Contagion’s Tom Bates had a chat with Jucy’s Zoe Macfarlane who has been driving the company’s marketing and business management in LA.

It’s that time of year again, the internet is abuzz with excitement over another smartphone as Samsung releases its Galaxy S7. With Samsung phones so popular around the world we thought we’d see what’s driving all the hype in New Zealand.

Irish aging support charity, Alone, has released a heart-wrenching campaign about the harmful effects of loneliness.

Uber has expanded its rideshare network across New Zealand by launching in Christchurch this week, the latest city on its list of 400 in over 58 countries.

Skinny, and its customers, have plenty to celebrate this month with it taking out the Canstar Blue Most Satisfied Customers award and the Consumer NZ People’s choice award 2016.

Saatchi & Saatchi Argentina takes Shwepps down memory lane in a ‘One Day You’ll Understand’ campaign.

DDB’s Liz Richards and Nick Dellabarca are in Austin at SXSW 2016, and they sent through a few outtakes from the past few days.

The New Zealand Transport Agency and Clemenger BBDO are pulling on parents’ heart strings in a new campaign, hoping they will get tough with their teens and enforce the rules of a restricted licence.

Contagion’s Tom Bates caught up with Wellington-born Paul Noble-Campbell, who, somewhat unusually around this time of year, identifies as a local of Austin, Texas, working as a partner and customer experience innovation consultant at Upstream.

Neon is celebrating the launch of Game Of Thrones season six by inviting a fan to meet one of the characters.

Getting people to care about the Arctic isn’t easy. It’s far away from pretty much everywhere and very few people will ever visit it in there lifetimes. This disconnect is something that Greenpeace tries to overcome every time it releases a new ad campaign. And in an effort to drum the message home, the oraganisation’s latest campaign tells the story of someone anyone could connect with: a young, creative child.

Since 2006, the actor Jonathan Goldsmith has graced Dos Equis ads as ‘the most interesting man in the world’. However, his influence has now gone intergalactic as he has taken a one-way trip to Mars.

The growing prominence of ad blocking is proving a major headache for online publishers that rely on advertising to finance their businesses. And with every new person that downloads an ad blocking software, the problem only becomes bigger. Well, Swedish publishers may have found a means by which to stop the software from undermining their ability to sell ads—and it comes in the shape of teamwork.

We salute Samsung, Leukaemia & Blood Cancer New Zealand and Red Bull this week.

Summer may be over, but not for Tui and Corona as the brands set to go head to head in the surfer market. Playing the first move is Tui with a new campaign by Colenso, featuring a ‘From where you actually are’ billboard.

In what has been something of an annual pilgrimage over the last few years, Contagion’s social influence director Tom Bates headed to the SXSW festival again this year. And during the early part of his visit, he caught up Contagion alumus Firtha Hookway for a brief chat on what she’s been up to and what she thinks marketing and advertising types should be focusing on in 2016.

Adblock users across the world experienced disruption over the weekend, but not through the typical form of advertising. To celebrate World Day Against Cyber Censorship, Colenso BBDO partnered Amnesty international with Adblock to share with users messages of cyber censorship victims.

For this year’s edition of the Axis Agency Challenge, ad folk were asked to click on the online Rand-O-Matic machine, which served up random couplings of words that had to be combined into a creative idea. An opportunity of unbridled creativity is not something agency folk shy away from, and few creatives across ad land dedicated some of their already packed schedules to finding amusing ways to combine the incongruous words spat out by the Rand-O-Matic. Of all the bizarre ideas that emerged, none entertained the judges quite as much as FCB’s titillating reinterpretation of Cluedo.

Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.