2011 has got off to a busy start for Zephyr, with three new accounts being added to an already impressive looking client roster.

Raydar has picked up the Virgin Blue Group account in New Zealand, which will see it handle advertising in New Zealand and Pacific Island markets for Pacific Blue and Polynesian Blue airlines.

Hot on the heels of the Yellow/Groupy deal and in line with the online acquisition strategies of other major media networks, MediaWorks has entered group buying territory, signing a joint venture agreement with Cudo Australia, Microsoft and Nine Entertainment Co. to launch Cudo in New Zealand.

Very little of anything seems to get done in New Zealand in January and that rule also tends to apply in the world of advertising, so, aside from Kiwibank’s new ‘we make it easy to change banks’ push and Hyundai’s launch of the i45, it’s fairly slim pickings on the new campaigns front this month, with all the usual DIY, retail and grocery suspects (particularly Countdown on ONE) dominating New Zealand’s holiday screens.

When Cannes Lion-winning Curious Film director Darryl Ward was interviewed in the September/October edition of NZ Marketing, he said he’d done the music videos, he’d done the films, he’d done the commercials and now he was keen to reference his love of film and start dabbling in distribution. And the Curious gang have obviously got pretty good taste, because independent film Winter’s Bone, the first film it distributed in Australia and New Zealand, has received four Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress for newcomer Jennifer Lawrence and Best Supporting Actor for John Hawkes.

I recently read a great article in The Economist about Starbucks’ decision to remove the words ‘Starbucks’ and ‘coffee’ and also the circle around the siren from the logo. As the writer says, there are relatively few brands that are recognised purely by a logo—think Nike, Adidas, Playboy, McDonald’s and Apple. So it’s part of the evolution of a super brand to announce itself as such an integral part of our lives that words are no longer needed. The company now transcends the product itself, which tends to be tied in to the fact that it can now start selling things it wasn’t traditionally associated with. And for Starbucks, this means alcohol and various beverage accessories.

Much like logos, slogans are one of the most accessible parts of the marketing process, which means the general public often feels compelled to pass judgment on them. At StopPress we have an unashamedly unhealthy obsession with town slogans and spend most nights and some weekends devising new ones (for example, Christchurch: Unexpectedly Dangerous). Judging by the response we usually get when we ask our readers to come up with slogans, the marcomms community likes to have a bit of fun with them too. So we got fairly excited when we saw the local Tauranga newspaper had started a campaign to come up with a new slogan for the town in time for the Rugby World Cup, simply because it didn’t have one and obviously felt like it was missing out.

DDB was recently crowned the YoungGuns agency of the year (primarily on the strength of the Sky Arts Channel campaign) and Media Design School is also beaming, with recent Adschool graduates Ed Knowles, frontman of Kiwi band The Checks (wanna see a cool music video?) and Charles Twaddle taking home a Silver Bullet for ‘Reflections’, an ambient outdoor advertising campaign that plays on famous landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera House for HSBC.

The world is going gaga for social buying sites at the moment: Google was rumoured to have put in an offer of $6 billion for Groupon, Yahoo!7 just purchased Spreets for $40 million, APN has had a fair swag of success with its 50 percent stake in GrabOne and now Yellow has jumped on the bandwagon by snapping up group buying site www.groupy.co.nz.