Football fever is sweeping the globe and Powerade’s 2014 FIFA World Cup campaign, ‘There’s Power in Every Game’, is the latest effort to catch our eye.

Fronted by Spanish professional footballer Andrés Iniesta (who you may remember scored Spain’s winning goal in the 2010 FIFA World Cup), the campaign focuses on stories of five amateur athletes from around the world on their journeys to overcome adversity and power through.

Sampling is an effective marketing channel to really give consumers the chance to “try before you buy”. It’s proven not only to lead to improved sales but, perhaps more crucially, drive loyal customers.

Generic, mass-market sampling remains the bedrock channel for many brands, particularly those looking to raise brand awareness, more so for those early in their brand life cycle. But sitting alongside generic sampling is the equally effective targeted sampling, which is increasingly becoming a big pull for more established brands, in light of the higher quality customer data they can now get their hands on.

“Keep your scanners peeled”- Michael Knight, Knight Rider

Every time ReadWrite publishes a story, I get a jolt. Literally. And I don't mind, because that good vibration may point us toward the news industry's wearable future.

Even when I'm away at a conference or traveling on business, I want to stay on top of ReadWrite's newsroom. So when I joined the publication a year ago, I signed up to get a text message when we tweeted a story. Soon afterwards, I turned off my phone's vibrate feature: There were just too many notifications for me to get shaken up every time one came in.

Yet when I started testing a Pebble smartwatch recently, I started getting those vibrations again. The Pebble's best feature is how it carries notifications automatically from your phone to a screen on your wrist. I found I didn't mind the gentle shake it gave me for every tweeted headline.

Even though the Easter celebrations are only just getting started, we’ve already stuffed ourselves silly with chocolate over here at the Cream HQ! But the thought of spending hours next week at the gym hasn’t put a dampener on our Easter Spirits.

Here is our pick of the top Easter campaigns from over the years!

Here today...Goo tomorrow!

Who knew that making a short animaton about the fate of a Cadbury's Creme Egg could be so brilliant?

View the the full campaign here!

“The era of the store as media is upon us” - Doug Stephens, Retail Prophet

With his eloquent delivery and passion for his products, Steve Jobs could sell ice to an Eskimo, or so the saying goes. But Jobs, if you asked him, never sold a thing. Former Apple VP Allison Johnson divulged that Jobs hated the word marketing. He didn't want to be a marketer or a salesman. He wanted to effectively communicate what's so great about Apple's products and what made the experience using them so enjoyable. In other words, he wanted to be a storyteller (and boy, was he ever).

What he was describing-selling vs. storytelling-has become the greatest showdown in retail history, leading to the downfall of decades-old brands like Staples, Radio Shack and JC Penney. Following the lead of Amazon and Zappos, younger, smaller, more agile brands likeWarby Parker, Thrillist and Birchbox took to the Web with innovative business models. They pushed established retailers to the fringes of relevancy by pairing content with commerce-providing customers with brand journalism, personality, customization, personalization, information, convenience and free shipping, all just a click away.

People have been taking photos of themselves for years. Yet, suddenly – like the explosion of a little cultural word grenade – the word ‘Selfie’ has entered the mainstream. I bet you have used the word in conversation in the past week. And I also bet you had never mentioned the word in your life before that. Like me, you might have found this quite odd. You may have wondered about how easily our sponge-like brains can be manipulated, with not even a book or a classroom to impart the information. Just where did this all come from?

This is an example of a “meme”, coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to describe a unit of a transferable idea, in the same way as a “gene” is a unit of heredity. If I remember correctly, the first example Dawkins used to illustrate his new term was the wearing of baseball caps backwards, which just goes to show that just because a meme is successful it doesn’t mean to say it is necessarily tasteful or for the general betterment of humanity.

Starcom MediaVest Group was awarded Agency Network of the Year last night at the Festival of Media Global Awards in the Rome Cavalieri Hotel, with the most winning campaigns across different countries out of any agency.

Starcom’s winning entries hailed from Poland, the Philippines, United Kingdom, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, and Sweden.

The Festival Chairman, Charlie Crowe, kicked off the event with the introduction of Dr. Markus Nordberg, Head of Resources Development at CERN, who talked about the importance of understanding big data and in obtaining value through finding connections and meaning in them: VISION + COMMITMENT + TOLERANCE has been the algorithm for success in CERN's science community.