Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has appointed Republik to its media and creative account, and this move will see the agency part ways with Peugeot after 10 years.

Facebook has revealed a series of insights on how the Kiwi political parties are doing in the lead up to the 2014 general election. And given that 1.8 million Kiwis log in to Facebook on a daily basis and that ‘election’ was the second-most commonly used phrase on the site in 2013 (only bettered by Pope Francis), the social media channel is becoming an increasingly important space for politicians to share their policies—or general vitriol—with potential voters.

This week Ian Thorpe revealed he was gay in an interview with Michael Parkinson. A few months back, Michael Sam and Jason Collins became the first openly gay men to be drafted into the NFL and NBA respectively. And New Zealand and many other nations have legalised gay marriage. So progress is certainly being made in the area of gay rights, at least in the developed world. But there’s still a long way to go. And as John Browne’s book The Glass Closet, ASB’s response to Thorpe’s news and OUTLine’s 100% OK campaign show, the business community can lead the way.

In the 80s, after the rest of the world turned its back on David Hasselhoff, the German fans stuck with their bare-chested man. And although his slow-motion running along the beach and his talking car do play a part in this fame, it is in fact his singing career that has made him a staple on television screens in the country in the latter parts of the decade.

Recently, a chatbot called Eugene Goostman is thought to have passed the Turing test by convincing a few people it was a 13-year-old boy (RadioLab discussed the issue of talking to machines in a great podcast a few years back). And as artificial intelligence continues to develop, human-android interactions will become an increasingly common—and perhaps problematic—occurrence. But even if they have our sentience, they can never have our smell. Unless …

To commemorate the return of the Pretzel Bun, Wendy’s commissioned the Boyz II Men trio to give a smooth and sonorous rendition of the tweets sent in by fans of the hybrid burger.

ASB has launched a new campaign via Saatchi & Saatchi to draw attention to its GetWise initiative, which has been created to educate kids on how to be smarter with money. In the new 60-second spot called ‘Creating cash-clever Kiwis’, a series of adorable kids are depicted giving imaginative answers to questions about money. Then, once the kids have had their say, a narrator interjects saying that ‘kids have some funny ideas about money’ before prompting viewers to visit the GetWise section of the website.

Back in the day, StopPress used to be an insert in the monthly NZ Marketing magazine until we put it online in 2009. Since then, the son has started eating the father and, like many publishers, a lot of the action has been online, which isn’t entirely surprising given the digitally-savvy sector we cover. We publish columns and some other content from the magazine on StopPress from time to time but, as the site was developed for news and short, snappy pieces, it wasn’t really suited to displaying the longer features. But now we’ve launched a new section dedicated to bringing some of that long-form content from the magazine to life online. PLUS: even more gratuitous self-promotion!

C’mon to New Zealand was a film made for Air New Zealand and the New Zealand Tourist and Publicity department for the purpose of showcasing the great things about our country to Australian travel agents.

Beer is renowned for loosening the lips. But it’s not often you see a beer with loose lips of its own.

Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.

As part of the ‘History Will Be Made’ campaign in the lead up to the Commonwealth Games, Sky TV and DDB have fully customised a container to house an actual running track where punters can measure themselves against past glories.

After 14 years, Vivien Bridgwater has called it day on her career as the general manager of university relations at AUT University. So what has she acheived in that time, why is she leaving and what is she doing next?

Greenpeace has been nipping at Shell’s heels for years, pulling out everything from fake press releases to sneaky banners at car races to a big emotional ad featuring a homeless polar bear to draw attention to the oil company’s proposed Arctic drilling. Now it’s targeting one of the world’s most-loved brands, Lego, after it signed a deal to create a series of toys for Shell. And it’s flipped the premise of the hugely popular Lego Movie to show that everything is not awesome.

Speaking during the Cannes Lions festival earlier this year, Getty Images founder Jonathan Klein uses a series of iconic images to illustrate the intrinsic potential of an image to move the viewer and how photography can, in fact, play an integral role in shaping the way we see the world.

We speak to Ubiquity’s Nathalie Morris about her team’s philosophies around developing for a changing world, about being number two, and about what exactly you do when you’re the “technical muscle” for a marketing campaign.

Three Mobile’s most recent spot in the UK was one ol’ big sorry. They said sorry fopr the hot dog legs, the plane wings, the sunsets and the #NoFilter instys.