Paper has had a pretty rough time of it recently, with big printing company closures, publishers haemorrhaging cash and direct mail struggling to get the same amount of attention that other ‘sexier’ channels like online or TV get, despite NZ Post’s recent study into its effectiveness. But advances in printing technology mean there are a number of creative possibilities now available, and a few recent Kiwi examples have caught our eye.

Brands tend to inflate their importance in people’s lives. And The Onion has showed this phenomenon in its inimitable fashion with a clip featuring “fans from all over the country flocking to see all of their favourite brands” at the Lollapalooza music festival.

Brian Sweeney is a man on a mission to rebrand New Zealand as something other than the land of hobbits and sheep.

After a brief but rewarding fling with StopPress and Idealog, tech reporter/photographer/regional man of mystery Sim Ahmed finished up yesterday and is off to work for POS start-up Vend HQ. But we’re not letting him get away without mentioning a bit of copyright hilarity he was involved in on Twitter last week.

Snapper chief executive Miki Szikszai noticed an awkward ad placement on the New Zealand Herald’s website this morning.

While Telecom is currently focusing on the advertising of its major competitor, with proceedings lodged today in the High Court over aspects of what it believes are misleading claims in Vodafone’s recent SuperNet campaign, it will be focusing on its own advertising come Sunday night, because it’s launching a new campaign for its Business Hubs, the local (and often locally-owned) business-only locations offering services and products to SME customers.

The Luddites among us may remember the pre-mobile age as a wonderful time when you didn’t feel obliged to check your work email before you went to bed and phubbing wasn’t a threat to the very fabric of society. Telco beast Qualcomm sees things a bit differently and, in an entertaining, pratfall-heavy online film that’s clocked up 2.3 million views in a few weeks, it’s attempted to show what the world would be like without mobile. Answer: violent and crazy.

Kiwi ‘post-punk revival’ band The Naked and Famous have recently been holed up in Los Angeles studio trying their best to overcome That Difficult Second Album Syndrome for In Rolling Waves (by the way, That Difficult Second Album would be a great name for a debut album). And the band has once again called on Special Problems to direct the music video for its new single ‘Hearts Like Ours’.

Academic advertising isn’t typically renowned for its creativity and often tends to focus on the facilities or the wonderous achievements of its students. The University of Otago certainly does a bit of that, but it’s also continuing to push the uniqueness of the southern student experience and, after a big research project to see if it was still on the right track with its ‘Take your place in the World’ campaign, Zephyr has given it a refresh.

A new, two-day expo focused around “digital entertainment” – that’s “video games” for the layperson – will be held by Auckland’s Vector Arena over the weekend of 28-29 September.

The great Kiwi campervan adventure is a right of passage as old as time itself. New Zealand-based camper rental Jucy is giving New Zealanders (and our Australian and American cousins) the chance to haggle down the price by tweeting.

As this news report shows, being able to read an entire newspaper—aside from ‘the pictures, ads or comics’—on a computer was a giant technological leap back in 1981. While this development has certainly been good for the readers, it hasn’t been too beneficial for newspapers. And you can see where it started to go wrong. As David Cole from the San Francisco Examiner says in the clip: “This is an experiment … We’re not in it to make money.” Some might say the same strategy holds true 34 years later.

Long gone are the days when writing a ‘to do’ list involved a piece of paper, a pen, and not much else. Toodledo is just one of many iOS apps that allows you to not just create a task, but to detail every intricacy of it.

The ’80s were a time of big hair, bright clothes and bold claims. And they don’t get much bolder than the ones uttered in a rich velvety voice in this glorious piece of automotive advertising for the very advanced 1984 Chevrolet Corvette. Look at those wonderous LCD displays, listen to those epic synths and sound effects and take a trip into the future.

Mainstream rock radio station Radio Hauraki has released a new app for iOS and Android, called Hauraki, with an optimised player for streaming the station live.