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Hot cross food
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While we all tucked into hot cross buns over the long weekend, around the world people enjoyed the Easter tradition in a variety of food forms.

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What makes a good brand partnership? Spark’s experience
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Finding commercial partners is a cost-effective way to reach a wider, or desired audience. When a brand pairing works well, it can garner great results and high engagement. But what makes a good partnership? One brand that has paired wisely and has the results to show for it is Spark. Spark’s general manager of marketing Clive Ormerod talks us through some of the thinking behind its brand alignments.

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A moral debate
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Is it quicker to take a life, or save one? That’s the question raised by the Polish Red Cross in its latest campaign, which challenges the moral code of its audience as convicted murderers learn to save lives.

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Musical monetisation: how adland secures rights to wallet-opening tunes
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Music plays an important role in advertising. Songs can be inspiring, mood lifting, and according to the ‘Mozart effect’ may also improve memory. Everyone remembers ‘that song from that ad’, and in some cases more than they remember the actual ad. We caught up with Franklin Rd director Jonathan Hughes about the process of securing music rights, which allows brands to pump out catchy tunes that arrest the attention of their audience.

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Spark and NZME aim to help out the little guys in latest multimedia branded content project
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In today’s multi-channel climate, brands need to be very shrewd about how they get through to their audience. Traditional advertising just ain’t cutting as much mustard as it once did, particularly with the young’uns. Spark has recognised this, and following on from its last collaboration with NZME, which focused on what life might be like in 2025, it’s again enlisted the publisher to bring a second piece of content marketing to life, this time targeted at small business owners.

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Attack is the best form of defence: NZ Marketing adapts its model
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At Previously Unavailable’s breakfast event this week, Air New Zealand’s head of innovation Scott Bishop spoke about the difference between companies with an offensive mindset (like, unsurprisingly, Air New Zealand, or Tesla, which took its patents open-source and backed itself to stay ahead of the competition) and companies with a defensive mindset. The defensive companies generally fail because they’re trying to protect a legacy and tend to force customers to adapt to their business model, rather than looking at what their customers actually want and solving their problems. While we’re not deluded enough to place ourselves in the same category as Air New Zealand or Tesla, the same binary choice applies to us: try to create the new, or try to maintain the old. So, after much chin-stroking, spreadsheet-staring, brow-furrowing and distance-gazing over the past few months, we’ve decided to take the offensive.

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Here’s to another 10?
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Twitter turned 10 on Monday and while it celebrated with a #LoveTwitter hashtag, Hotwire decided to see how much love the platform was really getting and whether or not it will last another 10.

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Media Munchies: Jono and Ben
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The dynamic duo that is Jono and Ben can be found everywhere in the media these days. When they’re not on their own show, they’re in the news for attempting to ride a banana boat across the Cook Strait, or some other such shenanigan. We caught up with the pair to find out what media they consume when they’re not in it.

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Apple’s creative director Andrew McKechnie on a nomadic childhood, breaking into the US and creative inspiration
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Apple has long been considered a design genius, associated with powerful yet simple product and packaging design, innovation, and of course for drawing ridiculously long queues after every new iPhone launch. As part of Idealog’s AUT Alumni Profiles, Jonathan Cotton caught up with one of the people responsible, Apple creative director Andrew McKechnie, to talk about his past at Y&R and DDB in New York, to ending up in charge of a 60-strong team.

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Horse’s Mouth: Scott Coldham, Colenso BBDO
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He’s not even 40 years old, but Colenso’s recently appointed general manager Scott Coldham has already picked up the reins at one of the most successful agencies in the country. And sitting down with him, it becomes clear that he isn’t intimidated by the task ahead of him. In fact, there’s a strong sense that he’s been impatiently waiting for this opportunity for quite some time.

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Lest we forget
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Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has created an innovative way to correct collective memory errors surrounding the second world war.

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Contagion @ SXSW: three key trends this year
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Contagion’s Tom Bates shares key trends coming out of SXSW including social messaging as the new brand frontier, the search for uniqueness and realness in an age of mass content production and of course, virtual reality.

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