Ah New Zealand, what an egalatarian paradise you are, a place where you can shake hands with the Prime Minister without fear of being tackled by secret service agents, where anyone can play golf, squash or tennis without being harrassed by bogans for being an aristocrat and where an All Black can deliver your mail and make you a cup of tea.

Harrington’s small goods is setting out to spread the meaty truth and destroy the sausagey lies with New Zealand’s first official Sausage Awareness Week. Of course, every week is unofficial sausage week in New Zealand, but the real one will run from 5-10 July and aims “to help Kiwis recognise that ‘what goes into the sausage goes into you'”.

If they haven’t been washed away by the flash floods, six lucky New Zealand bastards are currently swanning about in the South of France. Of course, business is being mixed with pleasure: they are there in a professional capacity as judges for the Cannes Advertising Festival awards, which, as the world’s biggest and best advertising event, invites the world’s biggest and best advertising brains along to do the deciding. So here’s to them.

As someone (it’s usually Einstein) may have once said, perception is nine tenths of the marketing law. And the results of the third Attitude New Zealand survey, which delved into the strange and mysterious world of the Kiwi psyche, have shed some light on the perceptions around the nation’s brands, as well as revealing plenty of other interesting consumer and social trends that may have implications for marketers.

yMedia, a social enterprise that aims to solve some of the digital communications issues faced by not-for-profit organisations through the power of creative collaboration, has just kicked off. And this time round, twenty student teams, a host of industry professionals and their respective community groups will all be going head to head in the annual new media competition.

The results for the most complained about ads in 2009 have been released by the Advertising Standards Authority. And the lucky winners are…

This week on Ads@6, various commercial entities try to sell things through the power of free-to-air television. Of note this week, not much, although soup month is finally upon us. And it should be a worthy follow up to 2008’s international year of the potato.

With a combination of pomp, ceremony, donuts, coffee and the unflinching enthusiasm of Te Radar, a stellar line-up of speakers for this year’s Semi-Permanent “design symposium” was announced last week at The Church in K Rd. And there’s plenty on offer for the Kiwi marcomms community this time round, particularly in the interactive and experiential marketing fields.

With physical mail fighting a difficult fight against “electronic substitution” and potential cost-cutting measures at New Zealand Post have been in the news recently, the postal workers may be disgruntled. But the marketers shouldn’t be, because the Targeted Communications department has just launched a new website filled with insights and data that aims to help make targeting easier.

To get 42 Below to the point where multinational booze behemoth Bacardi wanted to buy it, Geoff Ross and his gang of merry vodka purveyors had to master the dark arts of PR and viral marketing. They were shameless, controversial, funny and confrontational, and, as a result, they managed to tap into a wide array of media networks to help establish the brand’s reputation.