned a few symbolic clods on the banks of the Waikato River and kicked the New Zealand Cycle Trail project into ‘high gear’.

It’s fair to say that ridiculing New Zealand towns – or, more particularly, the slogans attached to them – is one of our nation’s favourite pastimes. And we have the metrics to prove it

Porter Novelli reeled in one of the biggest accounts in the country yesterday after it was appointed as Microsoft’s “public relations agency of record for product and corporate communications”. And, adding to the new account festivities, Big Communications and NewImproved have been enlisted as the creative agency partners for the hospitality arm of the 2011 Rugby World Cup. 

Who for: Orcon broadband

Why we like it: Iggy writhes to the online Kiwi cacophony.

And number two:

Who for: Panasonic Lumix

Why we like it: It’s filmed in New Zealand. And it’s a moderately comical way to show the camera’s waterproofery.

Send …

Joanna Seddon, the executive vice president of Millward Brown and global head of Millward Brown Optimor, has been announced as the international keynote speaker for the 2009 Marketing Forum in December.