Real ale brand Bombardier Beer has revealed it is to restart its consumer marketing push, nearly three months after the death of actor Rik Mayall.

Mayall, who passed away in June at the age of 56, had played Bombardier’s brand character, William Charles Bedford, since 2011. Since then Bombardier has continued its B2B and trade publication marketing campaigns, but had stopped posting on its Twitter as a mark of respect to the late star.

Yet a statement released by Bombardier from Mayall’s family...

If you’re getting a little jaded of celebrities, friends and co-workers voluntarily dousing themselves in ice water, albeit for a very good cause, here’s a novel twist on it from Samsung.

The Samsung Galaxy S5 has officially taken the Ice Bucket Challenge, raising awareness for ALS, or motor neurone disease, and nominated the iPhone, the HTC One and the Nokia Lumia to go next.

It’s worth noting that

Adverts on the Internet are like mothers in law: you can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. But what if you could have an ad-free browsing experience? The only catch is you’d have to pay something in the region of £140 a year.

Yet according to survey data released by social bods Ebuzzing, a whopping 98% of UK web users said they wouldn’t pay the hypothetical ad tax.

The survey, which polled 1400 consumers, found that users were between a rock and a hard place,...

Four out of five consumers are more likely to “respect” an honest company, according to survey data of over 2000 consumers published today by Intent HQ.

This means being upfront and honest about how a user’s personal data is being used - and according to the social data analysts at Intent, it’s a key point for brands to unlock consumers’ trust, as an honest customer will reward your endeavour.

This comes from such basic best practices as adding social logins to your brand’s...

Shopping just got a little bit more fun. Patrons who visit the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent are being given the opportunity to win a Microsoft Surface 2 tablet by chancing their arm on a one-armed bandit – with overwhelming engagement levels the result.

The promotion, for Curry’s PC World, was put together by retail marketing bods NexusEngage, and offered passing customers a gamble based on the feature they liked most about the Microsoft slab. Match four in a row on the fruit machine, and...

Rum brand Malibu has launched its latest mobile ad campaign, interacting with users under the banner of ‘Best Summer Ever’.

The campaign, which enlists the help of agencies Havas Media and Millennial Media, utilises Millennial’s Video Ticker and Video Toggle ad units to create personalised campaigns for men and women in the UK aged 18 to 34, providing time and location-based data.

Using Video Toggle, three different videos can be played at any one time, giving consumers multiple content...

Twitter has released its second quarter financials, with a quarterly net loss of $145m (£85m) but revenue of $312m (£184m) to an adjusted EBITDA of $54m (£31m).

Describing the numbers as “strong”, CEO Dick Costolo said: “Our strong financial and operating results for the second quarter show the continued momentum of our business.

“We remain focused on driving increased user growth and engagement, and by developing new product experiences, like the one we built around...

Research from Webtrends published today claims that more than half of Britons are not concerned amount the about of data they share with brands, with a third admitting they’d give up their data if they were offered rewards to go with it.

58% overall said they didn’t mind brands getting their intimate data, with 18-24 year olds, not surprisingly, the most likely to share (68%). 64% of 25-34 year olds were okay with giving companies their info.

In what may seem like a depressing indictment of UK...

“A lot of companies across the globe are going to die over the next few years, and not because of macroeconomic stress, but because there is an entire emerging generation of customers who hate doing business with them.”

The opening line of Build for Change, written by Pegasystems CEO Alan Trefler, is pretty strong stuff. Trefler’s view is simple: enterprises need to reorganise their customer engagement strategy, or they’ll not be long for this world.

Why is this? Two words: generation...

A new study released by Intent HQ aims to turn the tables on evaluating how brand strength is calculated through social – yet still comes up with predominantly the usual suspects in the highest echelons.

Google topped the charts as the most social brand with a perfect score of 100, followed by Twitter (86.41), and then a big gap to Instagram (53.74) and Apple (52.38) in third and fourth. Yet there were some left field suggestions which made the top 20; NASA (#5), TED (#11), Whole Foods (#13), Etsy (#19)...

