WEEKLY DIGITAL/COMMS HIGHLIGHTS

FACEBOOK LAUNCHES ‘FACEBOOK DEALS’ VIA PLACES 
Facebook last week launched Facebook Deals, the much-anticipated new service which allows “stores, restaurants and businesses to offer promotions and discounts to users of Facebook’s location tool, Places.” Using Places, users can see what offers are nearby and share them with their friends, and can claim deals by simply checking-in to a business on Places and showing the business a voucher. (US ONLY UNTIL 2011)

GAP GIVES AWAY 10,000 PAIRS OF JEANS ON FACEBOOK PLACES 
Facebook Places launched ‘deals’ last week, which allow brands/businesses to reward people for checking in. First on board were GAP, all you had to do was check in to a GAP store in the US for your chance to win a free pair of jeans and, even if you didn’t manage to be one of the first 10,000, you still got 40% off!

FACEBOOK MESSAGES LAUNCHES (IT’S NOT EMAIL) 
Facebook has launched what it calls the “Modern Messaging System,” a product that integrates e-mail, IM and texting in a unified inbox.

CHECK-IN APPS NEXT STOP: THE SUPERMARKET AISLE 
Consumer foods players are following in the footsteps of retailers like Gap and starting to acknowledge the potential location-based apps have for them. PepsiCo, Tyson and Seventh Generation are among the major companies teaming up with the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla and CheckPoints, promoting programs that reward consumers for picking up products and giving them added incentives to put that product in their cart.

WHY LOCATIONS APPS OF THE FUTURE WILL DO SO MUCH MORE THAN CHECK-INS 
Sparkle is new location platform launching today from Location Labs that enables developers to more easily build sophisticated location-based iPhone and Android applications by tapping into Sparkle’s geolocation technology. It provides geofencing and messaging technology, offers support to control voice, data and SMS services for handsets, and can even detect mobile phone motion and velocity
So try thinking outside of check-ins when planning for geo/location…

BURGER KING: KING OF THE ROAD 
CP+B have teamed up two of their clients, Burger King & Microsoft, for a month of giveaways, content creation & experiential activations. Burger King is giving away an Xbox Kinect every 15 minutes for the whole month of November through in-store activation & purchase. In addition, CP+B have come up with the idea to send ‘The King’ on a road trip across the US to give away even more Xbox’s & to help them create social content which they’ll seed via Foursquare, Tumblr, Facebook, Youtube, Stickybits etc

5 BIG BRANDS THAT ARE ROCKING THE SOCIAL MEDIA SPACE 
Mashable rounds up their top 5 social media savvy brands of 2010 as part of their annual awards

HOW MUCH INFORMATION CAN YOU FIT IN YOUR BRAIN? 
A neat little infographic which shows the average amount of information we can fit in our brains in the course of 1 day (3.6 zettabytes!)

CAN MEDIA BE MORE UBIQUITOUS BUT YET LESS INVASIVE? 
The creative brains at Dentsu London and Berg London have teamed up to produce a pair of short films on a decisively lofty topic: the future of media surfaces.
They visualize a world in which information is somehow both more ubiquitous and less intrusive. TV screens will double as Twitter feeds and Foursquare check-in logs. Shop windows will be quietly animated. And train-ticket machines will do the unthinkable: They'll tell you where to find your train and when…

HOVIS’S 122 SECOND TV SPOT WINS UK’S TOP EFFECTIVENESS AWARDS 
Despite the decline of traditional media and the scaling down of budgets, an epic two-minute TV commercial by Hovis was the big winner at last weeks Institute of Practitioners in Advertising awards, the U.K. ad industry's prestigious effectiveness prizes. The spot is 122 seconds long, because it encapsulates the last 122 years of British history, in the form of a small boy running home from the bakery with a loaf of Hovis bread under his arm. In the street he passes by suffragette rallies, the troops marching off for World War I, the blitz, the swinging 60s, and the strikes of the 1970s. The tagline is "As good today as it's always been." It shows that if you can create a great piece of content then people will always watch it, advertisement or not…

5 MUSTS FOR MOBILE APP MARKETING 
Some great tips to keep in mind when promoting an app in a very cluttered space. Start before the app has even been released, don’t wait until after it’s hit the marketplace.