Telecom’s Tommy and Boris campaign has been going great guns but while the masses are busy fawning over Tommy and his cute turtle, elsewhere Telecom is busy rallying up young’uns in school to spread the word on the potential of ultra fast broadband (UFB). Its Amazing Ideas Search (AIS) was launched last month, inviting pupils across the country to consider what UFB will make possible in the future and what that future may look like.

While New World is busy trying to win shoppers’ hearts with nostalgia, and Pak ‘n Save with stickmen, Countdown is once again tugging at the most powerful of consumer heartstrings, free stuff. Off the back of its popular knives promotion, which saw more than 700,000 free Thomas Knives snapped up by customers, the supermarket has launched its Royal Worcester glasses promotion, and it’s confident this one will be just as successful as its predecessor.

When it comes to inspiring fear, public speaking is up there with spiders, heights and getting stuck in the lift with John Banks. But a Kiwi app development company called Sush Mobile hopes it can reduce the number of sweaty palms, dull thuds in the chest and embarrassing stutters with a new iPhone app called Speak Like a Pro. And it’s already proving popular, with the app reaching No. 1 in the iTunes entertainment app charts and, within 48 hours of its launch, No. 9 in the iTunes business app charts.

The Rock is certainly no stranger to controversy. The radio station is aimed squarely at men, and, more specifically, 18-35 year old male bogans, so on-air hijinks like win a divorce and un-PC promotions like win a wife (after some mild outrage the comp name was changed to ‘WIN A TRIP TO BEAUTIFUL UKRAINE FOR 12 NIGHTS AND MEET EASTERN EUROPEAN HOT LADY WHO MAYBE ONE DAY YOU MARRY’) are often the order of the day. Such activities don’t always go down to well with, for example, those who listen to The Breeze or Concert FM. But rather than shy away from these complaints, the station has embraced it as part of a new campaign.

As the numerous press releases attest, the launch of the “smaller, but smarter and deeper” weekday New Zealand Herald is seen as a pretty important step for APN NZ. And along with the new format, readers can expect to see a new masthead on 10 September—and, in the future, a bill for the content they consume online.

Vodafone has just launched its new brand positioning ‘Do Your Thing Better’, a very quirky, very Kiwi ode to the inventiveness of New Zealand that stars actor James Rolleston in the lead. Vodafone’s chief marketing officer Greg Campbell and DraftFCB’s planning director David Thomason tell us about the thinking behind it.

There’s danger in being good at something: you create expectations. Air New Zealand has created some pretty high expectations for its inflight safety videos after releasing a few stunners and most seemed to think they weren’t met with the last animated effort. But it’s trying again and, in line with Tourism New Zealand’s new 100% Pure Middle Earth slogan, it’s a tribute to The Hobbit movies.

The market for specialty food certainly seems to be growing in New Zealand. Farmers’ markets are cropping up all over the place, there’s websites dedicated to it, supermarket refrigerator sections seem to be hosting an ever-growing selection of it and there’s even entire supermarkets dedicated to it. But in a market where locally produced foods are often competing with the cheaper, mass-produced alternatives produced by the big boys, and increasingly, each other, presentation and marketing is key. And Hunter, which dubs itself the “world’s smallest global creative agency” reckons it got it right when it comes to its packaging design for new boutique ice cream company, Little Paddock.

By pretty much every measure—New Zealand’s medal haul, design and branding, entertaining memes, social media hijinks, overall awesomeness of the host city—the London Olympics were a success. And McCann Worldgroup, the agency chosen in 2009 as the official marketing services provider for the Games, thinks so too, as evidenced by this cheeky print ad proudly announcing that it had lost a client that ran in some of the UK papers.