The world’s financial situation isn’t exactly peachy keen just yet, but the global population appears to be up for traveling. Both luxury and budget brand hotels are popping up across the world.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which came in at the top of its category in the recent 2013 Harris Poll EquiTrend, “expects to have enough cash in the next three years to add another global luxury brand bringing their total to ten.” 

Mitzi Gaskins, VP/global brand manager for JW Marriott, noted that the “luxury space is growing a lot” and is “anticipating 50 percent growth over the next four to five years with 79 JW hotels up and running by 2015.” Less than half of the 30 or more hotels that the brand has in the pipeline are in the United States. Gaskins told Fortune that the luxury markets that are growing fastest are “top tier destinations and gateway cities,” noting that the JW brand was opening soon in Cabo, Turks & Caicos, Macao and Hanoi, and had “just launched” in Venice.Continue reading...

"Go home American Eagle you're drunk."

That's the most popular YouTube comment on a new "skinny jeans" ad from American Eagle Outfitters. Is it an early April Fool's spoof or a blatant attempt to go viral by spoofing a trend gone too far?Continue reading...

This week, Scion will select the 10 final winners in its Motivate program to help and learn from entrepreneurs in the creative community. It's also another step in the brand's program to engage more fully with Millennial consumers not only who might be creatives but also who might be inspired by their aims and passions—some of the same kinds of passions exemplified by Scion's youthful positioning and the unique designs of its vehicles.

The 50 Motivate semifinalists heard from speakers and learned and shared business-building skills during a three-day workshop in Santa Monica, Calif., last week, at the end of which each of the 10 finalists will receive $10,000, a Scion vehicle and a tie-in to a personal business mentor.

"If our objective is only to get a big share of the independent-minded-entrepreneur market, we're probably not going to hit our sales targets with that alone," Doug Murtha, vice president of Scion, joked to brandchannel. "But one thing we learned is that the concept of going out on your own and taking something you have a personal interest in and making a profession out of it resonates with the unemployed, the underemployed and people working at big companies as well. Whether they have the gumption to go do that is another thing altogether."Continue reading...

The originators of social media as we know it today—Facebook and Twitter—are dealing with a lack of interest from once-dedicated users: young smartphone-attached digital natives who grew up on mobile and social.

Facebook is busy revamping the social site's News Feed while Twitter is turning its focus towards the bevy of brands and advertisers that are trying to capitalize on the site's RTM capabilities. The trial and error of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter has in turn birthed the next generation of social media as younger digerati take to their devices and craft social platforms that are better-suited to their likes and habits.

Pheed, the social media platform that lets users share text, photos, videos and audio describes itself as “the evolution of social sharing,” combining elements of those platforms preceding it and adding capabilities of SoundCloud, Tumblr and Ustream, with no limits on content size, videos that can run as long as 4 hours and 20 minutes and photos in any resolution and shape. Notably, a copyright button lets users put a watermark on their content that is legally binding.

The website and mobile app are particularly popular with teenagers, who made it the App Store's number one social networking app in February, with a “user base [that] is 81percent between age 14 and 25.”Continue reading...

NYC judge just ruled on #sodaban, says it's arbitrary and capricious. This is a victory for small business and personal choice in #NYC.

— NYC Beverage Choices (@NYCBevChoices) March 12, 2013

It was doomed to fail, writes the Guardian. Even New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg acknowledged, "When we began this process, we knew we’d face lawsuits." He added, "When you adopt a groundbreaking policy, special interest will sue. That's America."

So the overturning by New York State judge Milton Tingling of Bloomberg's proposed ban on sugary beverages above 16 ounces, which was due to go into effect on Tuesday before being dismissed as "arbitrary" and "capricious" by Tingling, didn't come as a complete surprise.Continue reading...

Inter IKEA, the parent of IKEA, announced last summer that it was partnering with a hotelier to create a new hotel brand that oddly wouldn’t feature any of the Swedish furniture maker’s products. It’s now been confirmed at the Berlin International Hotel Investment Forum that Marriott is the partner and Moxy will be the name of the new affordable hotel chain, which plans to open 150 locations across Europe in the next decade.

“Moxy Hotels is the essence of the next generation traveler, not only Gen X and Y but people with a younger sensibility, for whom contemporary style is paramount,” said Arne Sorenson, president and CEO of Marriott International in a press release. “Every aspect of the hotel was thoughtfully researched and crafted to reflect and deliver on the changing lifestyles and expectations of this fast-growing customer segment.” 

According to TravelBite, this will be Marriott’s first budget brand in Europe. Fifty of those locations should be up and running in the next five years and Inter IKEA will be ponying up $500 million to help out, the Wall Street Journal reports. While the hotels won’t use IKEA furniture, the company has found a way to keep construction costs down in a different way: “Many of the hotels will use rooms prefabricated offsite and then assembled like IKEA furniture, a modular type of construction that is new for Marriott.”Continue reading...

Now that Chevrolet has rolled out the first creative under its "Find New Roads" brand positioning, General Motors CMO Alan Batey wants to give the upbeat, product-oriented theme as much exposure as he can.

Batey tells brandchannel that, in addition to new vehicle-specific TV ads in the weeks ahead, Chevrolet will be doing more in-cinema advertising than ever before.

The original ad that aired during the recent Grammy Awards telecast on CBS—including vignettes separately featuring the Chevrolet Volt, Spark, Sonic, Corvette Stingray and Impala—"will be broken down into four standalone-product ads," Batey told us, "and we'll also be using that work quite extensively not just on TV but also in cinema," he said.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...