What you need to know in advertising today
Once a place to professionally network, LinkedIn has evolved into a vehicle for marketing execs to weigh in on the hottest industry topics du jour in blog posts, self-promote and even dish out advice on entrepreneurship in their status updates.
To read how LinkedIn became the advertising industry's favorite personal branding tool, click here.
In other news:
Spotify grew its revenue to $3.5 billion last year, and will pay music labels billions over the next 2 years. The music streaming service's operating loss widened in 2016 but revenue rose significantly, the company said in its annual financial statement, ahead of a possible stock market listing before the end of next year.
A top Apple executive is denying an unflattering story from an upcoming book. Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said on Tuesday that parts of a recent story in The Verge about the invention of the iPhone were "not true."
W Hotels is launching a Frogger-inspired retro video game. The hotel chain is the latest brand to tap into gaming for its marketing efforts, following Gatorade, Pepsi and others.
The hugely popular teen app Musical.ly has a hit show on its hands. The three-year-old music app, where millions of young fans make videos of themselves lip syncing to hit songs, says that its has close to 400,000 fans watching a live show on its recently launched sister app, Live.ly.
Instagram has launched a tool that enables influencers to more clearly indicate when they have been paid to promote a product, Wired reports. The tool will help bring some consistency to the platform, where influencers have thus far used hashtags to indicate brand sponsorships.