Bangladesh plans to raise pay for garment workers and allow unions.

ABC veteran Barbara Walters announces 2014 retirement as Disney plans to live-stream ABC programming via app and cloud.

Yum! sales in China fall 29 percent in April.

ABB says CEO plans to resign.

Audi outsells BMW brand globally — again.

Bloomberg admits use of its terminals for data snooping.

CBS chief touts TV over digital engagement.

Cisco tries reinvention in tough time.

Danone sets deal to acquire Happy Family brand.Continue reading...

Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson wants to help everybody without $4.6 billion to their name find love. (And if it helps him make a few more bucks, all the better.)

Virgin Airlines, in honor of its new flight plan to Las Vegas, has introduced an in-flight service designed to bring folks together on all of its planes. Passengers can now send a drink, snack or meal to other passengers on their flight and send text messages to them via the touchscreens on their seatbacks. If airline travel was one of the last places that you could escape conversation and advances from others, don’t worry. Virgin does give the opportunity to decline any freebies from other passengers.Continue reading...

You want to make Reddit sensation Grumpy Cat really grumpy? Try using her name on a product without prior authorization.

The owners of the cat that took social media by storm five months ago have filed for a trademark for the name "Grumpy Cat" as well as the cat’s likeness. After all, their little kitty, whose name is actually Tardar Sauce, has since gotten her own website, Facebook fan page, retail space, an appearance on the Today Show and her own commercial for Friskies cat food, according to SmallBizTrends.com.Continue reading...

A Ford ad ties into the NBC series The Smash. So far, the show has brought lackluster ratings.

The Middle, Smash and Portlandia offer three examples of the growing seamlessness between product/brand placement and the creative content of TV series.

On ABC's The Middle this week, the episode was practically an ode to two brands: iPad and Red Lobster. The youngest child in the Heck family, Brick, pines and pesters for an iPad until his parents, Frankie (played by Patricia Heaton) and Mike, finally relent and buy him a restored model on eBay. Until they do, a huge chunk of the script is devoted to Brick's description of the wonders of the iPad.

Much of the rest of the story depicts the family at a Red Lobster, naming the restaurant repeatedly and including a shot of a juicy lobster. (A Red Lobster ad also aired during the episode — though there was no commercial for iPad.)Continue reading...

Uber, the San Francisco-based startup at the intersection of mobile, car transport and logistics, is disrupting the industry and causing wide-spread regulatory reverberations.

The app for U.S. urbanites to book a cab on iPhone or Android OS smartphones has emerged as an alternative to overcrowded public transit and an escalating dearth of regular taxis, but now finds itself in the crosshairs of local taxi and limousine commissions. The key issue, is Uber a limousine service or a cab service? Answer — a bit of both.

It's pitched as "Everyone's Private Driver. Request a swanky ride in a black car with just the tap of an app! We're changing the way people are getting around by offering a convenient, cashless, and stylish on demand car request service from your mobile phone." A clever marketing tie-in just saw the Uber app used by New Yorkers to hail vintage gangster cars in a "free on demand" (a double entendre for NYC cable VOD subscribers) promotion for the third season launch of Boardwalk Empire on HBO.

This week the app launched in Boston and last week in Dallas, making it available (in theory, if not in practice) in 15 cities in total: San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Diego, Denver, Atlanta, and beyond the U.S., London, Paris and Toronto. But it hasn't all been smooth hailing — D.C.'s taxi commission has just proposed new rules to shut down Uber.

Uber's execs thought they had recently passed muster in Washington, following a six-month battle in the District of Columbia to legalize sedans used by its car-service partners.Continue reading...

Richard Branson's Virgin America airline is doing it again, shaking up the status quo with its latest 'Originals' experience campaign featuring some of the airline's Elevate frequent flyers, and with more hailing from Silicon Valley than Hollywood.  

"For years, flying domestically had largely become a dismal, uninspired experience. When Virgin America launched, the idea that a domestic airline could reinvent that experience – through technology, design and entertainment – was still a pretty radical notion," stated Luanne Calvert, VP Marketing at Virgin America.Continue reading...

Being dropped by the second biggest satellite TV operator in the U.S. (after DirecTV) is no laughing matter. Still, IFC is leveraging its award-winning original comedy series Portlandia also with its two new comedy series, Comedy Bang! Bang! and Bunk, to help convince viewers to lobby Dish Network to not drop the AMC Networks-owned channel as part of Dish's legal threat to drop IFC and its sister networks under the AMC Networks banner.

Visitors to IFC.com are greeted with a pop-up that reads: "DISH Customers - DISH is dropping IFC. If you are a DISH customer, you won't be able to watch our films and shows like Portlandia, Comedy Bang! Bang!, Bunk, and Whisker wars. Tell DISH to put IFC back on the air. Call toll free 855-8-KEEP-ON or go to KEEPIFC.com." Once they click through the "don't let IFC go black on DISH" pop-up and enter the site, visitors will see on of the banners above in rotation across the site.

If, however, they click through to KeepIFC.com to find out what all the fuss is about, they'll be redirected to KeepAMCNetworks.com, and discover that it's not just IFC but also Sundance Channel, AMC (home to Mad Men and Breaking Bad), and the female-skewing WE TV. Once there, they can click on "get the facts" to learn more about the background to the legal spat, which stems from a prior lawsuit between Dish and AMC Network's now defunct VOOM HD Networks, a high-definition suite of channels that existed back when AMC Networks was known as Rainbow Media and HD TV sets weren't as ubiquitous as they are today.Continue reading...

American Express announced an innovative social media integration with Twitter this week, enabling US cardmembers to turn customized Twitter hashtags into savings via sync.americanexpress.com. Promoted with the tagline “Sync. Tweet. Save.” the social marketing promotion is the most direct use of Twitter to date by a brand that creates a real utility for customers: couponless savings loaded directly to their synced cards and automatically delivered in a credit statement.

“With Twitter, we’ve really hit the trifecta. We have a great platform in Twitter,” said Ed Gilligan, Vice Chairman, American Express. “We know our cardmembers are engaged in Twitter. We’ve been working with them to think about how can we help them move from conversations to commerce. To turn a tweet into a transaction.”

Brands trying out Amex Sync include Best Buy, McDonald’s, Whole Foods Market, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Century 21, The Cheesecake Factory, Dell, FedEx Office, FTD, Gulf, H&M, Seamless.com, Sports Authority, Ticketmaster, Virgin America and Zappos. They'll be closely watching the analytics on this test, with the Amex Synch API offering also supplying reports to merchants about customer spending, online and offline.

And if they're in Austin for SXSW on March 12th, they can celebrate at a concert featuring Jay-Z.Continue reading...