After thirteen months and 5.95 million tweets, the Chorus Gigatown campaign is now playing its closing scenes, and there can only be one winner. Next Wednesday the long-awaited Gigatown victor will be announced.

Getty’s latest edition of Creative in Focus, a lookbook for the photography industry and a guide to the changing realm of visual culture, sees the breakdown of gender roles, profiling of positive leaders of industry, and a lust for the amazing things our Earth has to offer as the key trends of 2015.

Stretchmarks, acne and cellulite are all selling points of the new children’s doll on the market, sent to replace Barbie. And not only are they selling points, the acne for the Lammily, which went on sale this week, will actually cost you more.

If you believe the headlines, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But if you believe some of the data (or Bill Gates), things have never been better, with fewer wars, more wealth and better health. Auckland University talked to New Zealand secondary school students about a range of things in 2001, 2007 and 2012 and here’s how their behaviour is changing.

From Drawing Dicks on the Herald Sun to the Mars Rover to GPS Art, the comedy value of phallic art seems to know no bounds. So if you’re stumped for a Christmas gift for your more immature friends and family members, have we got the site for you.

Since the first days of the internet, those online have experimented in creating behavioural chain reactions. Most often, these early attempts involved little more than sending out an email that contained a promise of all types of misfortune if the message wasn’t forwarded. And invariably, there would always be a few recipients who found the electronic promise of impending doom as sufficient impetus to send the message on. And while this achieved little more than cluttering the embryonic email accounts of early adopters, the principle underpinning these chain letters is still relevant in today’s social media age in the sense that if you give people a good enough reason to share something, then they will pass it on. StopPress looks at how muesli brand Hubbards has been trying to create a chain reaction of its own through a campaign called ‘Keep the good going’, which encourages Kiwis to participate in random acts of goodness.

Speight’s comically masculine southern man campaign idea had a long and very successful run, and its previous agency Shine attempted to bring the idea into the modern era with the ‘Knowing What Matters’ campaign. DDB took over late last year and, in one of its first major campaigns, it’s moved it even further away from ‘Good on ya mate’, with its ad for Speight’s Alchoholic Ginger Beer featuring some major self-deprecation from ex-Shortland St star Karl Burnett and a massive pun.

Following on from the social storm caused by Too Many Cooks, Adult Swim has now released another of its faux infomercials that introduces the Smart Pipe, a drainage pipe that analyses the stool and anuses of toilet users. Oh, and it’s also the only technology to be a registered sex offender.

The inaugural Ad:Tech New Zealand conference took place yesterday at the AUT Business School, with around 400 people in attendance. And while measurement is one of the digital realm’s major strengths, Todd Wheatland, global head of strategy at content marketing agency King Content, used his time on stage to prove the famous quote (that wasn’t actually uttered by Einstein) of ‘not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts’.

A recent article published on Gigaom.com revealed that Wake Me Up by Avicii has been become the most streamed song on Spotify by amassing over 200 million views, but this still lags well behind YouTube’s mammoth 450 million views of the song. And that wasn’t even the most-streamed song on YouTube. That accolade goes to Psy’s Gangnam Style, which has over two billion streams. Driving much of this traffic from within the YouTube platform is Vevo, the video hosting service that often has its name attached to artists’ channels. StopPress recently sat down for chat with the company’s newly appointed country manager Brendan Muller and its executive vice president international Nic Jones for a chat about what they plan to bring to the local market.

While Facebook has largely taken over from postcards as the favoured means of making people jealous of your holiday, you can’t eat a humblebrag. Enter Cookie Time’s Postcard Cookies. Plus: more postcard-related innovation with New Zealand Post’s Ad Card.

The first dog vending machine has arrived in New Zealand, dispensing doggie treats and balls to fetch. But the vending machine-in-marketing category is not a new one. Heck, even vending machines for dogs aren’t new. We take a look at some more illustrious examples of zany vending-machine marketing stunts.

There’s no shortage of anthropomorphised animals in advertising (Speight’s latest ad, for example), but Asus has taken it to the next level to promote its Transformer Book T100 by punning hard on the word ‘fly’ and enlisting a very digitally savvy, very productive avian mascot.

Visual communications company Getty Images has release a desktop version of its Stream app, which makes it easier for consumers to “to access, curate and share” its vast range of imagery.

Air New Zealand’s latest Hobbit-themed safety video topped YouTube’s most-watch list for the month of October. The clip, which was only posted 22 October racked up a total of 11.6 million views over the final nine days of the month.

Digital outdoor advertising again made its way into the media this week with the announcement that a gigantic billboard—the length of a football field and eight storeys tall—was about to be installed at New York City’s Times Square. The story was picked up by various mainstream publications across the world and once again served as a reminder of how hot digital screens are right now. Here in New Zealand, the adoption of digital screens has been slower, but APN Outdoor and Westpac recently added a few more glowing rectangles to Auckland.

Auckland has seen an influx of digital outdoor advertising over the course of the last year, and the nation’s brands are queuing in order to get their messaging on these glowing rectangles. And while APN Outdoor’s billboard on Queen Street certainly isn’t diminutive with a height of 3×9 metres, it is but a tinny when compared to the advertising battleship that is about to be steered into New York City’s Times Square.

The Auckland Art Gallery is well known for its focus on the aesthetic, with both its branding and its building winning a number of awards. And it’s continued that trend with a campaign via Special Group to promote its latest exhibition, Light Show.

As Whitney so rightly sang, the children are our future. And the ad children from two of the bigger schools are getting set show off the year’s work in the hope of securing gainful employment, with AUT holding a function tonight and Media Design School holding its portfolio event next Tuesday (and using the ‘reaction faces’ of local creative juggernauts to help promote it).