From all of us here at Cream we want to wish all our readers a very Happy Christmas! And what's Christmas without a bit of Wizard to bring in the holiday season in style!

We look forward to bringing you even bigger and better examples of media innovation from across the globe in 2015. We'll be out of action for the next week, but back with a bang on January 5th. 

All heroes start somewhere. – Guardians of the Galaxy

The vast majority of shopping is still done in stores – which is why location now makes mobile the most potent media for advertising for retailers.

Let’s face it: Black Friday 2014 brought the blues to retailers. Even after doling out deep discounts on merchandise, retailers struggled to entice shoppers to Black Friday sales events. Spending was down 11 percent from a year earlier according to the National Retail Federation. A tiny bit of relief came with Cyber Monday results – e-commerce sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving hit $2.04 billion, up 17 percent compared to a year ago, but e-commerce only accounts for a mere 9 percent of total retail sales. The vast majority of shopping is still done in stores – which is why location now makes mobile the most potent media for advertising for retailers.

A few retailers are leading the charge in this space with interesting results. Lorna Jane, a leading retailer in women's fitness apparel uses theMomentFeed mobile marketing platform to target custom audiences on Facebook with localized ads. The ad dynamically changes based on the location of the Facebook user, allowing for content that was relevant and personal. “The goal is to help larger retailers maintain that level of personalization in a way that scales across hundreds or even thousands of locations,” says Elle Morgan, MomentFeed’s Marketing Manager.

We couldn’t help but chuckle when we spotted the latest visuals from a new McDonald’s campaign – it’s just like looking in a mirror first thing in the morning!

McDonald’s France wants you to know that it’s also available in the morning, to establish its reputation at breakfast and to strengthen the bond between the brand and its consumers – and it has done so in a very humorous way.

The campaign, which includes a TVC and three visuals, hopes to position McDonald’s as an accomplice and ally of French people for whom waking up is difficult.

TBWA\Paris collaborated with Thomas Mailaender and Photographers to stage the various comical situations and we have to say, they certainly brought a smile to our faces… The slipper in the toaster certainly takes the biscuit for me! See below and let us know your favourite.

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…

We’ve all got our favourite brands – those built on trust, reliability, quality or whatever else it might be. Of course, if we were to put ourselves to the test to see how many brand logos we can instantly recognise, that would be easy. But if I was to ask where the brand name came from, I bet a lot of us would be stumped.

Well not anymore. Thanks to 7Brands, the infographic below takes a look at some of the most well-known brands from around the world and offers a little bit of insight into the name origins and meanings. Would you believe me if I told you Häagen-Dazs is completely made up? Read on to find out.

“It’s a great time to be doing political satire when the world is on a knife edge” – John Oliver.

Chances are, you’ve seen a clip of Last Week Tonight pop up in your Facebook news feed. HBO’s new weekly late-nighter, hosted by British comedian and Daily Show alum John Oliver already has an average audience of four million, equal to HBO’s other weekly talk show Real Time With Bill Maher and fast gaining ground on primetime darlingGirls.

The volume of easy inbound traffic and social referrals generated by Oliver’s YouTube clips has been a gold mine for click-starved Web publishers.

“Each week, the Content industry observes a sacred ritual: Together, but not quite in sync, dozens of websites embed and then post the longest segment from John Oliver’s HBO show, Last Week Tonight,” dryly wrote The Awl, in a post which included a handy chart detailing the top ten publishers who milk Last Week Tonight clips for social engagement. “That John Oliver’s weekly video(s) will go viral is, at this time, a given. Whether or not the posts that embed those videos will go viral is another matter altogether.”

… Well you have probably already guessed it, but yes Ellen DeGeneres’ infamous Oscar Selfie was the most Retweeted Tweet of 2014, taking the crown of the “Golden Tweet”, according to Twitter’s 2014 #YearonTwitter round-up.

But Ellen wasn’t the only one to take a selfie this year, it turns out that the term ‘selfie’ has been mentioned more than 92 million times on Twitter since January 1 (a 500% increase over 2013 – that’s a lot of faces!)

More than 500 million tweets are shared each day around the world, and Twitter is closing the year with a look back at some of the best global moments to take place on the social network in 2014.

In other news, it turns out that the World Cup also took a crown this year as the most tweeted about event ever with a whopping 672 million tweets about this year’s competition in Brazil. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the climax came during the final when 618,725 tweets were sent per minute – the largest peak measured this year – as Germany took home the championship.

Check out all the biggest Twitter trends and highlights of 2014 here at 2014.Twitter.com.

We’ve all heard the word ‘bots’ floating around in the digital advertising space but do we really know what they are and how it affects not just advertisers, but publishers too.

Advertisers invest serious time and money to create original, engaging and innovative ads. But not all of those ads reach their audiences. Unfortunately, as much as 36% of online traffic isn't driven by humans - it's driven by bots. So what are bots, and how does fraudulent traffic actually work?

Off the back of a new whitepaper looking at Traffic Fraud in Video Advertising, online video platform BrightRoll has produced an infographic, Attack of the Bots, showing how bot-driven traffic affects advertisers and publishers. Check it out below:

"We crashed and broke Twitter. We have made history." - Ellen Degeneres, March 2014

Millennials are called the “selfie-generation.” It might seem like a dis, but smart publishers know that it’s actually a good thing. It means millennials are self-aware, selective and smart. When we take a selfie, it becomes part of our personal brand online—the brand image that defines who we are, what we like and what we stand for. While members of previous generations would rather floss than see themselves in a video, we post selfies to Instagram and Vine constantly. We’re not afraid to put ourselves out there—and you shouldn’t be either. If you look a bit closer at the selfie generation, and take some cues from our quirkiness and self-deprecating wit, you might just let a few of us off the hook.