The star power of Beauden Barrett has moved niche Aussie magazine title Men’s Health to launch a dedicated New Zealand edition, featuring the first-five (or, in that strange sports lingo they use across the Ditch, ‘fly half’) on the cover.

The Magazine Publishers Association has released details of its finalists for the Magazine Media Awards 2017. All the usual corporate suspects – Bauer, Tangible, and Fairfax – plus a plethora of individual titles will square off next month at a gala dinner in Auckland, to name the winners.

Today the Electoral Commission and TVNZ, through agencies Saatchi & Saatchi and Starcom, launched an online campaign enlisting Shortland Street stars in a drive to get young voters to the polls, according to a report in NBR.

The Sweet Shop director Jeff Labbe, who’s based in Louisiana, started his career as a trailblazing agency creative on the West Coast of America. Today, M+AD publishes an insightful interview he did with Branding Asia publisher Bobby McGill.

Four staff positions at Auckland retail shop 99 are under review, as client Warehouse Stationery moves production roles in-house.

The Marketing Association has just released its New Zealand Marketing Awards finalists for 2017. These came in just as we were about to hit the button on today’s M+AD-daily mailout – so we’ll analyse them more closely over the weekend, and share what we learned in Monday’s edition.

NZME has lost its court battle with Trade Me over the media giant’s attempt to register three trade marks that contain the word ‘me’, according to an NBR report out today.