Despite anecdotal evidence that suggests all banks are sneaky, recent actual research from the June 2010 Roy Morgan New Zealand Banking Customer Satisfaction Survey has revealed positive shifts in the overall satisfaction levels for most of the major banks, with TSB retaining its position at the top of the satisfaction pile, but Kiwibank is on its tail.

Speaking at the Inbound Tour Operators’ Council (ITOC) annual conference in Blenheim recently, Doug Chapman, executive director of client services at specialist digital agency Amnesia Razorfish, told delegates marketing was in the midst of a revolution thanks to the internet. And, with a raft of new technologies and hundreds of new social sites to take New Zealand to a travel-hungry world, it is a revolution Tourism New Zealand is well-positioned to take advantage of to reach potential travellers in a cost-effective way.

Pacific Magazines’ slogan is “we create magazines people love”. But APN News & Media will soon be creating at least three of the core titles those people love, after New Zealand Magazines acquired the licence to publish the weeklies New Idea and That’s Life, and the monthly Girlfriend.

Some wine is good. Some art is also good. So why not combine forces for a new wine, thought a wine company and an artist. The result was the seemingly socialist booze that goes by the name of The People’s Wine. And we’ve got heaps of it, in two different colours, to give away.

Alan Dale, left, and Kelly Addis

When he was growing up, Kelly Addis dreamed of being a rock star. His first job as a butcher’s apprentice at Onehunga Foodtown was pretty much diametrically opposed to rockstardom. But now, almost three decades on, he’s living the dream, heading up award-winning Melbourne ad agency BoilerRoom. And last weekend he was honoured by his alma mater as one of three inductees into the Onehunga High Business School Hall of Fame.

Since April, Positively Wellington Tourism has been on a mission to lure more of our Aussie friends across for a visit and smash a few misconceptions. And all indicators suggest the ‘There’s No Place Like Wellington’ campaign, which aims to showcase the region and its creative edge, has worked very well so far. But it’s taking things up a notch and getting experiential with WLG, a pop-up restaurant that will be operating in Sydney for two weeks next month in a bid to generate some buzz about the city.

The modus operandi of Eshe, a Kiwi streetwear clothing company that was started in 2008, is to take things back to the glory days of skating counter-culture; to slaughter a few metaphorical sacred cows. And it’s managed to inspire some fairly contrived controversy with a combination of sacrilege and old-school Garbage Pail kids imagery with a new poster campaign in Auckland.

The numbers have been crunched, the Kiwis have been canvassed and the companies that consumers believe are the best—and worst—have been announced, with New Zealand Post coming out on top and Telecom bringing up the rear.

The first, rather large musical instalment of APN Outdoor’s ‘Friends in High Places’ series was a fairly  successful and well-attended venture (particularly given the distinct lack of B2B activity from APNO during the previous year). And the next event in the series is tapping into the Next Top Model phenomenon in an effort to discover adland’s dreamy hunks and smokin’ babes.

StopPress always feels a little bit sorry for Radio NZ journalists, partially because they’re poorly paid bureaucrats, but primarily because they’re not actually allowed to accept free stuff. We sold our journalistic integrity many years ago (on Trade Me) and are firm believers that getting free stuff is easily the best part of the journalist’s job. Still, sometimes we have to wonder why so much of this free stuff is sent to us by PR companies, as a large proportion of it is of little editorial interest. But occasionally something fairly interesting gets delivered, like The People’s Wine, which looks as good on the outside as it tastes on the inside. 

The humans are digitising. And the adspend is following suit. Hell, you can even get fridges that connect to the internet these days. So, given that it’s still considered by many to be a rather intimidating, mysterious realm, it’s not surprising to find that the marcomms community can’t get enough of that educational digital stuff. As such, the Marketing Association/Jericho’s Brainy Breakfast gathered together a few of the country’s successful digital exponents to offer some of their insights and tell marketers how they can convince their corporate gatekeepers to fully embrace digital marketing.

It was less than two years ago that BNZ released its cute, fluffy, cloud-like logo into the wild. Some thought it was fresh, different and looked like toothpaste. Others thought it was too fresh, too different and too toothpastey and, therefore, lacked history and gravitas. And it seems the BNZ brand boffins agreed with the latter, because it’s gone back to its astronomical roots and changed its logo again, adding the classic Southern Cross back in, reducing the fluffiness and chopping that cheeky vestigial tail off the B.