Agency executive Paul Manning has walked away from a lucrative career as MD of one of the nation’s largest creative shops to take a $5 million punt on a start-up business in a start-up industry that doesn’t exist yet.

You can always rely on NZ Herald writer Chris Rattue to provide a searching examination of major sports events. In Saturday’s paper his focus was the World Championship Parker vs Joshua heavyweight title fight (read it here).

We at M+AD are not particularly religious types – but when it comes to festive holidays, we’ll take ’em, along with everybody else!

Spark, Facebook and Colenso BBDO have joined forces to create the Tall Shorts Film Festival, flipping the traditional landscape film format on its side with a vertical-format film festival “for the mobile age”.

At an agency and media event in Auckland this morning, TVNZ, MediaWorks and Sky TV joined forces to launch ThinkTV – a collective voice for the industry to promote the scale and effectiveness of television advertising in New Zealand. 

Saturday’s Weekend Herald featured an interesting piece – with a taped interview – about Bridget Taylor, the ECD at Contagion, the full-service indie agency she founded with husband Dean Taylor.

Sydney, Today – Following a successful year beta-testing the bespoke music platform in Australia, Admusic V2.0 will launch on both sides of the Tasman this week under the name MusicBrief.

Sydney-based Kiwi Andrew Holmes, who’s now lead editor at creative services company Heckler (his last job was the new Tiger Beer commercial) has picked up a Silver Lotus Award at Adfest 2018.

Auckland music production house Smoke is stepping out for another spin with Mediaworks, creating all the dance tracks for the seventh season of Dancing with the Stars.