It’s been featured in Wired, the Huffington Post (“a virtual reality explosion”), The Daily What (“a prototype for Skrillex’s inevitable 2017 Super Bowl half-time show) and a fair bit here on StopPress. And the V Motion Project has started its experiential journey into the public domain, with a surprise in-cinema activation showing the technology in effect on the big screen.

There’s plenty of debate about how to measure the value of social media, and, in some cases, whether sites like Facebook and Twitter are at ‘the heart of a fallacy’ around online advertising. But, according to a new study by McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the business and economics research arm of McKinsey & Company, social technologies have the potential to raise the productivity of knowledge workers by 20 to 25 percent, as information is made more accessible and searchable and communication streamlined.

Over the weekend, we received a message from Facebook’s account manager Adnan Khan asking us to consider adopting Facebook’s Social Plugin commenting system on StopPress, as it would increase the authenticity of the conversations and reduce the number of “faceless trolls” and offensive comments (if you’re so inclined, you can comment on StopPress stories through Facebook, Twitter or Google by logging-in to Disqus). So we couldn’t help but revel in the irony when ComputerWorld published an article yesterday about the fact that, according to social media management tool Status People, 94 percent of Khan’s almost 30,000 Twitter followers were fake.

L&P is a much-loved Kiwi brand. Many of its ads are classics, its Facebook page has over 184,000 likes and the recent Reader’s Digest survey listed L&P the seventh most trusted brand in New Zealand. But sales were simply not matching the affection and loyalty the brand enjoyed. So the packaging has been given a spruce up by brand design specialists Dow Design in an effort to make it more contemporary—and more compelling for the younger generation.

The wise mouse from sorted.org.nz has been helping to enhance Kiwis’ money smarts for almost ten years now. But in March the campaign took a different tack by upping the engagement rather than just driving traffic to the website. And the second part of its three part financial education campaign aims to highlight the ways Kiwis can better manage their debt.

Music is a powerful force in advertising. Jingles are thought to be the leading cause of ‘song rash’ among New Zealanders, choosing the right backing track can sometimes mean the difference between ‘meh’ and magnificent , and, due to the creative proclivities of those working in this industry, many of those who inhabit it are annoyingly talented musicians. And the advertising event that many jokingly (or, in some cases, not-so-jokingly) refer to as the year’s most important is back for 2012. So let the inter-agency banter for the Battle of the Ad Bands commence.

Porirua chocolate maker Whittaker’s has been voted New Zealand’s most trusted brand in the annual Reader’s Digest Most Trusted Survey, moving up three places to top the 2012 list, knocking last year’s number one St John’s from its perch down to number two.

Once the face of a campaign to attract visitors to Australia, Aussie Lara ‘where the bloody hell are you’ Bingle is the latest celebrity to join Air New Zealand’s promotional ranks, staring in the latest installment of its Kiwi Sceptic campaign, where she describes New Zealand as “that thing down there”.