North Shore-based printer Benefitz has sold its significant interest in publishing business Mediaweb to major shareholder Toni Myers after managing director Aidan Bennett decided it was time to move away from offset printing and focus on some of the other, more exciting aspects of the business. 

Last year New Plymouth-based manufacturer Howard Wright’s M8 Intensive Care bed took out the top nod at the Australian International Design Awards, and with the finalist list for the 2011 awards recently revealed, Kiwi products have once again made the prestigious design cut.

Facebook seems to have stumbled upon the perfect mix of narcissism and voyeurism. But in an effort to promote its new Core i5 processor, Intel has taken that to new, very impressive extremes with one of the coolest online branding efforts we’ve ever seen: The Museum of Me.

In just five-and-a-half years, Facebook has morphed from a network of four or five million college students in the US into a massive social network of over 500 million. It’s also gone from banner ads and text links to an advertising medium that’s completely transformed the way brands talk to their customers. Now Facebook has taken another big step in its social marketing journey with the launch of Facebook Check-in Deals in New Zealand, a geo-location innovation that allows users to look for relevant offers and discounts on the fly—and tell their friends about it in the process. 

Apparently, if you read those preachy books by internet evangelists, the crowd has great wisdom. If you’ve ever met anyone from ‘the crowd’, you’ll know that’s highly debatable, but there’s no doubt they like having their say these days. And, in the latest incarnation of the burgeoning trend to get consumers to help decide on the product that actually ends up on the shelves, Barnes, Catmur & Friends and the Boundary Road Brewery, a division of Independent Liquor, have set out to find 999 Kiwi beer tasters. 

After a fairly long period of relative austerity when it comes to the outdoor sector’s trade marketing efforts, it seems things are starting to brighten up, with the Adshel Rally making a welcome return a few weeks back and APN Outdoor ready to celebrate the first birthday of its ‘Friends in High Places’ series by hosting the after party of the CAANZ Media Awards. 

Ah, Ads@6. Welcome back. We’ve missed you. In this edition, unlike ANZ, Westpac thinks life can be perfect; Mitsubishi lets one rip; State continues the stop-motion approach and offers car protection instead of car replacement; Specsavers attempts to save the short sighted from humiliation; Big Save keeps yelling; Stihl’s dark humour makes a welcome return, as does the Spray and Walk Away guy; Hyundai launches a new model, while Ford harnesses the design strengths of the All Blacks for its AB35 project; MasterCard taps into its World Cup sponsorship by revisiting a classic match; and Infratil goes large with the big ‘Z’ launch campaign while BP fights back with a fairly hard to swallow petrol love fest. 

Comparison shopping site PriceMe asked 460 of its registered users a range of questions about their online shopping habits as part of its annual survey recently. And, in the slightly surprising/unflinchingly honest words of PriceMe’s marketing director Chris Palmer, the results are “not exactly riveting reading”. 

There are a huge number of boring statistics we could tell you about. For example, the increase in the amount of tissues purchased by men on Sundays, ROI on SEO for CEO’s KPIs, or possibly even the amount of TV watched by people in Invercargill aged 45-46 between 6.15 and 6.30pm. But humans are simple creatures. And we’re interested in simple things. Like whether the end of Oprah is deemed to be more important than the end of the world. Well, if you believe social media, and you probably shouldn’t, it turns out she’s not.

Rumours that Groove Guide lives to fight another day are entirely … true. 

The Wellywood debacle has led to a vast array of humorous jibes being directed at the Windy City (add your suggestion here and we might send you some beer) and Tui has joined the cacophonous debate, in typically cheeky fashion, claiming the proposed sign will detract from the awe inspiring TUIWOOD sign that was erected six years ago in Mangatainoka. 

BMW’s Summer Sale 2011 campaign by DraftFCB has been awarded top spot in Yahoo! NZ’s first quarterly Digital Strategy Award. 

They say everyone’s got a book in them. And most of them should stay there, say others. But to encourage entries into the 2011 BNZ literary awards and get in front of different kinds of people, Sugar brought writing to life with a nice little ambient media stunt that projected real-time stories onto buildings in Aotea Square. And they did it all with a budget of around $10,000.