Although Brendon McCullum and his squad will return to New Zealand without the coveted Cricket World Cup trophy tow, the team has certainly won the hearts of the nation and, as a corollary, the continued support of the companies that sponsored the team as the action unfolded over the last few weeks. And this has seen several brands take out print ads dedicated to the efforts of the Black Caps in the Herald.

For decades, pink has been for girls and blue has been for boys. This arbitrary assignation of colour to gender has for generations dictated the colour of children’s rooms, clothes, stationery and toys. And these constraints that omnipotently decide ‘this is for boys’ and ‘this is for girls’ have also extended into other areas of children’s lives, often limiting what they feel they are permitted to participate in. However, these notions that have until now been cast in plasticine GI Joes action figures and Barbie dolls are starting to melt together, blurring gender lines and giving children the ability to determine how they want to represent their personal identities.

UK-based creative DLKW Lowe has shown the power of home-cooked flavours in a heart-wrenching spot for Knorr that features a mother bringing a meal to her daughter all the way in the Arctic. The ad is based on the premise of a Knorr study in which 82 percent of respondents said that some foods remind them of childhood, while 77 percent said that food is always part of life’s most meaningful moments.

The fervour around the Black Caps and their amazing performance in the Cricket World Cup is manifesting itself in a number of ways. Here are a few of them.

Quitline is rolling out phase two of its ‘crayons’ campaign, joining up with Screentime creative Toni Urlich, and has released the first of two TVCs, which provide a strong reminder of the impressionable nature of children and their desire to emulate the actions of family members they look up to.

While attention to the rampant growth of the ‘interactive category’ grabs headlines, there’s an extra piece of the expenditure puzzle which largely goes unaccounted for. And that’s the value and confidence New Zealand marketers are showing by increasing their investment in data-driven marketing and advertising (DDMA), argues Marketing Association chief executive Michael Pryor.

Despite how joyful we become when we see fundraising school kids knock on our door with a box full of chocolate or cookies, sadly, we know it’s not good for us—and this is what Ecostore is pushing in a fundraising initiative campaign where it’s teamed up with four-time world shot put champion Valerie Adams for ‘Good Soap for a Good Cause,’ which might see some fundraising groups selling bars of soap instead of chocolate.

Last year, Spark announced it was teaming up with Kiwi NBA player Steven Adams on a project dubbed ‘The Boroughs’ which would see it partner up with Auckland City Council to open five high-tech basketball courts. And today Spark and the Ōtara-Papatoetoe local board started construction on the first court at Otamariki Park in South Auckland.

Like most other media outlets, we’re flagrantly tapping into cricket fervour and trying to shoehorn anything cricket-related onto the site. Thankfully, the Wellington data/cricket nerds from Dot have come to the party and, rather appropriately given the agency’s name, it has been tracking every dot ball in the Cricket World Cup. Here are some of the interesting discoveries.

One of the joys of Wellington is its compactness. And that means residents do a fair bit of walking. In the past five years, however, an average of 13 pedestrians have been involved in accidents on the golden mile each year. So Wellington City Council created a safety campaign that aimed to get Wellingtonians crossing the road with a “clear head” and it has slowly been rolling it out over print, video, outdoor and social media.

Wellington’s wide array of promotional activities have helped to greatly increase visitor numbers to the capital, both domestically and from Australia. Now it’s trying to get some of our neighbours to think about staying for longer with the Wellington Works digital campaign.

From delivering pizzas, to firing rockets to finding lost souls to letting film-makers capture amazing aerial footage, drones are proving fairly useful. And New Zealand production company Reel Factory is benefitting from providing what it claims is the first drone-based footage for a live, full HD, international broadcast at the Cricket World Cup.

Approximately one million NFC-enabled smartphones are in use in New Zealand and as more and more humans become accustomed to paying via contactless terminals, those two technologies are edging ever closer. Semble, a joint venture between banks and telcos (and supported by Samsung), announced its arrival last year (and is holding a special event on Tuesday), and there are plenty of other ways to pay without using notes or coins. Now the country’s biggest bank is joining the fun with its own solution: an update to its goMoney app that will turn your phone into a mobile wallet.

Danushka Abeysuriya is a geek-turned- adept-businessman, whose smartphone video game development company Rush Digital, founded in 2010, now has 20 staff, turned over more than $1 million in 2013, and has clients across in Europe, the US and Australia. This is the story behind the success.

Despite a rocky start and questions over commercial influence on the government, the $10 million strategic marketing partnership between Warner Bros and Tourism New Zealand (with Air New Zealand also along for the ride) seems to have done the business, with The Hobbit trilogy—and the Lord of the Rings movies before it—getting the country into the minds of numerous foreign moviegoers and helping to increase the number of visitors to our shores. But we could always do with a few more, so it’s released the third and final instalment of its ‘Home of Middle-earth’ series.

Often when we visit or move to a new city and are ready to explore what it has to offer, we can be overwhelmed with choice. Where are the decent cheap eateries? Which art galleries will I like? Which music venues suit my tastes? There are plenty of media outlets devoted to informing us where the best bits are, but one of the more interesting—and increasingly popular—options is Concrete Playground, an online guide to culture in Auckland, Wellington and Australia.

For its latest campaign, McDonald’s seems to have taken inspiration from the the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a song of six pence’. But rather than having “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” singing to a king, it has instead added a touch of music to its Big Mac boxes. Yesterday, as selected McDonald’s customers in Auckland opened their Big Mac boxes, they were blasted by song straight from the burger’s container. The singing boxes were part of McDonald’s global ‘imlovinit24’ initiative, which sought to share 24 moments of joy to millions in 24 hours.

As the .GIFYs, Buzzfeed and Reddit show, looping images are extremely appealing to modern day humans. And, in celebration of International Happiness Day last Friday, Google, Pharrell Williams and the UN foundation invited folks from all over the globe to create their own dancing GIF and spread a bit of happiness for climate action.