AA Life and interactive partner DigitalWorks Worldwide have revamped the website with new tools and video content designed to simplify the very taboo topic of life insurance.

Getty Images has released an innovative calendar for 2014 that allocates specific galleries to every day of the year, thereby making it easier for website owners to update their sites with content (and imagery) relevant to a specific day.

Hamilton-based King St’s chief executive Chris Williams has confirmed that the agency has struck the Wendy’s New Zealand account from its ledger. This news comes at time when Auckland Uni, another of the agency’s big accounts, is accepting pitches from competing agencies.

The much maligned .GIF format, star of hackneyed electronic cards and dated websites, now has an awards site to call its own. LA agency CP and B has formed The Gifys, which sorts the image format stars in a raft of categories.

Little Giant has kicked off 2014 with a revamped one page scrolling site for this year’s Beer Festival which allows different organisers to chip in with content. The site is an iteration of last year’s, when it overhauled the festival’s branding.

Hungarian pop singer Csemer Boglarka has undergone a live Photoshop face transplant for her new music video. And although such uses of Photoshop are by no means new or original, the way in which it is done in this video is particularly impressive. All the changes made to Boglarka’s face are effected while she is singing her new song.

Uber is on a recruitment drive, hunting three key staff in Auckland and a swag more in Asia. The recruits will have autonomy to grow the ride sharing app and service in the local market.

Call of Duty’s trailer for its Ghosts Onslaught content pack starts as every person’s nightmare with kidnapping, but ends with the gamer’s dream of time to satisfy their addiction without interruption.

Squarespace has followed its Superbowl trailer with the full clip of A Better Web Awaits, but the lasting memory is an extended version of everything that’s wrong with cyberspace.

More than 180,000 visitors have signed up for Seek’s Facebook contest, a twist on the dated genre of the inspirational poster. The Reinspiration Project asks entrants to make new versions for the social channel instead of the office wall.

By tapping into a marketing budget that other companies could only dream of, Old Spice has launched a series of nine websites dedicated to fake (and unavoidably uncool) products. But instead of actually sending the products to those who attempt to purchase them, Old Spice commissions the services of the bare-chested one to conduct an ‘internetavention’ to encourage buyers to stop making stupid decisions.

In order to encourage prospective pet owners to consider adopting abandoned dogs, Costa Rica-based dog rescue centre Territorio de los Zagautes commissioned the creation of a campaign that highlighted the uniqueness of mixed breeds.

SodaStream is no stranger to controversy—and, in quintessential challenger brand style, no stranger to directly confronting the big drinks companies it competes against. It had its first major brand ad pulled in the UK for being “too disparaging towards soda manufacturers” and its Super Bowl spot from last year was rejected by CBS because it showed truck drivers in clothing featuring Pepsi and Coke logos (in the end, it ran a tweaked version of the UK ad). There’s obviously a fair bit of PR value in having your ad banned from the Super Bowl (and these banned ads often live on in the online world) and, surprise surprise, this year SodaStream’s ad featuring ambassador Scarlett Johansson, who utters the the line ‘sorry, Coke and Pepsi’, has also been knocked back.

Telecom is catering for growing data use as Kiwis report live from big summer events and hotspots. And they find uploads and downloads are growing in parallel, with faster networks allowing the trade of richer content.

In a new series, we talk to Kiwi keyboard tappers that have managed to shift from the personal realm of blogging to create online media brands that are widely read (and in some cases profitable). In the second segment, we chat to Dan Lake, the founder of Dan News.

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

In order to ameliorate cricket’s image as the boring cousin of other sports and make it more accessible to a younger generation, the creative agency True has collaborated with OMD, New Zealand Cricket, ANZ, iHeart Radio, Radio Sport and several Kiwi celebrities to give the sport a new voice through an initiative called the Alternative Commentary Collective (ACC). Updated with cricket and rugby viewership numbers from Nielsen.