A while back Swedish hair brand Apolosophy got plenty of attention for its creative use of subway advertising. And a Swedish cancer charity has added a little more emotion to that idea.

BNZ is getting involved in the world of forums by launching BNZ Community, a social hub “where New Zealanders can give, and get, guidance on all things banking and money-related”. Coinciding with the start of Money Week, BNZ’s director of retail and marketing Craig Herbison says that BNZ Community will help make it easier for New Zealanders to talk about money and banking. BNZ Community has two main components: a forum where users can post a query, start up a conversation and search out the best answers to questions; and the separate ‘Good with Money’ blog, where BNZ’s staff will be providing information on how customers can be smarter with their money.

MediaWorks is playing the Paul Henry card next year and moving him to a hybrid TV/radio/digital breakfast show that will spell the end of The Paul Henry Show, Firstline and Marcus Lush on RadioLive. MediaWorks says his show was a success. So you can judge for yourself with a comparison to the last year of Nightline from Nielsen’s TAM ratings. PLUS: Firstline vs. Breakfast.

Customer backlash has forced Sealord to cast its latest ad, starring reality TV star Heidi Montag, to Davy Jones’ Locker. After screening the new campaign for less than two weeks, Sealord has pulled the ads from YouTube and television.

Wellington’s Ocean Design has been around for 26 years, but it’s been content to float under the radar. Now, after adding some new business to its list of very longstanding clients and bringing a few new staff onboard, managing director Blair Mainwaring pipes up.

ANZ is understandably keen to get more Kiwis buying, building and renovating, so it’s bringing Kevin McCloud, design expert and host of the British home renovation show Grand Designs since 1999, to visit New Zealand to offer some inspiration to property lovers. He’ll talk about the highs and lows of the show (MediaWorks is currently looking for houses for a New Zealand version of the show) and offer his thoughts on how that relates to New Zealand at a one-off speaking event on 22 October at the Viaduct Events Centre. And we’ve got a couple of tickets to give away, so post a link to the coolest/funniest piece of design you’ve seen recently and to the winner shall go the spoils.

The expression ‘a third wheel’ and the oft-used phrase ‘two’s company, three’s a crowd’ are usually employed to describe a situation whereby a third participant somehow ruins the dynamism between a couple. However, DDB doesn’t agree with this sentiment. In a trio of new TVCs, which aim to draw attention to Lotto NZ’s new game called 3 Play, DDB attempts to show that ordinary activities are way better when done in a group of three.

Next’s annual Woman of the Year awards took place last night, with Sita Selupe, founder and principal of Rise Up Academy and chief executive of Rise Up Trust, taking the supreme and education awards, Lisa Carrington taking the sport category, Miranda Harcourt taking the culture gong, My Food Bag co-founder Cecilia Robinson taking the business category and psychologist Sally Merry earning the health and science winner. So sit back, grab a saveloy from the Friday snack table and check out some glamour shots from the night.

Hey look! There’s Lorde!

There are plenty of critics who, as this brilliant story in The Atlantic shows, believe that there has been a dumbing-down of news, a rise in entertainment and a focus on celebrity. Because we now have the technology to see what’s being read and watched, some feel it has become a vicious cycle of banality. But the research of George Gallup from almost 90 years ago on what people read in their newspapers shows that this isn’t a new phenomenon, that native advertising was always effective and that “readers are liars”.

Want to know what the future looks like in 20 years? What technology you’ll be using? What your house, car or even your kids will be like?

As Mashable wrote last year, all start-up videos seem to look the same (including Xero’s, which appeared on its list of cliched techniques twice). So they’re ripe for taking the mickey out of. And Canada’s Invoke Media has done that with a pitch video for an amazing new start-up called Carrot.

In the lead up to this year’s edition of McHappy Day—the signature fundraising event for the Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC)—McDonald’s has launched a YouTube video that draws attention to the charitable work the organisation does to assist families who have children suffering from illnesses. The video features compilation of clips heart-wrenching clips of families living in on the Kiwi-based Ronald McDonald Houses.

Remember when Cadbury sneakily added palm-oil to its chocolate and decreased the size of its packs? The company got an absolute slamming and its trust levels went through the floor. So it was interesting to see the exact opposite of that response when Whittaker’s put a post on Facebook saying that it would soon have to raise its prices.

At a launch event held last night at Auckland’s Snapdragon Bar, TSM NZ chief executive Rob Ellis unveiled a new mobile wallet brand, bringing fruition to a plan that was first announced over a year ago. As part of the launch, Ellis also said that the collaboration between the shareholders 2degrees, Spark, Vodafone, Paymark and banking partners ASB and BNZ would no longer be known as the TSM but rather as Semble. The main principle underpinning the Semble system is that it aims to remove the need for cards by facilitating a contactless payment system through the user’s mobile phone.

The founder of Ello started up the ad-free social network because he felt like the internet had turned into a giant billboard. There are ways to get around that, of course, and the rise of adblocking software is one of the most popular (nearly five percent of all internet users now use such software, up 69 percent on last year, and 18-29 year olds in the US clocked in at 41 percent). Converse is a brand aimed at the younger end of the market, so, in keeping with the trend towards utility in advertising, it created its own solution to annoying banner ads: a downloadable browser extension called The Ticket.