Morning Bulletin: Seven isn’t heaven for Samsung, Fireman Sam acquitted & Twitter’s live video ads
Today we look at the implications for Samsung following its disastrous launch of the Note 7, a reprieve for Fireman Sam in a Qu’ran row and a look at Twitter’s first stab at selling adverts for a live sports video feed.
Campaign leads with an unusual crowd funding campaign which seeks to supplant ordinary adverts on London’s tube network with images of cats as part of a ‘citizen takeover’, helping to ensure commuters are feline fine on their travels.
Ad Week meanwhile labels Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 ‘a complete disaster’ following a blanket product recall amidst fears that its battery could explode when charging, warning that the incident could prompt Android stalwarts to jump shop to Apple.
Fireman Sam is off the hook for allegedly disrespecting Islam when a character ‘stepped on a Qu’ran’, after Ofcom investigators replayed the contentious scene in the highest possible resolution and found it was impossible to identify a page of Arabic looking text as belonging to any particular book.
Ad Exchanger carries an interesting report from Zenith Optimedia which calculates that ongoing mobile growth will disproportionately affect desktop ad spend, with the latter declining at a quicker pace than even that traditional industry laggard, print.
Car maker Ford has stumped up $65m in cash to acquire shuttle van start-up Chariot according to Business Insider. The novel service uses 15 seat fans to ferry passengers across 28 routes chosen by crowdsourcing in San Francisco, offering a handy alternative to overloaded public transport.
Reuters claims that struggling supermarket chain Morrisons is on the cusp of a ‘quiet revolution’ with Britain’s fourth largest grocer on track to return to profit growth, with analysts pencilling in an underlying pre-tax profit of £150m in the first half of the year – up from £141m in the year prior.
In other retail news Primark has said that it will absorb costs incurred by a fall in the value of the pound rather than pass them onto consumers in the form of price rises as it commits itself to ‘best value’ in clothing.
TopShop parent Arcadia is set to shake-up its ecommerce payment systems as part of efforts to increase its appeal to younger shoppers, introducing the new system across its suite of websites from this month.
Twitter is moving onto virgin territory by selling ads for live sports feed for the first time as it streams a series of NFL broadcasts, kicking off with a clash between the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills on Thursday.
The New York Times has got its hands on newly released documents which suggests that the sugar industry played an active role in shaping consumer health concerns in the 1960’s, by paying scientists to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the chief villain of the dinner plate instead.