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.

When you’ve written a book about subversively influencing the masses, what better way to promote it than to hijack election billboards? That’s what Nick McFarlane, designer by day and author of the so-called propaganda manual Spinfluence has done, sneakily adding prints to a handful of signs in central Auckland recently.

The marketing deal between Google’s Android and Nestle’s Kit Kat was celebrated by the marketing fraternity (the choc-tech website is worth a look) and met with surprise by some in the tech space (it was initially thought the new IOS would be called Key Lime Pie). But, as this cartoon suggests, real humans may have a different take on the deal.

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

Some of the best ads in the local newspaper business were celebrated last night at AUT. Unfortunately, no-one from Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington was there to pick up the Best Art prize for its Wellington Zoo ad. But News Works NZ’s Lorne Maltman was on hand to accept it in their absence, and he revelled in the win, giving the longest speeches of anyone and receiving resounding applause for so openly claiming others’ spoils. Plus: Special Group’s violent Agency League run-down.

In an effort to increase the numbers attending the ASB Classic and Heineken Open, Auckland Tennis has created a new umbrella brand called the New Zealand Festival of Tennis, changed its ticketing options and upped its game in terms of food and beverage.

Old Spice has undergone a major resurgence in recent years, becoming the no.1-selling antiperspirant and deodorant and body wash brand in North America, and it all kicked off with American actor and former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa on a white horse. That ad by Wieden + Kennedy was one of the most-talked about commercials of all time and won a Cannes Lions Film Grand Prix. And now, with Old Spice launching a range of products in New Zealand, he’s reprised his role for an online video in which he aims to “define what it means to be a New Zealand male”.

The BBC has suffered two embarrasingly public epic fails. Newsreader Simon McCoy, whose past gaffes include appearing to snooze on the job, has now presented an item while clutching a ream of photocopy paper instead of his iPad.

A great ad idea is nothing more than a cliche if it doesn’t achieve a specific outcome. And it doesn’t hurt to tap into the mood of a nation or hold a mirror up to people’s weird and wonderful behaviour if you want your ad to work. Those are some of the messages from Clemenger Sydney creative director Rebecca Carrasco, visiting for last night’s News Works Newspaper Advertising Awards.

While the judges deliberate on who will take home the other categories of this year’s Innovators Awards, it is time for you to decide who should win the People’s Choice. The finalists are in and voting starts… NOW!

Product demonstrations are a dime a dozen. Product destruction demonstrations, not so much. But that’s exactly what local footwear label Yours has done.