British Olympic gold medallist Victoria Pendleton is among 11 female athletes who will act as brand ambassadors for Pantene in the lead-up to this year’s Olympic Games.

Cycling star Pendleton will promote the hair care range this year as the brand seeks to use national icons from various countries in its marketing activity to capture the international excitement surrounding London 2012.

The other athletes include Brazilian volleyball player Jaqueline Carvalho, US swimmer Natalie Coughlia, Argentinian tennis player Gisela Dulko and Mexican diver ...

Twentieth Century Fox has quite literally launched its marketing activity for its new film Chronicle with a viral campaign based on a publicity stunt that saw three people flying over New York.

Eschewing the usual Hollywood publicity drives, the film’s maker devised the creative PR exercise as a way of generating word-of-mouth publicity.

The project involved human-shaped radio controlled planes taking to the skies above New York and New Jersey over the last few weeks.

Clips of the ‘people’ soaring above famous landmarks ...

Scope is calling on disabled people to submit their “visions of the future” to create a new user-generated brand identity that will inform its work over the coming years.

Some 60 pictures sent with these stories will be crafted into a new logo that will appear in all 238 shops and on every piece of communications it sends out to supporters, campaigners and service-users.

Handing over its visual identity in this way means that every time someone comes into contact with Scope ...

Smarties is hoping to make the most of the brand’s “iconic” heritage as it celebrates its 75th anniversary this year by releasing a limited-edition run of retro-style tubes to mark its birthday.

The tubes swap the now-familiar blue background and bubble writing in favour of the original brown design and simple white logo, though the chocolate brand is keeping the hexagon-shaped tube it introduced seven years ago, when it also switched the plastic lid in favour of cardboard fliptop.

Smarties first emerged in ...

Edinburgh Zoo has commissioned a brand new tartan to mark the arrival of two giant pandas at the attraction.

Approved by the Scottish Register of Tartans, the pattern was designed by local firm Kinloch Anderson to welcome Tian Tian and Yang Guang, two pandas who arrived on a specially chartered flight from China in December.

Deirdre Kinloch Anderson, senior director at the tartan firm, is hopeful that the design will “fly the flag for Scotland”.

“Careful attention was given to create a tartan ...

Sakata is launching its first UK ad campaign with a competition on Facebook to choose the pronunciation of its name.

The PepsiCo rice cracker brand is pinning all of its hopes on creating a social media following, particularly among health-conscious women, as the campaign involves no other marketing activity.

Sakata was introduced in the UK last year and the campaign is a response to the different ways people have been pronouncing its name since.

To enter the competition, fans need to “Like” the ...

Coca -Cola is using its digital marketing channels creatively to celebrate this year’s Super Bowl with a pair of American football-mad polar bears who will watch the game live on February 5th.

Viewers can watch the match with the polar bears by visiting a dedicated micro-site, where a live stream will showcase the bears’ reactions to all the on-field action, the halftime show and “highly-anticipated commercials”.

The bears, who will support a different team each, will also take over the official @CocaCola ...

Bayern Munich has been left embarrassed after a social media publicity stunt designed to drive deeper engagement with fans backfired.

The German club announced via its website that it would unveil a “spectacular” new signing on Facebook yesterday (January 26th).

Fans simply had to “Like” the club’s Facebook page to watch a live press conference where the player would be revealed.

Excited supporters tuned in to see Bayern general manager Christian Nerlinger show a piece of paper displaying the profile picture of the ...

O2 has responded swiftly to concerns that customers’ mobile phone numbers were leaked to websites they visited by making full use of its digital and social channels, particularly Twitter, as part of its reputation management strategy.

It emerged this week that a technical problem had meant customers accessing the internet from their phones were unknowingly displaying their phone number to any website they visited.

This sparked an outcry from worried customers, which O2 followed up with a quick statement explaining the situation ...

Small British businesses will be able to receive up to €100 (£83.85) in free Facebook advertising, the social networking site has revealed.

Facebook’s Ad Boost programme will see 50,000 companies in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain given £4.2 million worth of advertising space on the site.

The ad credit giveaway is part of major new campaign to promote the benefits of having a strong company presence on the social media site.

It comes as a new report from Deloitte reveals Facebook ...