Ever wanted a product to come to your country so badly you just had to have a whinge to the maker? These Canadian fans really wished they hadn’t when Taco Bell went a bit loco and made them literally eat their words.

The Herald on Sunday is one of the few papers in this country to have charted increases in circulation and readership over the past few rather difficult years. And that performance has been recognised after it beat out newspapers from across Australia, New Zealand, South-East Asia and the South Pacific to win the best Sunday newspaper at the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association (Panpa) Awards.

Kiwi viewers can now tune in to the Al Jazeera English news channel on Sky and will be able to see it on Freeview from 1 November. According to a recent statement, the channel will reach around two million New Zealanders on Sky channel 90 and Freeview channel 16, broadcasting live and free to air.

MediaWorks’ 2012 ratings star The Block has returned with strong first up audience numbers. Now screening three nights a week instead of two, the first three hour-long episodes drew an average five-years-plus audience of 411,800, a ten percent increase on the average audience of the first three episodes of the 2012 series.

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

Direct mail is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment and was up 16 percent to $58 million in the latest ASA ad spend stats. And Orangebox, which has just celebrated its tenth anniversary, is happily riding that wave.

When was the last time you felt you could rely on a company slogan to honestly say what it stands for? Just as well Buzzfeed is on the case, then, to tell it like it is.

New York agency Barton F Graf and activist group 350 Action have taken a unique approach to bringing shame on the names of climate change deniers: attaching their names to extreme storms.

We all know how the digital landscape has changed how we’re picked for jobs, but there are perhaps no crazier online recruitment processes than this one by US company founder Richard Silverstein, who wants an executive assistant.

Strea.ma, the cloud-based web app that aggregates and displays social media activity – developed by Hawkes Bay digital marketing agency Mogul – will take centre stage in San Francisco early next month. Not bad timing with fever around a certain boat race series hotting up.

What if Labour leader contender David Cunliffe’s speech had been made in a gladiatorial arena? Wonder no more, thanks to Radio Live.

Kiwi marketers have a chance to efficiently target their marketing across an array of screens consumers now use to access media. But that doesn’t mean they should get all creepy about it, an expert panel says.

Whether it be fake press releases about donating polar bears or satirical websites or staged PR disasters, Greenpeace has gone to great lengths to try and stop Shell from drilling in the Arctic. And it managed to piss Shell off again recently after smuggling in two remote controlled banners—one featuring the words “Arctic Oil? Shell No!” and the other “Save the Arctic.org—to the Belgian grand prix, an event Shell sponsors.

Shopping mall chain Westfield has paired with retail ad agency IdeaWorks to launch a new campaign to highlight its fashion offerings on Pinterest. The ‘Repin It’ campaign encourages Pinterest users to use the repin button – similar to using the retweet button on Twitter – to share Westfield products with their followers on the social network.

Kiwi tech companies aren’t just world famous in New Zealand, by the looks of a recent Forbes article.

Japan has a well-earned reputation for making batshit crazy ads like this, this or this. So, as part of the Comedy for Cure Kids on TV3 last week, Corey Jane punk’d some of the All Black newbies and tricked them into thinking they were filming an ad for the Japanese market.

When Terry the Bi Bipolar Polar Bear first appeared online five years ago, he “was a minor internet hit amongst bi’s, bipolars and bears”. And now, thanks to creator/writer/performer Jeremy Dillon, Pukeko Pictures and Yukfoo Animation, he’s back—and he’s better than ever.