Not all advertising suits everyone’s tastes. Of course, the fact that the Advertising Standards Association (ASA) received a whopping 31,136 complaints in 2013 about 18,580 ads, says enough.

Among the top 10 most complained about ads of last year, according to ASA’s 2013 report, were three Unilever products (go Unilever, you daredevil you!). Here’s that top 10 in its all its glory…  

1. VIP Electronic Cigarette – “She Wants You”
Total complaints: 937
Was it banned? Upheld in part

“ALL ABOARD!”

We’ve got some fun experiential activity to share with you today - First Great Western is taking a model train set on tour to showcase the great destinations and attractions on offer across the South West of England.

Want to check out the dramatic scenery of the Clifton Suspension Bridge or whizz past the National Assembly for Wales’ Senedd building? You can do it with this interactive train model, brought to you by experiential agency Blackjack Promotions. People are invited to drive the train through undulating landscape and have their time recorded on a score board.

Dear Brands,

The glaring problem with most of your branded content on social media is that it's too...branded. It's stiff. It's dry. It's boring. It's annoying.

We need to talk.

Don't make the classic mistake of transposing the worst tropes and trappings of traditional advertising onto social media content. Traditional advertising (TV, print, out-of-home, etc) still works for brand awareness, but it's a passive medium. Social media allows direct interactions and real-time conversations with the people who matter most to your brand and clients. Understanding the inherent strengths and contextual uses of each native platform is the first step to creating content that moves users and provides useful information or entertainment. The art of branded content on social media is the deft ability to achieve business goals while not pissing off your audience.

It was like something out of the dreams of Kiwi boys everywhere, but for 10-year-old Auckland boy Bailey Paki, waking up to find a group of All Blacks players at his breakfast table became a reality, thanks to a tie up between Weet-Bix and New Zealand rugby.

The hidden camera clip shows rugby-mad Bailey waking up to find the group of athletes at his table, before being taken into the backyard (which has secretly been transformed into a rugby pitch overnight by his grandfather and the local community) to play a surprise match against the All Blacks.

More articles for less money and media metrics that skip engagement get us away from what was central to the value of content marketing in the first place? There is a better way.

“I love the artistic challenge of doing something kind of impossible.”- Phillippe Petit, high-wire artist.

The last couple of years have ushered in an explosion of content marketing and “native” advertising activity. These concepts are not even a little bit new, but what is new is that as an industry, we’ve been feverishly working on standardization, scale, and efficiency in the name of truly making content marketing a meaningful part of the digital advertising revenue pie.

Uh-oh… It seems that illustrations of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl that was shot by the Taliban, recovered and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, did not go down well in mattress brand Kurl-On’s latest poster campaign, created by Ogilvy & Mather.

The campaign, from Ogilvy’s Indian office, depicts cartoon drawings of Yousafzai being shot in the head, before falling onto a mattress, bouncing up again and receiving an award. Eek!

Luckily Ogilvy & Mather took to social media to apologise for the “incident”:

“The recent Kurl-On ads from our India office are contrary to the beliefs and professional standards of Ogilvy & Mather and our clients. We deeply regret this incident and want to personally apologies to Malala Yousafzai and her family. We are investigating how our standards were compromised in this case and will take whatever corrective action is necessary. In addition, we have launched a thorough review of our approval and oversight processes across our global network to help ensure that our standards are never compromised again.”

What do you get if you cross a baby with a superhero? Evian’s latest Amazing Baby & Me 2 campaign, of course. The latest global campaign brings the newly-created Amazing Baby character to life on social media, encouraging fans to find their inner super-babies.

Harnessing the power of superheroes, Evian is set to help people solve their social media woes on Twitter. The first stage of the campaign sees Spiderman meet his own inner-child, the Amazing Baby. Working with social media agency We Are Social and building on the idea that there’s a super-baby within everyone, Evian is then encouraging its community to take a fresh look at everyday problems through this Twitter activation - all aimed at encouraging followers to let their inner super-babies out to play...

Check out the film here:

Evian’s Laurence Foucher said: “To build on the success of The Amazing Baby and Me 2, we wanted to encourage people to engage with, rather than just watch, the film. Using social media platforms, we’re able to bring The Amazing Baby & Me 2 to life and leverage fans’ excitement in the weeks following the premiere of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 film release.”

"Technology is mind-blowingly inspiring to me" -J.J. Abrams, Director and Screenwriter

In 2007, legendary director and screenwriter J.J. Abrams (creator of LOST and director of the 2009 Star Trek movie, among many other incredibly addictive storylines) gave a TED Talk in which he explored how advances in technology have suddenly let filmmakers do incredible things with storytelling. A man getting sucked into the engine of a jet? Now possible! An extensive recreation of Star Wars' Tatooine? Also possible! The things we can now do on TV and in movies is limited only by our imagination - and we're at the same point with digital publishing today.

Incredible creativity in digital media is being unlocked by technology. We have the opportunity to publish in real-time, on any device, instantaneously across platforms. We may even incorporate brand messages sometimes. Today you can publish a 140 character message on Twitter and hit 10 million people in one shot. Of course, we still take a lot of inspiration from printed magazines but it's dramatically easier to invent new features, to give editors a brand new authoring environment.

At Say Media, our little black box of tricks comes in the shape of Tempest. The ability to create beautiful, scalable online media experiences has always been limited by existing cobbled-together systems. But that all changes with Tempest. Tempest is built from the ground up to support the specific needs of the modern digital magazine. We partner with leading digital magazines to give them a best-in-class publishing platform and professional services, allowing them to focus on their content, their readers, and their business instead of their technology.

And it lets us create beautiful new experiences like Adaptive Ads, the first technology to seamlessly incorporate quality content and brand messaging on any device.

For the editors it makes their lives a whole lot easier because we give them tools to create rich interactive stories. For readers it's cleaner and less cluttered - the content is front and center and the interface gets out of the way. And for brands, their messaging has the opportunity to be integrated into this environment in novel and beautiful ways.

Tempest is hosted by Say Media, which means it's reliable and scalable - and reduces publishers' hosting and development costs to zero. Even better, Tempest is updated daily, so it's constantly getting better across all the digital magazines that are using it.

The crux of this is about creating an enhanced user experience which is suited to the time we live in. Forget page views, brands want engagement and we want to create media for humans. Just look at some of these examples - xoVain, ReadWrite, Lifetimemoms. Instantly you can see high levels of integration, seamless design dramatically changing the way media is created and consumed.

The media companies of the future are based upon the foundation of technology and having your own technology in place means you can innovate faster and keep making things better. While good strong editorial with a point of view should be the standard in any publishing house, it's great technology that's bringing digital media experiences a little closer to magic.

Paps Shaikh is European GM of Say Media. Follow him on Twitter @papscallion.

*This was first posted on Say Daily.