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.

Invivo has launched an outdoor poster campaign across New Zealand this month with hundreds of Invivo posters being placed around busy street locations in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.   To design the poster Invivo appointed creative Tristan O’Shannessy.

Yahoo! NZ and PriceMe are combining forces this Christmas to launch a new comparison shopping service. The co-branded Yahoo! PriceMe site goes live on December 1 and can be accessed at deals.yahoo.co.nz or via Yahoo! NZ.

Strategy Design and Advertising and the Christchurch City Council’s Share an Idea campaign, which involved the community piping up about the redevelopment of the Central City following the earthquakes, was the unanimous overall winner of this year’s Co-Creation Award—and it’s the first time the Netherlands-based Co-Creation Association has given it to a campaign from outside Europe. 

Each year in the lead-up to Christmas, comparison shopping site PriceMe tracks what products are searched for the most, and what are trending up or down. So, for the people in your life who’ve behaved themselves all year round, here’s the definitive list of what’s hot, and what’s not.

The problem with disasters—either man-made or natural—is that those not directly affected by them and the media reporting on them when they happened often tend to forget about the ongoing struggle to recover. That certainly seems to be the case two years on from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and Fraser Grant, an expat Kiwi working in Switzerland, and his Swiss partner Gabriel Mauron have created a cool heat-sensitive postcard for the Gulf Restoration Network based in New Orleans in an effort to get a few more hands on deck. 

Eight of New Zealand’s top advertising photographers are revealing a little of themselves to the public. Renowned for their world-class commercial work, this group of internationally awarded photographers is showcasing personal work in an exhibition to launch 1 December. 

Ah the swings and roundabouts of local branding with multinational companies.  Johnson & Jonson Pacific Ltd has been quietly reviewing its New Zealand organisational structure in light of changing business conditions in the local industry, and the entire marketing department is the first casualty.

Editor of The New Zealand Herald for the past ten years Tim Murphy has been promoted to the new position of editor-in-chief of Herald titles.

Collaborations between musicians and artists have brought us some of the most memorable pop culture images of the last 50 years. Think iconic images such as the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen, or The Velvet Underground and Andy Warholʼs famous collaboration. And now Beck’s is looking do the same by revamping a series of limited edition labels with the help of local talent.

For the first time in IBM’s C-suite surveys, chief marketing officers were included in the mix. And the results show many of them feel unprepared to deal with the volume and complexity of information available through social platforms.