Auckland: Comms Council Industry support group First Five Rungs has unveiled a new event – labelled First Five Dates – for millennials in communications and advertising.

Raydar & 99 have forged a partnership to launch Church Road Journeys of Discovery on TVNZ for Pernod Ricard. The series marks the first work from Raydar & 99 since winning the Pernod Ricard brand work from Ogilvy late last year.

AUCKLAND, Today: NZME has announced that Greg Cassidy has taken up the role of head of NZME’s online/print automotive platform Driven.

New Zealand agencies have just 10 days to enter the 2018 Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity, due to be held in Singapore from Wednesday 26 September to Friday 28 September.

Winter proving to be the winning season for MBM. Off the back of a record year in 2017, the Auckland/Wellington indie media agency MBM reports that it is enjoying a cracking 2018 with three great new business wins coming in over the last couple of months.

TOKYO, Sunday: In a move reflecting the changing dynamics between Big Tobacco and advertising, Philip Morris International has appointed Thirteen, a Japanese creative agency owned by McCann Worldgroup, on a project basis for an undisclosed product launch around its IQOS heated tobacco brand.

WELLINGTON, Today: State-Owned Enterprise KiwiRail has announced its appointment of DDB as creative agency following a competitive pitch involving five agencies. The incumbent was Clemenger BBDO.

For planners, spending time outside the bubble of Adland is a necessity, argues Deutsch’s Rob Campbell in an essay for WARC’s Future of Strategy report 2018 (published yesterday – scroll down for the link to the full story).