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.

It’s not easy being a freelance journalist. When you’re reporting on an event overseas, the fee for your work doesn’t always meet the cost of getting you there, let alone a place to stay and a packed lunch. Award winning journalist Jon Stephenson is returning to Afghanistan before Christmas 2011 to cover a number of stories, and he needs a bit of support to get there.

Here at StopPress, we’re big fans of J&D’s, a website that proclaims everything should taste like bacon (for the special someone who has everything, its new Bacon Lube really is the perfect Christmas gift). And while we were baying for blood at the Fight For Life on Saturday night, we also became big fans of Buffalo Creative’s efforts to leverage Kiwi Bacon’s sponsorship of the event. 

From 1 January 2012, MediaWorks Radio will be replacing Solid Gold with a new nationwide station called The Sound.

New Zealand social media agency Catalyst90’s post-election Twitter analysis reveals that some MPs missed the boat by ignoring social media as a platform for strategic campaigning and positioning.

Rumours are rife Cudo is on the brink of closure after just nine months, with some claiming the company has already let most of its staff go.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are big days for retailers in the States—and, judging by some of the figures this year, the discounts offered up by all and sundry certainly got consumers to prise open their wallets. In times of economic stagnancy, the level of consumption is often used as a barometer for recovery. But, as this fairly brave print ad for Patagonia that ran in the New York Times shows, maybe less consumption is a good thing. Or perhaps it’s just a bit of cheeky reverse psychology in action. 

There was a bit of a storm in a beer mug back in July when DB was given the rights to use the generic term Radler as a brand name. Corporate bullying, some indie brewers cried. Cutting off your nose to spite your face and making consumers dislike you for no good reason, others shrieked. Mwahahahah, DB laughed. So when The Boundary Road Brewery launched its Lawn Ranger brew recently it claimed it was ‘Radler-style’ and put up a cheeky billboard saying ‘Fine, we won’t call it Radler then’. Now DB has set its lawyers Simpson Grierson on the case, saying the term ‘radler style’ is off limits and telling BRB to lay off the allusions. 

DrafFCB’s had a pretty good year on the awards front. Hell, it even helped to halt inflation with its ‘What’s My Number’ campaign for the Electricity Authority. And that campaign has won Yahoo!’s Q3 Digital Strategy award, following on from a win earlier in the year for its BMW Summer Sale campaign.