Michael Birch, the co-founder of recently revived social network Bebo, has sent a cease and desist document to apartment and rental firm Airbnb after claiming its widely discussed logo redesign is in breach of Bebo’s ‘genital marketing’ trademark.

The new Airbnb logo was unveiled last week in a blog post entitled ‘Belong Anywhere’, with the logo attempting to signify several things, the key one being a sense of human connection and belonging:

Meet Inst-ore. The Israel-based startup is offering a service whereby Instagram users can hit a brand’s in-store landing page (hence the name) just by liking a photo on the social network.

There’s no app or login process involved, and the whole thing is relatively simple. User likes a photo, it’s stored on the Instagram API, they go to the bio tab of the brand, and then gets the link to go to the commerce page.

Currently Inst-ore only has two brands signed up – New York fashion brand...

Just Mobile Sdn Bhd, a Malaysia-based IT and mobile technology firm, has updated its eMemorial Facebook app to include separate pages for each of the 298 people who lost their lives in the MH17 flight to Kuala Lumpur, which was shot down over Ukrainian airspace last week.

The eMemorial app, currently in beta, allows people to post memorials “to remember loved ones and share their legacy and life with the rest of [their] Facebook friends”, yet also features memorial pages to celebrities, from as...

SponsorPay is no more. The Berlin-based ad optimisation revenue platform has changed its name in favour of Fyber, with the company calling the rebrand “a natural evolution.”

When companies change their name it can be for a myriad of reasons, but it often comes down to two main issues: either because the old name didn’t align with what the company was now doing, or because it felt like the right time to start afresh.

Last month MarketingTech noted the third birthday of Google+ with the question: Is it time to wave the white flag? It was one of the most popular articles of the month, and the sentiment certainly resonated among our community with over 50 comments.

Well, Google has had another crack at modifying its problem child social...

For any historic, established big brand, they can’t rest on their laurels if they want to stay at the top. Whether it’s through a catchy marketing slogan, or a change to the company logo, the sands of time are constantly shifting.

Take three of the world’s biggest brands; McDonald’s, Guinness and Coca-Cola.

It’s fair to say that the ubiquitous soft drinks manufacturer has suffered slightly over the past year or so, where before it was at the very summit of its brand power. Earlier this week

Apple has retained its position as the UK’s top storytelling brand, according to research published by AESOP in association with One Poll.

Cadbury and McDonald’s were second and third respectively, with IKEA moving up six places to fourth and crisp manufacturer Walkers rounding off the top five.

There’s no place in the top 100 for Google – interesting given the daily stories which are told in the Google Doodles – yet YouTube makes the top 10, the highest new entry at #8.

The...

Adbrain has appointed Xaxis EMEA director of data and audience Tim Abraham to take the reins of the multi-channel ad firm’s data solutions.

It’s further proof – if any were needed – about the power of data at marketers’ fingertips as campaigns become more integrated. Abraham joins Adbrain having previously progressed through the AOL machine as head of Advertising.com’s analytical services division.

Adbrain CEO and co-founder Gareth Davies called Abraham “a hugely...

Brands, listen up: NewsCred and Outbrain have formed a strategic partnership which enables organisations to more effectively source content and then maximise its social reach.

The deal enables marketers to utilise NewsCred’s more than 4500 content providers in its Publisher Network, with NewsCred customers able to share content out through Outbrain Amplify, a platform which allows marketers to promote stories at scale.

“By integrating Outbrain directly into our Content Marketing Cloud, we’re...

Cider brand Bulmers has unleashed its latest creative campaign with Microsoft which enables users to watch an advert piece by piece through whichever platform they are on.

The campaign, created by Starcom MediaVest, Adam & Eve DDB and We Are Social, uses technology from Microsoft called Creative Sequencing. This means that Bulmers adverts can appear on a variety of devices and platforms, from Windows 8 to MSN, Skype and Xbox 360.

This is achieved through the logging of a user’s Microsoft ID, which...