Domain name registrar and hoster Go Daddy, with agency Deutsch New York, have put Muscles from Brussels Jean-Claude Van Damme in the most dangerous positions of his career.

Election marketing is all about values and pork barrels. But sometimes you wish candidates would cut the frills – that’s just what Auckland mayoral hopeful Penny Bright has done.

Vodafone hopes to launch its SmartPass mobile payments app in the next few months and in the meantime is trialling it on Samsung’s Galaxy S3 and HTC’s One, in partnership with Visa and BNZ.

If your dream is to live out retirement surrounded by cats and stacks of old newspapers, this informercial parody by US students for Tenth Life Cat rescue could show you how to get there.

Tourism New Zealand is taking its message to key new Latin American and Indonesian emerging markets with new versions of the newzealand.com. The four new translated editions for Chile, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia bring the total number of market versions to 20.

GrabOne, best known for its daily deals, is marketing itself to a new audience with a booking and information site for national travellers.

Recently, Tui put up a few Yeah Right billboards that said ‘My shout, I’ve got shares in Moa beer’, which was a jab at the fact that its stock price dropped by around 32 percent after it failed to meet its sales targets. And Moa has responded in typically comical fashion by showing how hard it is to get hold of Tui’s owners.

Columbus Coffee kicked off in 1995 and it’s grown considerably since then, with 54 stores now dotted around the country. But after an 18 month project to breathe some new life into the brand, the chain is celebrating a new look, a new menu, new fit outs, new products and a host of new partnerships.

Every now and then a gem of an email comes to us – this time it’s from a “a digital agency that cares about New Zealand and Kiwis” that’s giving ordinary Joe Public the chance to slap John Key with a fish.
It’s all about the GCSB, bro!

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

The Nokia Deutschland Twitter account @Nokiahomebase was the scene of a battle in the escalating mobile device war with the Finnish company slaughtering a rival Samsung phone.

No-one does absurd advertising better than Old Spice and W+K. And to celebrate the launch of the NFL season it’s released four absolute pearlers that continue the trend of its bar soaps campaign and parody the hell out of the ‘transportation’ genre of advertising.

Everyone loves critiquing a logo, which means that releasing a new one is a fairly nerve-racking experience for any business. But Yahoo! has taken a different, slightly more democratic approach to the unveiling of its new logo, offering up 29 different variations over the past month and asking for feedback. Which one would you choose?

Tech entrepreneur Rowan Simpson has launched a directory of Kiwi companies including desktop and mobile software firms, SaaS companies and ecommerce players.

EzyFlix.tv is joining rival Quickflix by launching in New Zealand. The Access Digital Entertainment service, which recently launched across the Tasman, lets users pay to view content on demand, or download it to own.

The news that Volkswagen was reviewing its relationship with DDB was a surprise to many given the brand’s performance in recent years, and BMW, which managed to reclaim the top spot in the premium stakes from Audi with DraftFCB in the passenger seat, is following suit.

It’s the time of year when you get to have a say in who should take home an award at the NZ Innovators Awards. Before we announce the finalists in the different categories, we are opening up nominations for the People’s Choice Award, the award that is all about who you – the people! – think should be recognised.

Tony Abbott’s been in the news for a string of gaffes, now his rivals are imagining tweets that would make him really unpopular. Nothing’s new in the murky world of political campaigning, except perhaps catchy music.