The second-largest ad holding company in the world, Omnicom Group, is in talks to acquire LBi, one of the last large-scale digital agencies, Ad Age has confirmed. The talks are in the early stages and the companies are not close to inking a deal. To that end, LBi issued a statement acknowledging talks with multiple parties are underway: "Such discussions are at a very preliminary stage and there can be no certainty that an offer will be made for the company." LBi did not respond to requests for comment beyond that statement, and neither has Omnicom. Ad Age reported last week that LBi
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NEW YORK — Bloomberg Television has a new ad campaign in the New York City area, touting the journalistic credentials of its morning anchor, Betty Liu. "PULITZER PRIZE-NOMINATED," the ads shout at commuters on trains in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. "HAS ALL THE HEAVY HITTERS ON SPEED DIAL. AND THAT'S JUST THE ANCHOR." The only problem is that Liu has never been Pulitzer-nominated. The Pulitzer Prizes don't list her among the nominees for any year. When asked by msnbc.com about the discrepancy, Bloomberg TV said the ads are wrong and will be corrected. It turns out that Liu is another example of a
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I recently spoke at the Corporate Social Media Summit in San Francisco where a packed room of marketing leaders collaborated on social media for the enterprise. Now several years into social and most organizations still struggle with how to both defend and enhance your brand in a social world. Many old-world PR and corporate communications leaders will adhere to the old standards, usually to the peril of your brand. The rules have changed, but are actually simpler, more straightforward. Here are a few first steps to both defend and enhance your brand using social media, with a few examples along
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The New York Times has found a way to finally make all its content available on Flipboard, the popular reading app for tablets and smartphones: It's bringing its pay meter to Flipboard as well. It hasn't previously made much sense for The Times, which requires a subscription from anyone who wants to read more than 10 articles per month, to put its complete content on Flipboard, a free app that aggregates users' chosen media brands and social feeds in a magazine format. So Flipboard users have had to settle for pulling in The Times' various social-media feeds, which only offer a selection
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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A double outage rocked Twitter on Thursday, as users worldwide reported significant down-time and slow service across the website and mobile applications of the microblogging platform. The outages left another bruise on a service that earned a reputation for unreliability in its early days. The San Francisco-based company blamed the disruption on a "cascading bug" in one of its infrastructure components. "One of the characteristics of such a bug is that it can have a significant impact on all users, worldwide, which was the case today," Mazen Rawashdeh, a Twitter vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post
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"It's hard to be a pioneer." The line, spoken by a sleep-deprived jurist during the second morning of judging, was met with laughter of the you-had-to-be-there variety. We laughed in part because to compare our hardships to those experienced by the likes of, say, Lewis and Clark, was obviously laughable. But we laughed as well to break a tension in the room that reflected how seriously we took our responsibility as the first jury to judge the branded content and entertainment Lions at the Cannes Festival of Creativity. Lions, after all, can win or lose accounts, and make careers. And a
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Public health advocates on Wednesday accused the drug company Merck of improperly marketing an over-the-counter allergy medicine directly to children using animated characters from the movie “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.” Advocacy groups worry that children may confuse the Merck medicine with candy. In a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission, the Public Health Advocacy Institute and 10 other groups, called the marketing strategy for Children’s Claritin dangerous and deceptive, pointing to the inclusion of Madagascar stickers in some boxes of the product, the creation of activity books that parents can download for their children and the enlistment of a team
Read MoreHow much is a top 10 YouTube network worth? Apparently between $5 million to $10 million. That's the range that Alloy Digital paid for YouTube powerhouse Clevver Media in a deal that closed Friday, according to a person familiar with the deal. Clevver operates seven YouTube channels, which collectively ranked ninth in April among YouTube partner networks with 6 million unique viewers, according to Comscore. Clevver's flagship channel ClevverTV, a celebrity- and entertainment-news channel, boasts 460,000 subscribers, giving Alloy Digital 8 million subscribers across its YouTube properties. (Alloy Digital's Smosh YouTube channel has 4.8 million subscribers alone.) Three of Clevver's other
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While cable’s TV Everywhere initiative is usually perceived as a means of countering over-the-top services like Netflix, some of its early products seem downright complimentary. Case in point: Disney’s just-released iOS apps for kiddie cable channels Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Jr., which seem to steer viewers looking to stream older episodes toward Netflix. The three apps let the 22 million subscribers of the No. 1 pay TV service, Comcast’s Xfinity, watch live feeds of the Disney channels, plus a limited selection of repeats, on iPhones and iPads. A more limited amount of content is available to non-Xfinity users who can’t
Read MoreNEW YORK — Amazon.com wants “.joy,” Google wants “.love” and L’Oreal wants “.beauty.” Big brands are behind hundreds of proposals for new Internet addresses, including scores for generic terms such as “cruise,” ‘’.kids” and “.tires.” If approved, Amazon could use “.author” in an attempt to dominate online bookselling, while Google could use “.love” to collect registration fees from its rivals. Amazon and Google also are vying for “.app” and “.music,” while the wine company Gallo Vineyards Inc. wants “.barefoot.” It’s all part of the largest expansion of the Internet address system since its creation in the 1980s, a process likely to cause headaches for
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