Cocktail Hour: October 12, 2012

Each week, The Agency Post curates the top marketing-related news of the week, musings on the advertising industry and the creative work worth your attention. Here’s the scoop.

HEADLINES

Pinterest Design Influences: EBay continued its brand overhaul with updates to its layout, search functionality, product pages and payment system.

Wishing and Wanting and Collecting: Facebook launched a new service for select retail partners that allows fans to click a Want or Collect button on products. Fans will then be able to add these products to a Wishlist. While Facebook won’t be charging brands for the service, it may provide the social network with additional advertising opportunities with these brands who are looking to integrate social and e-commerce further.

Searching for Tweets: Twitter continues to make its site more search-engine friendly by adding a directory of accounts. This comes soon after the site updated its robots.txt file to allow search engines to crawl and index tweets by content and as it continues to force more users to visit the site instead of using third-party services.

MUSINGS

Untargeted Content Marketing: Content marketing and the buzz surrounding the discipline have prompted many companies to increase the amount of content created and shared. But has the focus on having something to share outweighed what is being shared? Content/product disconnect is plaguing brands that look for ways to target consumers through content. [Janetaronica.com]

Advertising is Dying. Long Live Design: The internet has made brand interaction and communication more transparent. So while advertising can reach a consumer through social, mobile, TV, print and a multitude of different ways, there is also more opportunities for consumers to call bullshit if the promises don’t match up. Focus on design — the experience, product and service. Advertising won’t save a company that fails to deliver on these elements. [A Version of Events]

Twitter Dominates Live TV Because Social TV is Failing: While research shows that people are using their laptops, mobile devices and tablets while watching TV, it doesn’t prove that viewers want to devote a second screen to social TV apps. The author writes, “What does ‘synchronous experience’ mean to the average user? What about the concept of ‘flinging things from second screen to TV’? Or, let’s take another step back: do regular everyday users even understand the term ‘social TV’?” Creating an experience that will make social TV a success will depend on if companies understand what and how users want to watch TV in the future. [TechCrunch]

CREATIVE

Alex Bogusky and The Center for Science in the Public Interest launch “The Real Bears,” a campaign to showcase the effects of marketing by soda companies.

http://youtu.be/myxwCEGcBYc

Joy dish soap released a series of print ads in the Philippines to change the way people wash dishes.

Lexus brings print to life with this interactive ad featured in Sports Illustrated.

http://youtu.be/wSsvdHwk--I

STATS

132% - Increase in mobile ad spend in the first two quarters in the UK. [Econsultancy / IAB UK]

77% - Users that prefer a social login to registration. [All Twitter]