February 14^th has come around yet again and we’re feeling the love today at Cream HQ. Love is truly international and here’s a selection of some of our favourite Valentines-themed case studies from around the world to get your heart a-fluttering:

1. AsiaRooms.com – Romance of Travel (Singapore)

AsiaRooms.com launches the first-ever in-train activation in Singapore to spread the love around Valentine’s Day. The main event was two live marriage proposals and guess what? They both said yes!

Asia Pacific offers a dynamic mix of both highly-developed TV markets and those with enormous potential. In fact, four of the top 10 biggest pay-TV markets come from the region.

Take a look at this snapshot of the pay-TV market from 2012 through to 2018, brought to you by the Festival of Media Asia Pacific.

Click on the image below for full-screen view. 

Every year, design experts from across Fjord come together to debate the key technology trends that will affect businesses and society over the next twelve months. The result is a list of 10 trends that we believe will reshape how businesses run and how we as consumers live our lives. Five of our Trends are summarised here:

“With great power comes great responsibility” – Spider-Man

The Internet doesn’t care about your marketing. Online pioneer John Gilmore once said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Replace the word censorship with “your precious sales message,” and you’ve got the same outcome. And yet, people still have problems and desires. They also have these amazingly powerful search and social media tools to find the answers to questions, the solutions to problems, and the perfect satisfaction of just about any desire.

That’s the thing – online, those tools put them in charge, not you. So, smart online marketing is about giving people what they want in a way that leads to sales, because they’ll easily route around you if you don’t.

And so the Super Bowl is over for another year but which brands came out on top? We’ve taken a peek at Unruly’s Viral Video Chart* to see which Super Bowl commercials won the 2014 ad blitz. Bottoms up to the drinks brands, who have certainly dominated the rankings - the top 5 alone is made up of Budweiser x2, Red Bull, Coca-Cola and Bud Light. Check them all out here:

1. Budweiser Super Bowl XLVIII Commercial -- "Puppy Love"

Agency: Anomaly
Total views: 45,337,061
Total shares: 1,700,552

“And they called it Puppy Love”… Filmed to the soundtrack ‘Let Her Go’ by Passenger (already a winner for me!), the story follows the friendship between a puppy at an adoption farm and the horses next door. When the puppy gets taken away, the horses set out to get their friend back. The ad ends with #bestbuds. If they say good advertising tugs at the heart strings of consumers, then Budweiser has definitely hit the nail on the head with this one:

Native advertising is a hot topic and with BuzzFeed launching in Australia as part of a global expansion drive, we thought it only fitting that this week’s #FestivalFlashback is dedicated to Jon Steinberg, president and COO of BuzzFeed. Speaking at The Festival of Media Global last year in Montreux, check out what he had to say about native advertising and his views on how it is set to change the future of the industry.

“For nearly 10 years, Facebook has been on a mission to connect the world” – Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder, Facebook.

Today is Facebook’s 10^th Birthday – can you believe it? – and what better way to celebrate than to take a look back at some of its highlights from the last decade. Dpfoc Canada has produced this really cool infographic. We’ve picked out some of our fav bits below.

As VW pointed out in its teaser ad, there seems to be a tried and tested formula for Super Bowl spots, which usually includes celebrities and/or animals, slapstick humour and very high production values.

For the 48^th edition of ‘the biggest show on Earth’ a lot of advertisers stuck to some variation of this creatively, which is understandable since a 30” spot on Fox can cost up to $4m. However, this year many more brands were thinking beyond airtime to tap into the cultural phenomenon that is the Super Bowl.