MTV is hawking its popular reality TV series Jersey Shore (it's a "young people live in a house together" variant) to audiences around the world. Gawker has a fascinating look at the different ways it's being pitched to different countries, from India to England.
Revelations that half or more of the news we receive through the media is linked to public relations are not new. Jim Macnamara provides a potted summary of some of the studies of PR and the media over the past 80 years.
Food empire Nestle showed how not to do social marketing recently, pissing off fans by deleting comments and engaging in childish flame-wars with critics, before finally having to apologise: "I have stopped being rude."
Breakfast cereal -- and its slogans -- are a nice little snapshot of the times, from Rice Bubbles being marketed in war rationing times as a good filler, to 'constipation' being mentioned four times in a Special K ad.
The town of North Tyneside in England is a retail ghost town, full of empty and abandoned shops, but their solution to attracting new business is a stroke of genius: put up fake shopfronts to show what the town could be.
Internet ad blocking software and plug-ins may stop you from being annoyed by intrusive flash ads and videos, but they also stop the sites you like and visit from making money, argues web editor Ken Fisher.
What better way to celebrate the emancipation of women than with this timely ad from Freedom Furniture, declaring: "Every woman's dream: Being rewarded to go shopping".
A new study has found anti-drinking ads drive many people to drink more. Ad Age explains why you can't shame people into sobriety.
Users can ban embedding of their YouTube videos and plenty of record companies are employing it. But stopping video clips from float freely around the web is simply killing the ability of videos to go viral.
"To smoke is to be a slave to tobacco" may not sound like a troublesome anti-smoking slogan. But juxtapose that with a young person hinting at a submissive sexual act, and you can understand the controversy surrounding the new French campaign.
