… with ACP Media, Sugar, DB Breweries and Alcatel-Lucent all issuing a few new swipe cards.

In a bid to capture consumers in the lead-up to Christmas (which is—deep breath—less than eight weeks away), HP and Microsoft have teamed up and established a temporary pop-up store in central Auckland. Called Ten O’Connell, the store opened on Thursday night  and will remain popped-up for …

With Tourism New Zealand’s campaigns to China, Japan, Australia, the UK, USA and Germany now firmly unleashed, comes good news for New Zealand’s tourism market, with fresh figures from the Tourism Satellite Account: 2010 showing spending by international tourists in New Zealand increased 1.6 percent ($149 million …

The wheels of change seem to have been spinning in opposite directions in New Zealand’s bike industry, with online cycle magazine RoadCycling.co.nz announcing its retirement last week and Spot On Publications this week announcing the launch of New Zealand’s first dedicated road cycling magazine, New Zealand …

As the UK plunges into the depths of a freezing, grey winter, tonnes of Kiwi’s look as if they want to give it up, opting instead for beaches, BBQ’s and that season called summer. Marmite’s Bringing Home the Kiwis competition, which will bring home 100 Kiwis for …

Next year is the 75th anniversary of Tip Top. So, as part of the celebrations that are sure to come in the new year (and to herald the arrival of the prime time ice cream consumption period sometimes known as summer), Colenso BBDO and up and coming Sweet Shop directors Mark Albiston and Louis Sutherland have gone to town—and country—and made eight almost documentary style, nostalgia-inducing commercials that are filled to bursting with all the ingredients of the classic Kiwi summer.

It’s that time of year again: Sausages are consumed voraciously, jandal-adorned feet almost instantly become sunburned, refreshing beverages are sought and summer advertising campaigns are released. And, following on from the man-heavy launch spot for the new Ranfurly Frontier lager a few weeks back, Lion Nathan and Publicis Mojo have also entered the masculine mainstream beer fray with a new number for Speight’s, which documents a rather urban Southern Man’s domestic journey to dish out a few cold Gold Medal Ales to the boys.

In this edition of Ads@6, there’s one dominant and quite unusual theme, with Countdown continuing to go for the media jugular and blast everyone for two minutes (but only on ONE) with its ‘Meet the Colemans’ soap launch, its Richard Till spots and a few other Countdown-related comms.

Following on from requests from local advertisers and in an effort to replicate the success of parent ninemsn’s opt-in email initiatives, MSN New Zealand has released a new service called Hotmail Featured Offers that allows advertisers to promote their wares to local Windows Live Hotmail users.

New Zealand Post has been in the news recently after announcing the arrival of ‘Localist’, a start-up directory business that aims to target Auckland’s small to medium sized businesses, where the local advertising market is thought to be worth around $600 million a year. Yellow responded to the threat with an $8 million investment and the promise of 100 new national sales roles. But away from all that excitement, New Zealand Post Targeted Communications has launched another marketing toy called iTRY, a digital-to-mail sampling solution that gives companies an opportunity to get their products and services into the hands of consumers to trial.

State’s recent ‘My 3 Things’ campaign aimed to show Kiwi consumers the company was actually very nice, cared about your stuff and, quite perplexingly, was looking to find a way to insure the things that were uninsurable. Now DDB New Zealand and AMI Insurance have taken a similar—although more light-hearted and colloquial—approach with a new campaign and repositioning statement for the company that aims to show it ‘Insuring New Zealandness’.

As the well-known Queenstown saying goes: “It’s tourist season, but, sadly, you can’t shoot them”. And to try and further increase visitors over the upcoming summer boom time, Tourism New Zealand has launched a fresh marketing offensive in China and expanded its digital campaigns in Japan, USA, Canada, UK and Germany, all of which signify a marked change of strategy following the addition of digital specialists Amnesia Razorfish to its agency roster.

Given the stellar performance of the yellow orb known as ‘Old Brighty’ over the long weekend, you probably didn’t receive your regular dose of television advertisements. So here’s a whole heap of them to welcome you back. This time round the love-hate relationship with Tower’s Brian and Lisa continues; TelstraClear launches its big TV push to celebrate 20 years of Kiwi service; the next ad in the RaboPlus ‘It Pays To Focus’ series continues the good form; and, despite threats to pull its advertising from TVNZ following the Paul Henry furore, Countdown instead releases a massive new soap opera and forks over a whole heap of cash to block out ONE’s ad break.

If you miss today’s 5pm deadline to enter the New Zealand Marketing Association’s RSVP and Nexus Awards, they would like to alert you slackers to the fact that, if you pay your extension fee, there’s a maximum of one extra week to get your entries in. Also, early bird discounts for Social Media Junction 2 run out next week.

Oliver Maisey takes up some new creative reins, Naked adds two senior comms planners to its roster and Perceptive loses one of its account managers to social media.