Ben Lightfoot, the can’t-do-no-wrong boss of McCann Worldgroup’s New Zealand operations, has been appointed chief executive officer of McCann’s Singapore office, a promotion that’s just reward for Lightfoot’s efforts in relaunching a Kiwi face for McCann two years ago, according to Michael McLaren, regional director of McCann Worldgroup, Asia Pacific.

Comedy Central canned two of its most popular shows, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report in September because the licences had expired. Cue protests, outrage and steam coming out of viewers’ ears. But, not one to let an opportunity pass it by, Comedy Central has, in truly arse about face fashion, now decided to create its own “campaign” to make the network change their own stupid minds.

… 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’.