Advertising

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.

Piccadilly Circus' famous wall of light-up adverts will be switched off by site owner Land Securities in January so they can be replaced by a single high-resolution LED screen that will be the biggest in Europe.

The handy LinkNYC booths that were first installed in New York City this January are crossing the Atlantic and coming to London. Under the guise LinkUK, the booths will provide the public with ultrafast Wi-Fi, charging for mobile devices, free calls and local information.

Given that transport trucks travel across continents, the advertising on them can't be for regional businesses … right? Well, it soon could. RoadAds has developed e-ink displays that are mounted on the back of trailers, and that automatically change content depending on their location.

Plenty of DJs have a cheesy taste in music, but none have ever taken it so far as to play their records on a pizza box. They can now though, courtesy of Pizza Hut's newly-created playable pizza box turntables, which connect to DJ software on a laptop or mobile device to put pizza fans in the mix.