The second Engaged Web in New Zealand Report, which saw Intergen assess the five most visited New Zealand websites from ten different sectors to measure their level of customer engagement, has just been released, with the highlights being that 90 percent of websites increased their level of engagement since last year, companies are focusing less on the primary corporate websites, New Zealand’s news and media websites are the most engaging and the shopping and classifieds, and banking and finance sectors have made the biggest improvement. 

According to a study commissioned by San Francisco-based advertising agency Heat, advertising and marketing types are pretty unique in their use of social media. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ad types are three times more likely to pay attention to brands on Facebook and Twitter. But—more interestingly—they’re also much more likely to do drugs (26 percent vs three percent of the general public), throw up from excessive drinking (37 percent vs nine percent) and hook up with a colleague (26 percent vs eight percent).

On March 27 StopPress published a story about a BNZ campaign by its outgoing agency Sugar. A comment ostensibly authored by Jasmine Wilkinson was published under that story that took aim at Sugar, BNZ and other partners. We can confirm that Jasmine was not the author of this comment and that another user posted this comment using Jasmine’s name and email address. The comments were inaccurate and in no way representative of the views of Jasmine nor of StopPress, and were thus removed. We regret that both StopPress and Jasmine were implicated in this malicious use of the blog. We have reviewed the commenting system and will implement a new system in the near future. 

The Block is one of the biggest reality TV shows in the world. In Australia, where the show began, it remains the highest-rated television series of all time, and over 350 episodes have been produced in the UK, USA, Israel, Russia, Romania, Belgium, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Given New Zealand’s penchant for property, it’s perhaps surprising it’s taken this long to arrive here, but it’s landing soon and MediaWorks is claiming a first for a major New Zealand television series by allowing foundation partners whose brands are integrated into the show the ability to use the stars in commercial campaigns outside the broadcast of the programme.

Y&R NZ has been appointed as the creative agency for Quickflix Australia and New Zealand and will start immediately on developing separate campaigns for both markets. And Quickflix is certainly going to need some help in this market, as it seems to have largely gone under the radar since launching with a call to the government to regulate content rights because they hinder broadband uptake. 

With the seemingly imminent move to a tabloid format on weekdays for The New Zealand Herald, the recent appointment of Deutsche Bank to undertake a strategic review of its media assets in New Zealand (and presumably ready some of them for sale) and the decision to upgrade its stake in GrabOne to 100 percent and buy out Shane Bradley, there are some big things happening at APN at the moment. And while times are pretty tough in the newspaper business, there’s plenty of courage being shown under fire and The New Zealand Herald has been rewarded for its efforts by scoring a hat-trick of wins at the 2012 International Newsmedia Marketing Association.

The One Club’s Creative Week in New York has come to an end, and the world’s best creative advertising ideas have been acknowledged. But it was fairly slim pickings for the Kiwi contenders, with Colenso BBDO winning a rare Gold Pencil for the Levi’s ‘Rear View Girls’ web film at One Show Interactive and Publicis Mojo taking a Silver Pencil for the Greenpeace ‘Oil on Canvas’ campaign in the integrated branding – public service campaign category at The One Show.