…as Telecom farewells a marketing doyenne, MediaWorks lures Richard Fenner away from the golf course, Terabyte Interactive opens a Sydney office and QGroup announces a couple of new digital hires.

Ads Worth Spreading is TED’s initiative to recognise and reward innovation, ingenuity and intelligence in advertising – the ads that people want to see, and share with their friends.

The coolest little capital in the world will be turning on the marketing heat in Melbourne next month, with the second serve of the WLG pop up restaurant.

After five years touring the globe, the Giant Rugby Ball – New Zealand’s most successful experiential marketing installation – has finished its world trip on a high note at home on Auckland’s waterfront.

We’ve already seen the foundations of Labour’s election campaign, with a policy focus on no asset sales and the implementation of a capital gains tax. National decided to hold off its launch until the conclusion of the RWC and, while it has erected plenty of hoardings around the country, all of them featuring both the candidate and the man many deem to be the nation’s first celebrity prime minister, it soft-launched its campaign this week with a campaign featuring stop-go men wearing blue and red stating ‘This year the choice is clear’. 

Cameras flashed, glasses clinked and pink paperclip trophies were dished out as 250-plus gathered for the 2011 NZ Innovators Awards ceremony at the HP/Intel Winter Garden in Wynyard Quarter last week. And, among the marketing-oriented winners, DraftFCB’s The Journal added to its already healthy collection of accolades and cloud-based POS system Vend, which has recently expanded into the US, took out the supreme and ICT awards.  

As the nation shrugs off its collective hangover and tries to return to normality, many are struggling to remember life before the World Cup… What did we care about? What do I do? But at Air New Zealand it was straight back to business as usual, and first up was ensuring the airline’s continuing support for the All Blacks.

Given the unexpectedly small one-point gap on Sunday night—and the fact that the final was the biggest ever event in the TAB’s betting history with over $3 million wagered—the TAB will probably do quite well out of the RWC final. But, much more importantly, its ‘prediction chicken’ has been shown to have verifiable soothsaying skills. 

Despite the modern world’s waning interest in news via paper, print is still the best way to create contextual ads. And, as you’d expect, various brands—whether official sponsors of the tournament, teams or players or not—went riding on the coattails of the All Blacks and the success of event itself. There will undoubtedly be a range of different rugby-related commercial communications on their way, but the host of ads that ran in the New Zealand Herald on Monday show print’s main benefit: speed. Top marks go to Weet-bix, Mastercard and Steinlager, with a campaign that also formed the basis of the day’s cartoon. 

Billed as the Big Day Out for business types, ‘Thrive’ packed out the Aotea Centre on Thursday, showcasing Kiwi businesses that have achieved success locally and internationally.

An app to book a hotel room at super short notice. You’d think someone would have thought of that already. But you’d be wrong. As it turns out, 21-year-old AUT marketing graduate Veronica Nobbs is trying to cash in on this gap in the market with Get a Room, a mobile app that offers punters hotel rooms at the cheapest rates when they’re booking at the last minute from their mobile.

Last week he was talking about Lotto’s new digital signs. But, as of January, New Zealand Lotteries Commission chief executive Todd McLeay will be talking about publishing in the new role of chief operating officer of APN News and Media in New Zealand. 

Sir Richard Branson launched ‘The Virgin Business Challenge’ on sunny Takapuna beach this morning in typical style. After making a glamorous entrance, arriving on an amphibious Kiwi invention Sealegs, he then challenged Air New Zealand’s Rob Fyfe and BNZ’s Andrew Thorburn to race him past the buoys and back.

Years of pain, suffering and putting up with calls from antagonists who try to dull the throbbing hurt by saying ‘it’s only a game’ might—and should—all be forgotten on Sunday night. And, from a marketing point of view, what a ride the RWC has been. There have been enthralling PR disasters with the likes of MasterCard, Adidas, Telecom and the IRB; there have been PR masterstrokes, like getting the whole NZ-based Tongan community behind their team; there have been great campaigns and stunts that sit somewhere between sneaky and savvy from the likes of Steinlager, NZ Pure, Vogel’s and KFC; there have been more than three million Tweets about the tournament and the teams involved in it; and, despite many doubters, Martin Snedden and his gang of RWC 2011 optimists managed to reach their massive ticket sales target and, with 87 percent of tickets sold, showed that marketing and fulfilment don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Hopefully that ride comes to an appropriate conclusion in Auckland, which, as one cad said, has looked like an artist’s impression for the past six weeks. And hopefully Richie McCaw gets to lead the ticker tape parade down Queen St in Telecom’s pink fist car, perhaps with the injured Captain Underpants riding shotgun. 

Vodafone and Smudge Apps launched what being called New Zealand’s first large-scale augmented reality smartphone app recently to celebrate its sponsorship of the upcoming Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards. We’ve got two of the fancy e-shirts to give away and all you have to do is invoke the spirit of Keanu Reeves and tell us which part of reality you’d most like to augment in the comment wall. 

The online domain has created a whole new portal when it comes to the dissemination of ideas and creativity. Crowdsourcing is one of the trends to ride on the back of web-induced capabilities, but in the design domain, it has proved controversial. With companies using it as a way to source, among other things, new logos, some designers complain that it undermines the expertise of qualified designers and design companies. But, like it or hate it, it looks set to stay and in New Zealand, it’s just received a boost with DesignCrowd launching a New Zealand crowdsourcing site, DesignCrowd.co.nz.