Collaborating with startups is becoming popular these days. GE funds a startup incubator program; PepsiCo is expanding its PepsiCo10 initiative, which pairs startups with brands such as Quaker; BMW's iVentures arm is a $100 million venture capital fund that's investing in mobile innovation; and Lexus is getting into the startup funding business.  Now you can add Mondelēz International to that list.

With a tagline of "The Future in 90 Days," the two-day old company's new Mobile Futures program was announced at the Mobile Marketing Association's Advertising Week conference in New York. The program is structured in two phases: scaling startup innovation, and creating entirely new mobile ventures by partnering entrepreneurs in the mobile space with "up to 10" Mondelez brands, as Mondelēz VP of Global Media and Consumer Engagement Bonin Bough told Ad Age.

Bough is bringing a solid track record to the task. He oversaw digital and consumer engagement at PepsiCo, including the now wrapped Pepsi Refresh Project crowdsourced community project-funding platform, before joining Kraft Foods in February. He's tapping that experience to spur mobile innovation at Mondelēz, the just-launched global corporate identity for Kraft Foods following Monday's spin-off of Kraft's North American consumer packaged brands.Continue reading...

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is busy pitching Wall Street and Madison Avenue on FB advertising, calling it "incredibly effective" in her first post-IPO interviews. She's not the only Facebook exec defending the efficacy of ad campaigns using the social graph, even as the FTC raises privacy concerns about FB's new partnership with Datalogix for ad metrics, and social ad skeptic GM challenged the site's analytics.

With its stock down 43% since its May IPO, new initiatives to increase revenue including mobile ads and now the Datalogix union are attempts by the social behemoth to wean marketers off clicks, which is the key metric pitched by Google. Instead, Facebook is focusing not on the click-through rate (CTR) but on the number of times a user sees an ad (and whether the campaign has reached its target audience) as more effective metrics to track in marketing.

Indeed, Facebook reports that fewer than 1% of in-store sales tied to brand campaigns come from people who clicked on an ad.Continue reading...

Advertising Week kicked off in New York Monday morning with a "Memoriam for Advertising." Now Declan Stone may need to update his new Logo R.I.P. book sooner than expected.

If 24/7 Wall Street's soothsayers have an accurate crystal ball, it’s time to slather on some Avon products, pull on some Pacific Sunwear shades and an Oakland Raiders jersey while reading Salon.com’s story about American Airlines on your BlackBerry.

These are six of the 10 brands mentioned in 24/7 Wall Street’s new list of what 10 big name brands could disappear in 2013. The others? MetroPCS, Suzuki, Talbots, and Current TV. 24/7, ever so slightly tongue in cheek but in a wake-up call, too, believes these brands will either be bought out or go out of business before the big ball in Times Square drops at the end of 2013.

According to the website's prognosis, American Airlines is “inefficient.” BlackBerry-maker RIM has “lost its edge.” Pacific Sunwear “no longer has the capital to compete.” At MetroPCS, “investors have abandoned.”

All 10 of the companies suffered from at least one of the following:Continue reading...

On the eve of Advertising Week, Nielsen announced a modest uptick of 2.4% in global ad spending in the second quarter. And now that Advertising Week is upon us, the ratings giant is out with its latest metrics on how the rise of online video and digital platforms are upending traditional ad models.

According to the new Nielsen Cross-Platform Report, “in addition to watching 34-plus hours of TV per week, the average American spends nearly five hours online on the computer. More than half of Americans now watch video online, with online viewing increasing average weekly video consumption to roughly 35 hours.”

Nielsen is pitching its clients to rethink how they view the viewer, and that an online viewer is equally valuable to the advertising ecosystem as a television viewer — a message that coincides with the kick off of Advertising Week in New York, and the launch of Nielsen Cross-Platform Ratings for multi-screen ad measurement to Madison Avenue.

After extensive trials across the advertising ecosystem with brands including ESPN, Facebook, Hulu and Unilever, the new product delivers unduplicated and incremental reach, frequency and GRP measures for TV and Internet advertising. Their new measurement includes the number of people who watched a campaign digitally, those who watched on TV, and the intersection of those two audiences.Continue reading...

“Can Progressive's perky Flo make mincemeat out of the Jolly Green Giant? For that matter, can the Old Spice dude clean Mr. Clean's clock?” That’s the question being crowdsourced via social media to determine winners in the eighth annual online competition for the top two U.S. ad icons and slogans. 

Voting kicks off this week on event sponsor Buzzfeed.com, and runs through September 30.

The winners will be permanently installed on New York's Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame, located between 42nd and 50th Streets and already adorned with the likes of Juan Valdez, Orville Redenbacher, Mr. Peanut, the M&Ms, Tony the Tiger and the Budweiser Clydesdales. 

Leveraging Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, 20 icons are in the running, but only two will be immortalized during Advertising Week 2011 in New York, October 3-7.

2011 icon contenders include General Mills' Jolly Green Giant, the Kia Hamsters, P&G's Mr. Clean, the Energizer Bunny, Old Spice Man (aka The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, or Isaiah Mustafa), and Flo, Progressive’s perky/pesky insurance clerk.

"It's the ultimate seal of approval from consumers," comments Matt Scheckner, executive director of sponsor Advertising Week, to USA Today. "This will become viral," he says, fully (and ambitiously) expecting at least one million consumers to vote.Continue reading...

AOL unveiled Project Devil, its new ad format at Advertising Week in New York this week. Touting "a better web," the acquistion-hungry portal is bumping up the size of ad units, making brands as sexy as content (despite its recent focus on content, including the acquistion of TechCrunch). Find out more in its Ad Week presentation, after the jump.Continue reading...