For this year’s edition of National Rail Safety Week, KiwiRail and TrackSafe NZ have followed in the New Zealand Transport Association’s footsteps by launching a game to get their message across to the masses.

Mensa-wannabes rejoice – you can massage your neuroplasticity with a Mensa-supported Brain Training Zone by Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Labs. It’s a site with hundreds of brain training games, puzzles and IQ tests “to get your cognitive thinking up to scratch”.

Colenso BBDO has partnered with Mountain Dew to develop a novel range of skateboard decks that reveal a hidden message as the skater grinds away the bottom. And what makes this project even more interesting is that Colenso owns a share of the IP that comes with the innovation, meaning that the agency could stand to profit if the concept attracts interest from players in the skating industry (production company Finch officially owns the IP and Colenso shares in it).

Over the last few weeks the nation’s political parties have been furiously hammering stakes into the ground in an effort to erect their campaign posters. And while most political ads feature smiling politicians with perfectly combed hair, the Conservative Party’s Colin Craig has instead opted for a monochrome death stare for his campaign.

Vine is still fairly nascent platform and, aside from V Energy, we haven’t noticed a huge number of Kiwi brands using it too creatively. But, just a few spots further down the alphabet, Z Energy is giving it a crack and we enjoyed its attempt to draw attention to its super long hoses as part of its ZipThru campaign.

Foodstuffs has collaborated with one-to-one agency JustOne to launch a new loyalty programme exclusive to New World. In the past, the company has relied on the Fly Buys reward scheme to give its customers added incentive to shop at the store, but Foodstuffs group general marketing manager Steve Bayliss says that it was time to develop something discrete. And while this is a novel move for New World, it comes well after Countdown first launched its loyalty programme in 1994.

AJ Park patent specialists Anton Blijlevens and Jillian Lim touch on some interesting patents to look out for in the future.

In an age where click-hungry online publishers are looking for their next hit, a celebrity death is basically manna from heaven. Philip Seymour Hoffman was the last major case (The Sydney Daily Telegraph got a telling off for this headline). And Robin Williams was found dead in his house this morning, so, unsurprisingly, the story has been dominating many of the world’s major news websites. So is it a case of a bottom-feeding media doing everything it can to increase its audience, or a concerned media attempting to offer a fitting tribute? Or both?

Not knowing about sports and then commenting on them is a surefire way to get some laughs, as Bad British Sports Commentary shows. That relationship was flipped around by NBC Sports last year to promote its coverage of the English Premier League when it got some laffs by creating an ad featuring a US football coach (played by Jason Sudeikis) who became a UK football coach. That didn’t go so well, and now Coach Lasso is back in a new role, with star US goalkeeper Tim Howard in support.

Back in the day, the Yellow Pages ruled. Business names were sometimes based on where they would end up in the book (that’s why there are so many accommodation options starting with A and the Krasilovky Brothers of New York took that to extremes with their long-running listing battle). But for many consumers the online realm is a much more efficient way of finding businesses and Google has taken its toll on the print-based directories and forced them to find new revenue streams. So why are there still so many online business directories in operation?

David Seymour, the Act Party’s Epsom candidate, released a campaign video in May that has been bouncing around YouTube for the last few months. And from the evidence on show in the nearly three-minute clip, it appears that Seymour might be a little new to the on-screen political game.

Following its identity change on Friday, Spark released its first ad campaign over the weekend. Dubbed ‘never stop starting’ and created by Saatchi & Saatchi NZ, the campaign’s first 60-second TVC brings the imagery used in the teaser posters to life by featuring a protagonist walking toward and talking to the camera. As the ad progresses, the actor takes on a variety of different characters and speaks about the importance of starting anew.

We took a quick look at the popularity of slow TV in Norway.

With Spark livery freshly stamped over those of the corporate we used to know as Telecom, the organisation is expanding its Givealittle fundraising platform from charity to individual projects. Spark My Potential will pick out some of the projects listed on Givealittle and give them crowdfunding coaching and in some cases match pledges dollar for dollar.

Technology allows us to do many things, such as detect monsters, take a horse’s heartbeat or stop drunk dialling. And a creative athlete from San Fran has found another use: puerile but entertaining GPS art.

With Telecom spreading its wings as Spark today, we decided to look at a few other rebrands of varying quality from here and around the world.

As Spark’s Jason Paris said in this story, the biggest part the rebrand “is valuing our existing customer base and turning them in to advocates so they become an acquisition channel in their own right”. So before the launch of the new brand, Spark set a series of Automatic Thanking Machines loose on the nation to do just that. And while it calls it a world first, perhaps there’s some morphic resonance/independent multiple discovery at play, because just this week TD Canada Trust had a hit on its hands with its own benevolent machine.

27 years ago, Telecom was given its name. Today it’s officially giving itself a new one. As one of the country’s biggest ever rebrands rolls off the production line, we talk internal enthusiasm, teaser campaigns, customer sentiment, competitive responses and man-hole covers with Spark’s general manager of home, mobile and business Jason Paris and Spark Digital’s general manager services and solutions Jo Allison.