Picture credit: Ello

You are not a product.

Meet Ello. With this declaration of intent this new, hip, invite-only social network has gotten plenty of traction over the past weeks for one key reason: it is fiercely opposed to brand dollars.

"Your social network is owned by advertisers", the firm's manifesto reads. "Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are...

Picture credit: pestoverde/Flickr

It’s one of the most popular social media...

Marketing comms provider Omnicom has sealed a deal with cloudy CRM provider Salesforce.com to give Omnicom’s agencies more personalised communications through the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.

The partnership means companies can ‘connect the dots’ between marketing, sales, communities and customer service, leveraging data from a variety of sources and devices.

“As marketers, you need to be wherever your customers touch your brand,” said Lynn Vojvodich, executive vice president and...

Audio content sharing provider audioBoo has rebranded and changed name to audioBoom, alongside putting together an iOS mobile app which works across all iDevices.

Why the name change? It’s a simple one letter addition, but it works on more than one level. As a piece of audio on the site is – or was – known as a ‘boo’, the company found it difficult getting brands and partners to ask their followers to ‘boo’ them on social media.

Add in the word ‘boom’...

It seems not even a PR disaster involving the latest U2 album can stop Apple. The Cupertino firm has again topped the charts as the coolest brand in Britain, according to the latest study from CoolBrands.

Four of this year’s top five also made that position last year, with Apple ahead of Aston Martin (#2), Nike (#3) and Glastonbury (#5).

Twitter, which came eighth last year, misses out on the top 20 altogether, while Instagram (#14) is a new entry.

“The idea that CoolBrands is about fads and...

Water brand Evian has teamed up with Sanrio, the Mr Men and Little Miss parent company, to create a brand new Mr Man character – ‘Mr Glug’.

“Mr Glug is a very active fellow indeed,” begins the copy. “His favourite sports include water skiing and roller blading.

“All that exercise makes him very thirsty and the thirstier he gets, the more the colour drains out of him,” it continues. “When this happens, Mr Glug must drink water so that his colour comes...

Instagram is in the process of rolling out sponsored content and advertising alongside its regular content to UK users, according to a BBC report.

The adverts, which have already been launched in the US, will aim to be “as natural to Instagram as the photos and videos [users] enjoy from brands who are already using Instagram”, according to a spokesperson.

Unsurprisingly, reaction from the social community has been somewhat negative. Yet the photo-based social...

Musician, entrepreneur and general techie will.i.am has today unveiled his eyewear brand, ill.i Optics, with a promotional video and campaign as part of the launch.

The product, created in conjunction with Australian designer George Gorrow, features a video where will.i.am is sat at a recording desk, yet cuts to various eyewear paraphernalia – will.i.am’s personal collection, spanning 20 years.

“I see a gap in the world of eyewear, and this is my instalment of what I feel is missing,”...

Telecoms provider TalkTalk has unleashed its latest billboard campaign specifically targeting its TV packages – with a more than apparent nod to rivals Virgin Media.

The billboards are being rolled across almost 20 sites in London, including a six sheet banner at Euston Station. The campaign will be seen from Elephant & Castle, Edgware Road, and Waterloo Bridge among others.

This campaign follows ‘The Mission’, a TV campaign “in which five household objects embarked on an odyssey...

A new set of research data released by CloudSense has revealed that the trend for users accessing free news content is inexorable – and concludes publishers need to do more to monetise their content.

The research, which gauged the views of 4000 UK and US consumers, found some interesting differences. Even though far more US consumers are prepared to subscribe to content (24% compared to 7% UK), the overall trend is the same worldwide: users are reluctant to pay.

Of course, this has been a problem for...

More mobile shoppers are clicking on ads, according to the latest study from call management provider Telmetrics.

One in three consumers see mobile ads as helpful and informative, according to the report, which represents a spike of 76% from this time last year.

The researchers argue this boils down to different types of content working on mobile today. More than half of mobile shoppers share ads on social media, particularly the youngest age demographic of 18-34 year olds, while there’s been a 40% in...

“Well let’s find a one-legged Showaddywaddy freak and flog ‘em to him!” Rodney replies. “And if he turns up in a Triumph Herald, we’ve had a result!”

Why did this scene come to mind at MarketingTech HQ? The latest research data which filled our inbox has shown that iPhone users are most likely to be fans of Brad Pitt, prefers crime movies, drives a BMW and drinks bottled water.

The figures are taken from digital advertising intelligence firm Exponential, who analysed...

Microsoft has announced it is to rebrand MSN, bringing the service forward as a new site featuring Bing apps such as News, Sports and Travel.

The new MSN moves into preview mode today – or it should do, as at the time of writing you get a nasty parsing error – with a glut of new features, including the dubiously named ‘services stripe’, linking back to Office, Outlook and OneDrive.

Looking at screenshots of the new MSN (top) compared with the current version (bottom),...

The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) has announced a revamp of its branding, with an innovative ‘audio logo’ being mooted to use across all of the charity’s communications.

According to a press release, the audio logo “will need to reflect the organisation’s human, positive and can-do values in just a few seconds.”

“Blind people are at the heart of everything we do, so it makes absolute sense that we have an audio logo as well as a visual one,”...

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...