Aah Christmas, what’s not to love?  Parties, presents, yummy treats.  But gifts aren’t always what you want, take reindeer sweaters, or singing fish ornaments for example. To make up for the bitter disappointment such gifts bring, we have two $50 gift cards to give away, for Subway and GrabOne.

BCG2 Health’s Pfizer ‘FACTORy’ programme, originally developed in New Zealand in collaboration with Spitfire, and then launched into Australia, has won a Pfizer Human Health global award for commercial excellence and innovation.

In our humble opinion, Powershop’s ‘Same Power, Different Attitude’ campaign is one of the best campaigns of the year. But we wondered aloud a couple of weeks ago whether its latest execution featuring Darth Vader prancing through a field like Julie Andrews crossed the IP line. Turns out it did, and the LucasFilm patent lawyers have been in touch telling them to cease and desist. They’ve done as asked, but, with a dose of challenger brand cheek, they’ve also taken a leaf out of 42 Below’s book and, with the help of its PR agency Sputnik, decided to have a bit of fun with the apology letter. 

A new free mobile application which helps make Christmas shopping easier has been a huge hit among iPhone users.

It’s nearly Christmas so we thought we’d lighten things up a bit with a look at some of the more, ahem, misguided marketing attempts.

Forget half an hour of current affairs – instead a new comedy show, to be hosted by Paul Henry, is planned for Sunday nights on TV3. Henry will host Would I Lie To You?, a comedy panel show featuring two teams and guest celebrities.

After a successful pitch for Maritime New Zealand’s business earlier this year, feast your eyes on the first ad produced by DraftFCB for the Maritime NZ: ‘Don’t be a clown, wear a lifejacket’.

It’s tough finding the perfect gift. And time is running out to find it before Christmas. But Colenso and Heart of the City have joined forces to make it slightly easier—and to promote the shopping districts of the Auckland CBD—with the launch of the Gift Guru, a festive addition to the Big Little City website that offers hints and tips from “super stylist and shopping extraordinaire” Charlotte Rust. 

Mega stores have changed the face of home retailing, and MSN is hoping to recreate that same success online with Homes NZ. The new website appears to be pushing all the right buttons, attracting 36,000 page views in its first two days.

When local tech start-up (and winner of the supreme honour at the New Zealand Innovator’s Awards) Vend HQ launched www.welovepos.com, a website for sharing point of sale horror stories and celebrating great technology and design, it purchased a clunky, obsolete old cash register named Steve with one purpose in mind: trashing him. So they went to the customers and asked them whether he should meet his maker via firing squad, hammers, dynamite, or by ‘falling’ off a tall building. Then, as the votes started coming in, they thought, why not all of the above? 

GrabOne, New Zealand’s leading daily deal website, is partnering up with Kidsline, a free peer counselling service for children under 14. Today GrabOne launches their Kidsline donation campaign on their website where customers can donate to the charity.

Apollo Marketing has capped off a year of strong growth and multiple awards by winning B&T’s Promotional Agency of the Year for 2011. This is the second year running that the trans-Tasman agency has won this award, beating fierce competition from other Australian and New Zealand agencies.

Colenso’s last campaign for Frucor’s PepsiMax, MaxIt Jobs, went down a treat with the young, mostly male, sugary drink-loving target audience and was a finalist for the FMCG category at the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards and took home a silver Effie as a result of the sales lift. And it’s followed that up with a similarly masculine campaign/competition called Bromitment, “a pledge, promise, obligation to be there with your boys, to participate in any and all shenanigans that may go down”. 

Christmas is rapidly approaching and we all know what that means: it’s going to rain. So what better way to survive a Kiwi summer than with a Blunt umbrella, the Kiwi invention developed by Greig Brebner that’s designed to stand up to Wellington-esque conditions, won’t poke anyone’s eyes out and has been coveted by the likes of Wired and Men’s Health. We’ve got two of the virtually unbreakable XL numbers in blue valued at $110 to give away to a couple of lucky StopPressers and, because New Zealanders love nothing more than talking about the weather, all you have to do is tell us about an occasion when a bad dose of it ruined something, be it a wedding, a shoot, a bar mitzvah or maybe even a base jump.