We don’t know if you guys are crazy excited about the third-season premier of HBO‘s mega-hit Game of Thrones, which is less than a week away — but we are!

You may have heard earlier this year (or in 2011 via our sister site AgencySpy) about how GoT‘s marketing/PR teams are absolutely the best, but we’d like to take a moment to remind you why that’s true (and encourage you to check out this awesome print ad one more time). This year the GoT folks followed up on their promo winning streak and even took it up a notch by sending customized “kits” to various celebrities, aka “opinion leaders”, each of whom seemed to follow up by hyping the show on social:

Guess who’s the new Mother of Dragons! #GameOfThrones (hint: it’s me!) twitter.com/StephenAtHome/…

— Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) March 22, 2013

We’re not sure what’s in these boxes besides Season 1 and 2 DVDs and some other assorted goodies, but does that even matter? And have you checked out the totally awesome Join the Realm site, where you can create your own family arms?

Here’s the lesson of this story:

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So Justin Timberlake released his new album The 20/20 Experience this week, and everyone’s going all out to promote it. His label allowed fans to stream the whole thing on iTunes two weeks ago, he hosted Saturday Night Live, and before all that he did this ridiculous “I’m ready” tweet thing.

Anyway, it’s Friday so we thought we’d share our favorite little JT promo stunt via our sister site AgencySpy. It’s so simple that it’s dumb — in a brilliant way. It’s called JT All Night Long, and it’s really just a quick loop from that (old) song set to different clips of Timberlake throughout his career, from the “SexyBack” video to the ramen-hair period. Just click on it before reading ahead.

Don’t you feel like you just got “Rickrolled” by Timberlake and creative agency CP+B Miami? We do — and we don’t mind at all. Say what you will about his music, but the dude has a sense of humor.

Today in Innovative Holiday Campaigns News, we bring you an interesting charity project that Minneapolis firm Preston Kelly created to address the problem of holiday season waste.

Common sense tells us that cards, wrapping paper and other holiday accessories create significant amounts of trash—but related statistics are alarming:

• Households produce 25 percent more waste during the holiday season
• Americans buy more than 2 billion Christmas cards each year–and the paper required to meet our card and wrapping needs consumes more than 30 million trees.

The Preston Kelly solution? Give “naked” by finding ways to wrap your gifts with existing materials.

Examples include socks, bandanas, scarves, cereal boxes and trash bags–and the firm promised to donate $1 to Oxfam’s “America Unwrapped” for each photo submission and Twitter use of the hashtag #GiveNaked. (The group also earned a mention from our sister blog AgencySpy.)

We know that most Americans won’t do this–we may not even do it ourselves–but it is both a cool campaign and a great way to focus on the significant waste that occurs in our society, isn’t it?

We’d like to highlight a piece about the nation of New Zealand’s decision to hang all its PR/tourism hopes on Peter Jackson’s upcoming Hobbit trilogy. We can certainly understand the logic behind this BFF relationship: As our friends at AgencySpy put it last week, “when you account for tourism dollars, the LOTR trilogy basically single-handedly boosted New Zealand’s entire economy”. As the managing director of Hobbiton tours puts it, “We are a small country and that brand awareness, how do you buy that? That’s what a movie does.”

But while we’re at it, we’d really like to review Air New Zealand’s incredible PR campaign: Middle Earth characters already dominate the Auckland airport, and we saw both of these videos for the first time today. First is a clip of the airline’s new Hobbit plane (though we can’t see anything special about it beyond the awesome paint job):

Here’s the real gem, though: a truly excellent in-flight safety video for all Air NZ travelers complete with “Elvish” codes allowing viewers to enter to win a free trip to the film’s New Zealand premier.

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A quick reminder for everyone in need of a drink this evening- tonight’s PRNewser + AgencySpy Trivia Night and Cocktail Party will be happening at Turtle Bay in NYC. Doors open at 6:30. And for the trivia winners, there will be prizes!

Click here to RSVP.

PRNewser and our colleagues at AgencySpy are hosting a trivia night and cocktail party, and you’re invited.

If you like drinks, games, and Mediabistro, join us from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, November 9 at Turtle Bay in NYC.

Click here to RSVP.