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.

In October last year, Getty Images entered into a partnership with BBC worldwide, which gave the stock image provider exclusive global distribution rights of the BBC Motion Gallery. And now, in an effort to illustrate what this means from a New Zealand perspective, Getty has a compiled a showreel of Kiwi footage that provides a glimpse at the nation’s cultural and historical inheritance.

While Telecom finds itself in identity limbo and as 2degrees makes its first foray into the high-value business-owner market, Vodafone continues to sit atop the Kiwi telco pile as the network with the most active users. So, following Sunday’s release of Vodafone’s bowl cut TVC featuring James Rolleston, StopPress had a quick chat with the red network’s consumer director Matt Williams on the company’s consistency in an increasingly diversified and competitive market.

Think of your typical Bentley driver and it’s not likely to conjure up images of tech savvy early adopters. But, like many of its competitors, the luxury car brand is integrating technology into its expensive rides—and also into its advertising.

While many Kiwis might be suffering from Middle-earth fatigue, Tourism New Zealand and Air New Zealand certainly aren’t, because, due to the rise in visitor numbers on the back of their recent marketing partnership—and in particular, the activity around The Hobbit movies—the pair have announced a $20 million extension to the deal. Plus: the airline also locks in a deal with New Zealand Winegrowers.

Today, the proliferation of online video, mobile platforms, online marketing, Google searches, and Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts has opened up a range of new digital doors that offer countless opportunities to marketers. But navigating through the potential pitfalls of each channel isn’t easy. So, in an effort to demystify some of the challenges surrounding digital innovations, the eighth edition of the annual Fresh Marketing Summit will be focused on the topic of connecting to customers in the digital age. PLUS: to win a ticket valued at $495, give us an example of a campaign that successfully uses technology to connect with customers.

Heat pumps might be seen as an easy and efficient heating option these days, but perhaps because our ancestors spent much time roasting woolly mammoth on an open fire, our primal instincts mean many of us still have a predilection for flame. And Rinnai and Logan Brooke have played on those instincts—and played up the comfort factor of fire—with a new TV ad and special flickering billboard.

Rebel Sport is continuing to tell its brand story via a new poetic spot that’s narrated by the stirring voice of ex-All Black star Brad Thorn. Written by Ogilvy’s executive creative director Angus Hennah and directed by a Sweet Shop team headed by Joel Harmsworth, the one-minute spot couples gruff spoken word poetry with a gritty montage of sportspeople enduring the heaviness of playing a sport outdoors in winter.

Andrew Hawley won his first piece of business—Telecom’s youth-focused mobile brand Pulsate—in 1999 when he was still at design school at Massey University in Wellington. 15 years on and the executive creative director and managing director at 72-strong “digital experience agency” Touchcast is still working with his foundation client, albeit in a much larger capacity, as well as with a number of other big Kiwi companies that have been drawn to its attractive combination of speed and quality. He tells us how that panned out and what makes the full service digital agency tick.

In an effort to attach Corona to a laid-back lifestyle, the team at MC Creative in Australia has created a content room on the Australian and Kiwi homepages of Corona Extra that features blog posts and videos of surfers, skaters, musicians and artists visiting idyllic stretches of the world.

Last month, when Vodafone launched its Gold Rush campaign for the release of the Samsung Galaxy S5, StopPress commented on how fortunate James Rolleston was to not have been given the same sadistic treatment as that thrown at Guy Williams for Telecom’s promotion of the snazzy phone. However, this observation may have been slightly pre-emptive because Vodafone’s latest spot, which although not resorting to physical abuse, will likely cause the actor a lingering sense of shame that can only come with seeing oneself—at primetime every night—with a bowl cut.

Interislander has been having a pretty rough time of it recently, with the Awatere losing a propeller in the Cook Strait, its replacement the Stena Alegra battling with a few issues of its own and Winston Peters making accusations about KiwiRail’s top brass covering up serious incidents. And it’s also struggling with its advertising.

The 18th Annual Webby Awards is kicking off on May 20 and what better way is there to celebrate all things Internet than awarding a “Meme Of The Year”?