Author: rssmasher

One of the neatest things about living outside the U.S. is discovering soccer culture, which is as strident and culturally charged as football is in America. On March 9, Italian club F.C. Inter Milan will turn 110 years old. To celebrate that historic benchmark, in November it launched “He110, this is Inter,” a massive project…

Instagram’s latest update to its iOS and Android applications borrowed a feature from sister app Facebook Messenger. The app’s messaging feature, Instagram Direct, now includes activity status, which adds a line below user names sharing the last time those users have been online. Users can opt out of the feature, but should they do so,…

NBC News is still hoping to secure an interview with President Trump on Super Bowl Sunday, a tradition that goes back more than a decade. “Without getting into specifics, I can tell you that there have been conversations between NBC News and the White House about a conversation format, the timing, the location, those sorts…

We’re getting pretty well-versed in testicular cancer awareness ads, and in the weird–sometimes creepy–ways associations find of getting people to do something we oddly all hate doing: checking ourselves regularly to ensure early prevention. Here’s the Colombian League Against Cancer’s approach. It might not be the most imaginative, but we like how the act of…

After last week’s news that Facebook is revamping its News Feed, small businesses needed some good news from Facebook, and they received it in the form of an update on the Facebook Community Boost program, which was originally announced last November. Facebook Community Boost is aimed at helping small businesses in the U.S. grow and…

It’s the second recent deal between a marketing organization and a comedy troupe.

Needless to say, advertisers and publishers were happy when the Interactive Advertising Bureau released its new Standard Ad Portfolio. This is a major step forward, one that can hopefully eliminate
many of the issues stemming from the hodgepodge of standards many advertisers were previously relying on. However, It also raises some questions on how willing various media and creative entities will
be in adopting these new standards.

Partnering with Arkadium, the Associated Press will begin to use the company’s InHabit artificial intelligent tool to add interactive content to its sports verticals.

Total Super Bowl TV advertising last year, including the game itself and pre- and post-game, came to $534 million — up 20% versus 2016, Kantar Media says. Total commercial TV time is also creeping up
— 4% higher to 51 minutes and 30 seconds in 2017, with a total of 102 commercial spots, versus 2016.

Facebook’s board of directors welcomed its first African-American member, as American Express chairman and CEO Kenneth Chenault will take a seat effective Feb. 5. Chenault has been with American Express for 37 years, and he is retiring as chairman and CEO effective Feb. 1, to be succeeded by vice chairman Stephen Squeri. Zuckerberg said in…