Tui is breaking years of tradition by adding some colour to its usually stoic black and orange billboards, in honour of duck shooting blokes everywhere.

Semi-Permanent is back in Auckland for its ninth year, bringing together designers, artists, film makers and mould breakers of all sorts – for a menagerie of creative thinking. And we’ve got two tickets to give away to this delightful thinkfest.

They say the customer is always right. But ‘they’ have probably never flown on a budget airline. Air New Zealand is lauded for its customer service and, as a result, has legions of loyal fans. But other airlines focus on price at the expense of almost everything else and have legions of loyal haters. And in the world of aviation, it’s a strategy that seems to work.

Wired magazine celebrated its 20th anniversary recently with a special issue dedicated to “the people, their companies, and their ideas that have shaped the future we live in today”. Anyone interested in where we are now and how we got there would be well-advised to give it a squizz. And anyone hoping to get a glimpse at what the golden age of magazines looked like would be well-advised to check out the story of how Wired came to exist.

When it comes to Pacific destinations, Tonga is a long way down the consideration list and has smaller visitor numbers than Fiji, Samoa, Rarotonga and Vanuatu, primarily because, unlike those countries, it has never really invested in promoting itself. But for the first time in its history, the Kingdom has taken to TV with a trans-Tasman campaign that aims to build on the 2012 launch of ‘the True South Pacific’ brand and show what its 176 islands can offer visitors.

A round up of the news from Google’s I/O conference, including news of a new streaming music service, redesigns everywhere, map goodness and tools for frazzled Android developers.

Ever wondered how David Ogilvy wrote an ad? Well wonder no more, because Letters of Note has shown us with a response to a question from Mr. Calt that is featured in The Unpublished David Ogilvy: A Selection of His Writings from the Files of His Partners.

After trekking through remote New Zealand with five Nikon D800 cameras, 16 lenses, 30 batteries, and four tripods and bespoke rigs, photographer and artist Joe Michael and his crew were able to shoot parts of New Zealand that many never see. And the end result is Dark Cloud: White Light, a new media arts project showing at Pataka Art + Museumfrom July 14—October 13.

Given the size—and growth—of the pet industry, and the increasingly close relationship humans have with their animals, it’s not unusual to see strange new products being launched (I’m looking at you cat soufflé). Not surprisingly, most of the products are aimed at pets that are still alive. But ‘cardboard engineer’ Mat Bogust and his wife Jane have seen a gap in the market and launched a Kickstarter campaign to try and give their cardboard casket business Rest in Pets a leg up.

Hitting the front page of Reddit is usually like hitting marketing gold, bringing with it the sweet sweet traffic generated by the never-sleeping internet horde. DraftFCB has had a taste of that delicious Reddit link love for its ‘Say Yeah, Nah’ alcohol responsibility TVC for the Health Promotion Agency – although many denizens of the online community are left confused if what they’ve watched is actually a beer commercial in disguise.

Hosts Paul Spain and Sim Ahmed pick the brain of former Telecom social media manager and current New Zealand Cricket online and social manager Richard Irvine about his career as the voice (and face) of the country’s largest telco on Twitter and Facebook.

Snakk Media (which listed on the New Zealand Alternative Stock Exchange back in March) has opened a New Zealand sales office, run by former APN group sales manager Rowan Spinks.

All it took was an afternoon alone with the Sony Alpha 99 camera for me to fall in love with it (or at least like it as much as a man can like an inanimate object, without it being creepy). Sony completely hits it out of the park with this flagship full frame delight and as soon as I get a raise or win the Lotto (the latter is more likely) I’m buying into this system.

Kickstarter has hosted (and funded) some dubious ideas in its time. There’s even a website dedicated to the weirdest of the bunch. But Kurt Braunohler’s Cloud Project, which raised over $6,000 to have ‘How do I land?’ written in the sky above Los Angeles, is one of our favourites.

In a communications crisis, speed kills. And nothing speeds like social media, says Jennifer Duval-Smith. So it pays to be prepared.

From the launch party being held in the rural Australian town of Wee Waa to the recording session that Pharrell Williams apparently doesn’t remember after being given a mysterious pill to Alan Partridge ‘Getting Lucky’, it’s hard to think of an album launch in recent times that’s had more attention than Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories (you can stream the whole album via iTunes ahead of its official release here on Friday). But let’s just hope that Brassft Punk gets the attention it deserves too.