HTC One, a.k.a. the Facebook Home phone that's coming to AT&T and other carriers, is just one focus of the company’s impending brand refresh and aggressive marketing campaign to get better market placement against competitors like Samsung. 

HTC has been known for good hardware and not-so-good promotion, but squaring off against marketing-savvy Samsung requires the former to up its game. "It's one thing to make a great device—HTC has done that before," Mike Woodward, president of HTC America told the LA Times. "What is a little different this time is the way that we're going to market. We want to really get that down to the streets and get that down to consumers." 

HTC had been using “quietly brilliant” as its slogan, but the brand is looking to step out of its shell with a new marketing message that has “bold,” “authentic” and “playful” themes. The new tagline, "Everything Your Phone Isn't," is courting "Generation Feed" (what HTC calls tech-savvy, early-adopters). "Tech millennials are hard to connect with," Erin McGee, HTC North America VP Marketing told Ad Age. "We wanted to create a closer connection by targeting passion points."Continue reading...

Murmurs were afoot early on the street and on the tweet, thanks to Taco Bell's Facebook hint that fans should head to a pop-up store at New York City's Ariston Flowers in the Chelsea neighborhood, setting the Twitterverse aflutter.

The product: new Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos. The password: ask for the blue bouquet.

But just when things began to heat up at the flower shop, Taco Bell also was letting the whole country know about what likely will be its biggest new-product announcement of 2013. The Yum! Brands chain is hoping to tap into the same fervor for Cool Ranch as it did a year ago for the original Nacho Cheese flavored Doritos Locos Tacos, which kicked off a frenzy new Doritos-based-shell franchise.

And if the blue nail polish on today's Facebook announcement wasn't hint enough, Taco Bell is wooing the cool kids to Cool Ranch by appealing to hipsters — judging by its Super Bowl commercial, as a mindset and not necessarily just millennials.Continue reading...

Often when a celebrity dies, no matter what kind of damage they may have done to themselves, the culture, or their families, their image suddenly gets cleaned and polished up quite nicely. 

Whoever is controlling the after-death image of Frank Sinatra, though, appears to want to go in the other direction. The mystique of Sinatra – a lady-killing, cocktail-swilling, cocked-hat-wearing Vegas-owning charmer with a sweet singing voice – isn’t getting cleaned up at all. Instead, his famed tippling ways are being amplified by Jack Daniel’s, which is bottling the Ol' Blue Eyes magic with Sinatra Select whisky.

To support the launch, Jack Daniel’s parent Brown Forman is now opening “Sinatra Experience” installations in duty-free shops at airports across the globe that will allow travelers to take a sip of the limited-edition whisky, check out images of Sinatra in action, and listen to his tunes.Continue reading...

Last year, Americans spent nearly $135 billion on gifts during the holiday season, with video games ranking most popular for kids. So this holiday season, Energy BBDO and Xi Chicago decided to remind kids the simple joys of play with the opposite of a video game: a cardboard box. 

Remember Caine's Arcade, the touching video of a boy who made a cardboard arcade in his dad's used auto parts store in East Los Angeles? Cue "Mister Imagine's Toy Store," a pop-up shop selling nothing but cardboard in Chicago’s Wicker Park, to promote real play and creativity, as part of the Chicago Children’s Museum’s current “Unboxed: Adventures in Cardboard” exhibit.

As Adweek notes, “Children can select a box (a donation is requested) and then head to the art room to create their own unique creation. If kids are having trouble figuring out what to make, they can step up to an augmented reality station and see options appear on their box, ask a handy art facilitator on staff, or simply look around at the stunning artworks that make up the decor.”Continue reading...

This holiday season, there are about a bazillion pop-ups sprouting up in New York and London, such as one at NYC's Ace Hotel for Krochet Kids International, the organization that teaches Ugandan and Kenyan women to knit, and the Santa Baby cocktail bar in London's Shoreditch area. Tech lovers and brands will no doubt be rejoicing at one particular pop-up that spans the Atlantic to both cities.

For eight years now, Wired magazine has been wowing tech-lovers with an annual pop-up shop stuffed with whatever the latest and greatest happens to be. This year, the magazine is not only back with a Big Apple pop-up stuffed with gadgets, gear, brands and cultural happenings, but also taking the fun to London. 

The London store features products from such companies as MakerBot, Arcbotics Hexapod, Hiut Denim, Makie Lab, Zboard, and plenty of others. Orders could be made on-site for the products to be delivered.Continue reading...

How hot are British boy band du jour One Direction? They've got their own toothpaste, and they're taking over New York, with a 1D World holiday pop-up store located in a former Borders bookstore near Macy's and Herald Square. Located at 2 Penn Plaza, the entire pop-up shop is an ode to One Direction, wooing fans with bling and merchandise. And what bling and merch it is.Continue reading...

BMW on Saturday wrapped its BMW i global Born Electric Tour's New York City pit stop, which featured a digital window that turned the reflection of cars passing by into its own electric vehicles, the all-electric BMW i3 and plug-in hybrid BMW i8 concept vehicles. Find out more below, along with interviews from the automaker's execs who turned up to the Big Apple.Continue reading...

It won't come as news to the millions of Americans who go to humanity-choked Apple stores and try to find a blue-shirted staff member who might be unoccupied, but Apple's outlets are the most productive retail real estate in the United States, according to new research.

Now if its former retail guru Ron Johnson could finally just figure out how to apply some of the Apple shine to JCPenney, where he is the increasingly beleaguered CEO after having left Apple as head of its retail stores a little over a year ago.

Apple's store productivity has soared in recent years as consumers have flocked to buy iPhones and iPads, reports the Financial Times. As a result, Apple recorded sales per square foot of retail space of $6,050 in the year ended in June, putting it ahead of all other contenders, including No. 2 Tiffany & Co. and No. 3 Lululemon Athletica, according to data from Retail Sales. But even Tiffany finished a distant runner-up, with sales of $3,017 per foot.Continue reading...