As many a North Shore expat will tell you, South Africa has limitless expanses of natural beauty, friendly people and an intriguing history. But relaying this story through advertising without making it seem clichéd, contrived and uninspiring isn’t easy. So rather than compiling yet another montage of wildlife shots, beach scenes and smiling faces, Tourism South Africa has instead to combine all these elements into a story that comes with a goosebump-causing twist ending.

Creative types are restless and often entrepreneurial souls so, once they’ve finished harnessing their powers to sell more baked beans, they often head home to focus on their own projects. Here are three we’ve noticed recently from Cleve Cameron, Chris Williams and Jacqui Lockington.

What is the sexiest vegetable you can think of? A cucumber? A succulent yellow capsicum? A plump aubergine maybe? Well how about broccoli?

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

The All Blacks generally get a few views when they’re wheeled out by the sponsors. But it’s small fry compared to football stars. And Samsung’s got a galaxy of them for its latest campaign.

Last month, StopPress covered the ‘Beef with Bullies’ campaign that the Mad Butcher had launched in an effort to raise awareness about the blight of bullying in New Zealand schools. As part of the campaign, the Mad Butcher also launched a competition that invited New Zealand schools to send in video clips that relay an anti-bullying message. These entries have trickled in over the last few weeks, and the Mad Butcher’s social media team started posting them onto the company’s Facebook page this morning.

Black, “an international fashion, beauty, arts and culture magazine published from New Zealand for the people of the world”, has long featured beautiful people in its pages. And after launching a new responsive website and digital magazine, it can now do justice to those beautiful people online.

Smartphones are great for ordering taxis, finding mates and detecting monsters. But Ubisoft and BETC Paris have attempted to show that they can control much more than that with a great stunt for the soon-to-be released hacker-themed game Watch Dogs.

For a few years now, the tech behemoths have been at the top of the chain in terms of brand value. That trend has continued this year in the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands study, but there’s been a change at the top, with Google making an acquisition of a different kind—the number one spot ahead of Apple.

Rather than commissioning a group of actors to over-emphasise the refreshing sensation of sipping on a Coke, Wieden + Kennedy instead compiled a montage of regular people giving their best “ahhhhs” after a gulp of the sugary drink.

Using the unfortunate premise that dinnertime has become a sordid affair that often involves gobbling down a fast food meal while perusing the rectangular screen of a smartphone, Brazilian fast food chain Giraffas found an innovative way to tap into football fever ahead of the FIFA World Cup. The company commissioned the development of a football game app that converts the smartphone into an ad-hoc goal complete with a a goalkeeper. Once the app has been downloaded, the phone can be placed at the end of a football pitch-themed placemat, which comes with a perforated edge that can be torn off and crumpled into a crude ball.

In the past, Facebook stalkers could scroll through your images and posts to deduce if you were in a relationship, without ever letting you know who they were. But the good old days of stalker anonymity are over. A new feature, which could only have been created to facilitate a shortcut for the lazy stalker, allows Facebook users to ask their friends if they are in relationships.

As traditional boundaries around production and advertising start to blur, some of the more progressive companies are doing much more than just filming pretty pictures. Motion Sickness Studio, which kicked into gear in Dunedin around 18 months ago, could be placed in that category. And now it’s moved north to try and get a slice of the content creation market in Auckland. Co-founder Sam Stuchbury sits down for a chat.