Huffer, which turned 15 this year, joined forces with Absolut last year to design its own bottle and now it’s putting its special touch on premium cars, because 15 unique Audi A1s—the result of a collaboration with local fashion man and Audi ambassador Steve Dunstan—will hit Kiwi shores in January.

Beginning as just a way to use up leftover apples in the 1960s, one of New Zealand’s classic juice bevvies, Fresh up, is celebrating 50 years of production this month.

A fat, shiny bull mounting a helpless cow: this is war launched billboard-style by Holy Moly ice cream, which claims dairy giant Fonterra is screwing over small businesses with what it believes is anti-competitive behaviour.

‘Tis supposedly the season of giving, and The Telecom Foundation (the telecommunications company’s charitable arm) is making it slightly easier to for Kiwis to do just that after buying online giving platform Givealittle.co.nz and making the fundraising service entirely free.

Auckland branding agency Redcactus picked up three gongs at the global Pentawards recently and it’s celebrating another coup with the completion and publication of Col. Harland Sanders – The Autobiography of the Original Celebrity Chef for KFC.

The top hat and moustache combo is an enduring style. And, rocking the Daniel Day Lewis/lion tamer/creepy magician look to absolute perfection, the addition to the face of APN’s Rowan Spinks has been deemed good enough to take home the agency Mo of the Week title and a $150 voucher from The Grill thanks to TVNZ.

Waikato-based advertising agency King St is feeling pretty chuffed with itself, having snapped up the business for Lion’s Waikato Draught brand, in a move pitted as restoring the brand “to its glory days”.

Media is a competitive business, with everyone fighting hard for their slice of the pie. But it’s also collegial, with everyone cognisant of the struggles involved in getting those slices. And the two worlds combined this week when Tangible Media’s NZ Fishing World took on Fairfax’s Fishing News in the second annual fishing competition.

In the quickly evolving digital sphere, it’s pretty tough to keep up. And while Yahoo! New Zealand has been tweaking its homepage regularly over the years in order to do just that, it hasn’t made any major changes since 2008. But now, after a year-long project, it’s launched its new, simplified, longer and de-cluttered version.

As Interbrand’s Tom Warden recently wrote, whether you go for a descriptive or associative brand name, choosing a name for your business is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. And The Namery, which claims to be Auckland’s first specialist naming consultancy, wants to help you with the process.

Entertainment has long been part of advertising, as evidenced by the (paraphrased) old Saatchi & Saatchi mantra of ‘if it’s interrupting you in your living room, it better be good’. But that idea has evolved over the years, to the point where Cannes added a branded content category into the schedule this year and Mumbrella recently held its inaugural Australasian Branded Entertainment Awards. And Special Group managed to take home a silver for The Gravity Coffee Run in best integration of brand story-telling (non-fictional) and a gold for The Smirnoff Night Project in transmedia. Air New Zealand’s Kiwi Sceptics campaign by Host Sydney took two bronzes in the same two categories.

There’s gold in them thar mobile hills. And a rare few developers have been able to mine it, with The Angry Birds brand estimated to be worth over $1 billion, and OMGPOP, the makers of the hugely popular Draw Something app, bought by Zynga earlier this year for US$185 million (it’s a fickle world, however, and, as is often the case, both Zynga and OMGPOP have failed to rediscover the magic recently). And now, inspired by the gameplay of Draw Something, Kiwi entrepreneurs Tristan Holman, who runs a consultancy called Flashgun in the UK, and Brett Hancock, who heads up Born Digital, are hoping they might follow in their footsteps with their own game called Act a Word.

As head of marketing for ANZ, Mike Cunnington is donkey deep in one of the biggest ever changes to New Zealand’s financial landscape. And the campaign to fuse the brands is now in its final stages. We had a chat with him for the November/December edition of NZ Marketing. And here’s what he said.