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

There are plenty of blogs devoted to strange and cringeworthy stock imagery. But what about stock video? It’s also ripe for the prodding. And as the very funny Getty Critics blog proves, adding sound makes these generic scenes way better.

An APN Outdoor digital billboard scored highly for recall on a test by walkers in central Auckland bombarded by ad messages.

Dancing chickens beat dancing babies any day, as this kooky ad to promote Mercedes’ stability control shows.

Whether it be Ches and Dale, the great Crunchie train robbery or John Rowles singing about roofs, many of the country’s most memorable ads feature jingles. Despite their propensity to burn themselves into human brains, they’ve largely gone out of fashion now, but Cadbury and DDB are trying to give the nation another dose of ‘song rash’ by giving a classic Roses ad a modern twist.

The recently merged creative agency Verdict/MEA Mobile is a finalist in this year’s Australian Mobile Awards for its campaign promoting Rip Curl’s 51st annual Pro Surf competition.

Radio streaming service Pandora may be a music company, but it’s also a business built on data.
At the heart of that data is the Music Genome Project. Twelve years in the making, it’s a big part of how the company decides how it will serve up your next song.

It’s a simple question. And one that very few of the Apple fanatics lining up to get their hands on the new iPhones could answer.

Using facial recognition tools, BNZ has launched EmotionScan, an online experience developed by BNZ in partnership with psychologist Stuart Carr and Swiss emotion recognition software company nViso, to help customers figure out how they feel about money.

We’re increasingly using online and mobile banking, but it’s not going to make human customer service go away. In fact Westpac’s new banking platform is designed as much to get in touch with real people as it is to do more services for ourselves away from branches.

Humans seem to have an innate fascination with slo-mo, as evidenced by the eight million or so clips on YouTube. And, judging by the photo booth tomfoolery at various awards evenings, they’re also quite narcissistic, so Dunedin-based design and production shop Motion Sickness Studio has combined those two things and set its slo-mo station loose on the nation.

If you don’t want your company to be the socially awkward kid in new world of communication between brands and consumers, make sure you look after your two-and-a-half percent, says Kiwi marketing guru Sarah O’Hagan.

Awards speeches are always the boring part once you get past the frocks and the big gongs. That’s why this crowdsourced Emmys concession speech by Grey Poupon was such a winner.

It’s not often you get insight into user experience from a tattoo artist and Samsung’s US-based creative director in one day, but that’s what organiser’s of Wellington’s UX Design Day next month have managed to pull off.

Roy Morgan data from the last five-and-a-half years is hard evidence of the tech behaviour we see in ourselves and others – like difficulty surviving without our mobile devices, the growing popularity of online shopping and the slow death of the desktop and the home landline.

Retail guru John Wannamaker is credited with the classic ad quote “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. There’s still plenty of mystery in marketing, but there are certainly a host of sophisticated analytics tools that give those forking out for the ads an opportunity to measure their effect. And Adobe and Goodby Silverstein + Partners have launched a brilliant new spot to show how gut feel isn’t the best business strategy.

It’s not uncommon to hear media owners talking up the benefits of their specific media channels—and occasionally giving competing media channels a serve. It’s less common to see agencies doing it. But Auckland interactive agency BKA has given it a nudge, putting up a cheeky—and perhaps slightly ironic—billboard on its building on Great North Rd in Auckland to show that it’s actually “better than a billboard”.

Kia is shifting its focus from brand building to promoting a specific model – the Cerato hatchback – in a new campaign that features its first locally-shot TVC.

Ecostore founder Malcolm Rands recently released Ecoman, the story of his and his family’s journey ‘from a garage in Northland to a pioneering global brand’. And he’s doing a bit more pioneering to promote it—and educate more Kiwis about the nasty chemicals some of its competitors use—this time with the company’s first-ever end-of-aisle promotion in the two major supermarket chains. Plus: some glamour shots from the Ecoman book launch.