More than 240 agency staff and marketers came together to hear the ‘New Rules of Brand Engagement’ from an impressive list of speakers in Auckland on Tuesday. And with marketers increasingly trying to create memorable experiences for consumers and get the humans talking about their brands, PR and experiential are increasingly being employed to achieve those goals, as the results of  the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group survey shows. 

The MYOB Business Monitor Internet survey of more than 1000 local businesses of various sizes across New Zealand examines the wide-ranging ways businesses now use the internet. And, according to latest results, the biggest e-transformation the digital world has led to is in where Kiwi businesses now choose to advertise. 

Publicis Mojo and Hallensteins received a smack on the hand recently after a fun-hater complained about the lyrics of the Sleigh Bells song used in its first ‘Brothers’ commercial. And the pair have gone down what could be another slightly controversial road for the next big push, with a campaign that hopes to catch the illustrious yet highly elusive New Zealand Canadian moose.

If you thought Mike Hutcheson was the smartest man in New Zealand, you thought wrong. Turns out it’s Brennan Martin. And we couldn’t help but chortle with delight/smack our gobs in disbelief at the man’s brazen show of commercialism when we received a press release boldly offering his services to endorse various goods and services. “Everybody who is human has their price,” he says, very intelligently, while smoking a pipe in a room filled with leather bound books. “As a unique promotional opportunity being offered to public and private businesses, I anticipate I will be well paid for my efforts. The rights to use my image and voice are a bargain at any price. However, my performance and appearance fee are negotiable.” Mmmm, confidence. He’s basically the thinking man’s Dan Carter. So tell us what kind of product/service/promotion you could use the country’s smartest man for and we’ll send the best effort a Tui gnome, a hip flask of Smirnoff and maybe even a couple of crappy business self-help books.

It was a time when Vanilla Ice was cool, Windows 3.0 was released and Tim Berners-Lee came up with a little thing called HTML. But 1990 also saw the birth of a company in Wellington called BNA design. Fast forward through an impressive client list that has included the likes of Telecom, Solid Energy, Formway, National Bank, NZTE and Yellow Pages, add in a rather scientific name change, and you get to the auspicious milestone of design agency DNA’s 21st birthday. To mark the occasion, DNA showed this video to clients and staff at its recent 21st parties in Auckland and Wellington. And having partied with the DNA folks at the Auckland bash, we felt the rest of you might want to have a gander at the entertaining documentation of the DNA story as well. 

Everyone loves a deal. And the Great New Zealand Deal Wars have been spiced up considerably after the arrival of a few new players recently. Now Positively Wellington Tourism is kicking off WellingtonWednesday.com, a site that offers up some of the hottest tickets in town to draw attention to its events culture. But with a reverse auction format and only the cream of the Wellington crop on offer, the creators say it differs from the other deal sites on the market. 

The polyester/labcoat clad investigative scienticians from Did I Believe It claim to have been helping you—yes you—think for almost 42 years. And, in what could be seen as New Zealand’s slightly more alcoholic answer to Look Around You, the visionary Silo theatre and the visionary 42 Below have joined forces to bring you a perfect theatrical/commercial muddle that aims to disseminate the silly, mad and historic facts about vodka. Ah, can you smell that? It’s art and commerce colliding. But not only are they helping you think, they’re also helping you win things. So in the spirit of weird, comical science edu-tainment that can be seen on the trailer here or the play’s Facetube page here, just come up with a completely nonsensical science-related question you would like answered and the weirdest effort will get one double pass to the show on Sunday 10 April. We’ve also got four very cool 42 Below gift packs (‘True Encounters of the Spirit of the 42nd Parallel) to give away.

Of note in this collection of televisual commercial messages, the Red Bull Trolley Derby gets set to take some skin off; a classic from Mini keeps it on top in the car class; Robert Harris launches a seemingly unnecessary product for lazy people; ASB and Expol let off a couple of groaners; Skinfood goes mainstream and gets itself on the telly; Tower hits the courts, Pinnacle Life continues with its enjoyable challenger brand cheek and a new campaign from Cigna tries to clear the murky life insurance waters; Magnum embraces temptation by sending a babe down a fire escape in a low cut dress; Telecom continues to push its Android smartphone wares hard, presumably welcoming news that Android took over from Apple as the biggest mobile operating system in the UK recently; and the Skyline ad maintains its place as the best ad on TV at the moment. 

Was that you with your top off and teeth showing in the photobooth at the Axis awards?

Hey good looking. And hey the rest of you. Check out the good, the gooder and the gorgeous at the Axis awards on Thursday, as snapped by one of Getty Images’ many talented camera wielders. We have 200 prize trips to Hobart for the funniest comments. Annnnd go!

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As a founding member and the first course leader of the AdSchool at Media Design School, David Bell has whipped a multitude of young advertising minds into shape and readied them for the cut and thrust of the real ad world. And to honour these efforts over the years, he was handed the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2011 CAANZ Axis Awards last week.

Hey look, a Friday afternoon press release about New Zealand’s favourite cliff-walking broadcaster Paul Henry, who has, blow me down, officially signed up with MediaWorks, both for radio and television duties. And here we were thinking he’d go to Stratos. 

As the entry video shows, Yellow and Colenso believed you could get anything done with Yellow. But in a world dominated by Google, they had to say it loudly. And, like the award-winning Yellow Treehouse before it, Yellow Chocolate did just that. Whether this campaign achieved business results is debateable (Yellow could also be in line for the Creative Accounting Business of the Year), but that’s an argument for another day. In keeping with the creative Axis vibe, what is clear is that Colenso came up with a big, complicated idea, the Yellow powers that be were brave enough to run with it and the pair brought the many disparate parts together in the form of a chocolate bar.