Wikileaks spoofed Mastercard's "Priceless" campaign this week. Watch the spot below, along with new perfume commercials featuring Scarlett Johansson and Christina Aguilera, plus place branding with a twist and more.Continue reading...

In another digital first today, Burberry premiered its spring 2012 collection in London on Twitter (sharing each look in a virtual #tweetwalk before it went down the catwalk. The collection was also live-streamed on Burberry.com and on Facebook.

Below, take a peek at the S/S12 collection, which designer Christopher Bailey called an homage to craftsmanship and tradition, the Independent called "the best of British" fashion and the Telegraph called "gorgeous without the bling."Continue reading...

Now that New York Fashion Week is a wrap, the spotlight turns today to London, where British designers are showcasing at their Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Up and comers including the designing duo behind Preen, above, whose spring 2012 collection features high-tech lace and pixelated pastels inspired by Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set.

Burberry will once again live-stream its show (taking place Monday) at Burberry.com, where anyone can buy fashions directly from the runway. Not hitting the runway, however: Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen, along with some models who feel LFW doesn't pay well enough to merit their time. (Click here for the full LFW schedule.)

There's hope that McQueen and McCartney will return to London Fashion Week in the spring, ahead of the London 2012 pre-Olympics buzz. The British Fashion Council, meanwhile, this week announced that Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen will participate in an arts-based collaboration, Britain Creates, part of the London 2012 cultural program.Continue reading...

IHT fashion doyenne Suzy Menkes today highlights Ermenegildo Zegna's digital retail experience, with its new 3D in-store app featuring model/actress Milla Jovovich (and directed by Hollywood special effects director James Lima) leading luxury retailers into cyberspace.

Launched in July in tandem with the opening of its new Paris flagship, Lima tells Menkes about the challenges of creating a virtual experience for a brand on the iPad, a 3D trend that Burberry and Ralph Lauren are also exploring.

“It is a very interesting problem, using high-end Hollywood visual effects and animation software, transported into a different Internet format," Lima comments. "In Hollywood, we design by story, it’s all from a script — but this is not Brad Pitt, it’s brand narration.”

Brand marketers are increasingly relying on in-text advertising that plugs their presence on the social web, "fishing where the fish are" (as the saying goes) to engage consumers with their brand messaging.

The in-text ads — think of them as mini-microsites with menu-tabs and interactivity — give users quick access to the marketer's Twitter feed or Facebook wall, or can direct them to a YouTube video.

Flite is one such cloud-based ad platform, designed to "improve brand recall and purchase intent" and enable marketers "to produce ads that express the power of their brand as effectively as the brand’s website."

“Marketers receive up to a 10x increase in ROI on their brand spend with ads developed in 1/10th the time,” Flite states, with its website featuring an array of campaigns it has produced for leading brands including Heineken (at right), Burberry, Coca-Cola, Lancôme, Volkswagen and AT&T.

According to Flite, consumers spent 30 seconds on average interacting with on of its ads (vs. the Google-reported average of 11 seconds as average), and are more likely to click on a “learn more” button, with 35 of every 1,000 users clicking through.Continue reading...

Love jeans with that relaxed, sandblasted look? You’re going to have to find a different brand than Gianni Versace.

The Italian design house has now joined Gucci and H&M (for which Versace is producing a collection this fall) by banning the practice after much outrage and lobbying by the Clean Clothes Campaign.

To get that look, “workers fire sand under high pressure at jeans” (according to the Courier Post Online), a practice that has led to the deaths of workers in Turkey, Bangladesh, “and other countries” where the process is done manually, the site reports. What's more, sandblasting leaves “large amounts of silica dust” in the air for workers to breathe. It can cause silicosis, a pulmonary disease that can be a killer.

Those things probably aren’t the first things  on the mind of a consumer when he or she is buying Versace. And now they don’t need to be.Continue reading...

Burberry reported its first quarter earnings today, with retail sales growth of 49% a validation of the brand's strategic focus on digital innovation and emerging markets, especially China.

According to the brand's press release, "Continued innovation in Burberry’s two core categories, outerwear and large leather goods, drove nearly half of the growth in mainline sales, while Burberry Prorsum and London again outperformed, resulting in double-digit average selling price increases. Monthly flow of new fashion product, supported by synchronised digital initiatives, attracted the local luxury customer, while the increased penetration of core replenishment styles supported high tourist markets."

Fans, however, were more impressed by another piece of news: the naming of model-turned-Transformer star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who replaced Agyness Deyn as a regular Burberry model, today announced on Facebook as the first "Burberry Body." Her racy new campaign promoting a perfume of the same name debuts on September 1st.

Anheuser-Busch InBev moves to trademark US city area codes, while Apple trademarks "280."

Charlie Sheen hopes to return to TV in Anger Management.

Claudia Schiffer launches a fashion collection.

CNN cancels Eliot Spitzer's talk show.

Ford is the first brand on Google+, with two accounts.

Louis Vuitton and Burberry awarded biggest counterfeit settlement in Canadian history.

PyeongChang, South Korea, selected by IOC to host the XXIII Winter Olympics in 2018.

Nancy Grace's Casey Anthony obsession boosts ratings for HLN.

P&G, Asda and Tesco consider joining brand advertisers that are boycotting News of the World.Continue reading...