Advertising

Back in May, a startup emerged from stealth offering the prospect of a free 55-inch 4K television to avid gogglebox watchers. The catch? A second screen underneath feeding frequent adverts. Now Telly has started shipping the "free TV" to US households.

This clever robotic EV charger will find a parking spot, reserve it for you, then sit behind you to charge your EV. It's a nifty idea, but we do wonder how Ziggy will cope with the brutally competitive environment of a mall car park on Christmas Eve.

When viewing sports coverage from other countries, it's common to see advertising boards promoting products you've never heard of, but a new TV system is capable of digitally replacing that advertising content with region-specific products.

Facebook and Twitter have recently laid out differing policies regarding political advertising. One platform has decided free speech is of utmost importance while the other has simply banned political ads altogether.

A longstanding conspiracy is the tale of how Facebook is listening in on your conversations, but the way it is actually serving you ads is much more unsettling.

To raise awareness of the plight of bees – and, no doubt, to nab some positive PR buzz and shift a few more Big Macs – McDonald's in Sweden has created what it calls "the world's smallest McDonald's." But there's a twist, would you bee-lieve it – it's not a McDonald's. It's a beehive.

Using a script written by IBM's Watson supercomputer, trained with a long list of award-winning luxury brand commercials and human emotional response data, Lexus has shot a TV ad digitally designed to make you feel things. Does it work? Well, kind of.

In a world bombarded by screens constantly blasting ads and visual noise, a team of artists and designers wondered if glasses could be created that can black out all those invasive messages. After a year of research and prototyping the IRL Glasses are now launching on Kickstarter.

Whether an architectural masterpiece or a toilet, Zaha Hadid's design language is recognizable in all her work. We're reminded of this again by a new billboard conceived by the late Hadid and longtime collaborator Patrik Schumacher that was recently installed on a busy road in London.

The famous lights of Piccadilly Circus came back to life today after a nine month renovation. The new lights replace the previous advertising displays with an LED screen covering 790 m².

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have pioneered a technique where everyday objects, such as advertising posters or articles of clothing, can be embedded with transmitters that piggyback ambient FM signals to send data to nearby smartphones and radios using almost no power.

​It's likely no surprise that a smile can go a long way in sales pitches. But apparently, the size of that smile has a lot to do with successfully closing the deal. At least that's the findings reached by researchers out of the University of Kansas.