"Through this agreement, Facebook will provide Heineken with a global marketing platform that reaches millions of people as well as access to Facebook's deep expertise in building long-term relationships between brands and their audiences," Heineken said in a statement. "The collaboration also provides Heineken with access to Facebook's latest products."

Ken Goldstein, who tracks campaign ads for Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, or CMAG, says videos like Romney's have become increasingly popular with candidates for a couple of reasons. "They're a very cheap thing for the campaign to do - sometimes it doesn't really even cost that much money to produce the ad," he says. "And then what they're hoping to do is get a bunch of earned media or free media coverage to amplify that message."

The wide-ranging inquiry into criminal abuses by the British press has led to testimony about relationships and careers damaged by tabloid excess. Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are at the heart of the scandal. A former features editor for one of those papers stole the show at Tuesday's hearing.

The 2008 financial crisis made it clear: Americans save too little, spend too much and borrow excessively, says Princeton professor Sheldon Garon. In Western Europe and East Asia, governments aggressively encourage people to save through special savings institutions and savings campaigns. Garon has just released a new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves. He discussed his findings with NPR:

The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight - colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic - shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe's Photoshop software, the photo retoucher's magic wand. And that is a problem, feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled.  Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. 

Video News Releases are short broadcast news reports that appear in some news programs as part of the news, but are really created by sponsors or special interest groups. Click on the links below to read more about each VNR, including the client(s) that funded it, the TV stations that aired it, and the techniques that each station used to incorporate the VNR into its newscast.

The relationship between Wonderful Pistachios and Rovio's Angry Birds entered a new level Thursday with the launch of The Hunt for the Golden Pistachio, the first fully branded Angry Birds game.

Examples of famous embedded ads in movies

Embedded advertising is persuasive material embedded in media content in exchange for a payment.  The ad may take the form of product placement, product integration or branded entertainment.  Though the terms are often used interchangeably, they denote increasing degrees of influence advertisers have over media content.

"Researchers studied 294 newscasts on network-affiliated television stations...90 percent of  the newscasts included at least one instance of stealth, or embedded, advertising." 

A CLOSER LOOK AT GUERRILLA MARKETING AND NON TRADITIONAL MARKETING CONCEPTS FROM AROUND THE WORLD AND A GREAT PLATFORM TO FEATURE OUR OWN GUERRILLA MARKETING EFFORTS.

The commercial highlights a smoking-cessation Web site called MyTimeToQuit.com, and it looks in many ways like a public-service announcement, at least initially. But wait-a logo at the end of the commercial reveals that it's sponsored by Pfizer. And the MyTimetoQuit site includes links that ultimately lead you to the Web site for Chantix (varenicline), Pfizer's blockbuster smoking-cessation drug.

Advertisers' messages are infiltrating small-market television newscasts at about the same percentage that owners of digital video recorders are skipping the commercials, say researchers at the University of Oregon.

Stealth advertising - an ad-industry buzzword for a few years now - is so low-key it doesn't look like advertising at all. Turns out it's also fairly recession-friendly - because it's cheaper than traditional TV advertising. And when it works, it's usually the kind of thing that really works.

We recently looked at the most shared articles in the US on Facebook over the past year. The stories range from cute to thought provoking and represent the type of news people have been sharing and discovering with friends in 2011.   

Yahoo News, The Washington Post,The Independent, and The Guardian have amassed millions of readers for social editions of the publications that launched in September. These publications are all sending large numbers of posts into Facebook news feeds, often to the point of eclipsing other types of content

ABC News and TED, the nonprofit conference that promotes "Ideas Worth Spreading" are partnering on a new series of reports focusing on ideas and inventions that could change the world. Called "Ted + Diane" for anchor Diane Sawyer, the first report aired yesterday and focused on new research that is looking into ways to reverse the aging process. The plan is to eventually feature a one-hour primetime special, but details on that are still being worked out. Check out the trailer below:

What's the first word that should come to mind when you or your students see a news story or get a news/rumor text?  We think it should be a skeptical "REALLY?" To reinforce the importance of becoming an educated news consumer, RTNDF is launching a news literacy project called REALLY? The campaign is designed to help everyone -- students, teachers, professionals and the general public -- separate fact from fiction. You will want to your student producers and editors to join you for this webinar - or see the archived version.

Facebook happiness index graphs from 2008 and 2009