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.

In an effort to encourage Holden fans to engage with its 60th anniversary microsite and share their stories, Holden has created an online competition that gives entrants a chance to win a restored 1969 Monaro. But rather than simply give away the car, Holden has used it as a content opportunity by documenting the restoration process through a video series fronted by Greg Murphy. When StopPress first covered this story, Holden had only uploaded the first video in the series, but since then an additional five have been uploaded (the most recent of which was published on 2 October).

News from the sponsorship desk, as Sonny Bill Williams dons the denim for Just Jeans, The Warriors re-sign with Canterbury and X Factor NZ announces its commercial partners, minus a couple from last time.

In 1995, Holden released a bizarre commercial that features a young child playing with light representative of the cosmos while the hypnotic voice of an omniscient narrator elaborates on the safety features of the Commodore Acclaim. By the end of this 30-second trippy journey, viewers are left with the uneasy feeling that their minds may have been incepted by some form of subliminal advertising. And while the car company didn’t further the campaign with any follow-on iterations, this unconventional creative approach seems to live on in the modern advertising efforts of the Church of Scientology, which for last year’s Super Bowl released a spot that also rates quite high on the bat defecation scale.