Read it and wipe… That’s literally what Neutrogena Brazil advised readers of Caras Magazine to do when they received a free sample of its Deep Clean wipes with their magazine recently.

To give consumers a deeper connection with the product, this was so much more than just a free sample as readers were able to remove the make-up from actress Giovanna Ewbank’s face on the front cover of the magazine by wiping it using the accompanying freebie.

Agency DM9DDB was behind the interactive front cover - an innovative and hands-on approach to print advertising where readers could actually see the product in action and experience it for themselves.

We’ve already looked at the cutting edge of augmented reality, projection mapping, dronevertising, and contactless technology, but there’s one current marketing tool that seems to be even more on the fringes of science fiction than all of these; virtual reality (VR).

Morpheus in the first of the Matrix movies said, “What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can hear, what you can smell, taste and feel, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” We’re already in an age when brands are able to fool our senses using the latest VR devices.

From 2016 onwards, virtual reality is going to become widely available to consumers with the commercial launches of Facebook’s Oculus Rift, HTC’s Vive and, the fittingly named, Project Morpheus from Sony.

In the meantime, brands are already starting to use VR in campaigns and here are our five favourite examples;

Hyundai – 4D World rally Championships

Hyundai gave visitors to the World Rally Championship in June 2015 a sensational 4D multi-sensory driving experience. Wearing Oculus Rift glasses, people could see just what it was like to be a co-driver on the track during a race. A motion platform simulated centrifugal forces of up to 0.5g, while specially developed software merged motion and audio data from the 360° race footage.

OMD, Starcom Mediavest, MediaCom and Mindshare have attained the highest number of shortlisted entries in this year’s Festival of Media LatAm (FOMLA) Awards, with Coca-Cola, SAB Miller and Visa among the brands achieving the highest numbers of nominations.

The FOMLA Awards 2015 shortlist spans work from 15 countries across the region, including Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Guatemala, with a total of 110 entries having made the list.

OMD has been shortlisted 17 times, the highest number of nominations, followed by Starcom Mediavest, with 11, and MediaCom and Mindshare joint-third with eight apiece. Arena Media achieved seven nominations.

A total of 54 brands made 2015’s shortlist, up from 48 on 2014. Coca-Cola won nine places, while SAB Miller achieved six nominations and Visa five.

This year's awards sees the introduction of a number of new categories, including Best Use of Video, Best Use of Mobile, Best Use of Programmatic Technology, Best Use of Native Advertising, Smart Use of Data Award and Consumer Research Award.

In terms of standout campaigns, four have made the shortlist across four separate categories - Visa’s ‘So Far Yet So Close’, Zapaterias Coban’s ‘Shiny Lessons’, SAB Miller’s ‘Entre Panas (Among Fellas)’, and Coca-Cola’s ‘Make Someone Happy’.

Check out the full shortlist here and below.

There’s no doubt that Instagram has fast become the shiny new kid on the advertising block and eMarketer’s latest forecast predicts that the image-centric social media platform is projected to rake in $595m in worldwide mobile ad revenues this year, before soaring to a whopping $2.81bn by 2017.

That’s pretty impressive growth considering Instagram only introduced its ad offering a year and a half ago. And with a raft of advertising products already launched and new features set to roll out over the next few months, it’s an exciting proposition for brands; particularly when you consider it has 300 million monthly active users and accounts for a large chunk of the 1.8 billion photos uploaded every day across social media.

A large part of Instagram’s success comes down to keeping advertisers on side by taking considerable steps to ensure that inappropriate image or video content doesn’t slip through the cracks. Last year, the Facebook-owned company inked separate deals with media holding companies Omnicom and Publicis Groupe for innovative partnerships to help build the infrastructure and tools to control the advertising process on the site.

Other visual sites should take a leaf out of Instagram’s book and step up their game by ensuring they have the necessary tools in place by giving brands visual protection against appearing alongside or in amongst ‘dodgy’ content – which could be something sexually suggestive, inappropriate or even violent as well as allow brands to ‘visually target’ ads alongside visual content.

Mobile advertising can operate through SMS advertising, apps, mobile websites or even mobile search. Through all of these methods, brands are gaining brand awareness, customer loyalty and, ultimately, conversions.

According to the GWI Device Summary, 31% of all web pages are now being served to mobile, a whole 39% increase from last year. These numbers are growing at a staggering rate with predictions that mobile will not only catch up with desktops but overtake them in the near future. But how does this affect businesses’ ad spend around the world?

Five countries, Russia, China, USA, Brazil and UK, were examined with ad-spending statistics provided by eMarketer to demonstrate the growth of mobile advertising and how different countries approach this in regards of advertising.