The 10 things in advertising you need to know today
1. An escort agency in Barcelona bought a billboard ad right next to Samsung's on the main road into Mobile World Congress. The agency had also been using the official MWC logos for marketing on its website without permission from the trade show's organizers.
2. Coca-Cola has redesigned all its packaging in Europe so its cans and bottles look the same. The only thing that now differentiates them is the color and a piece of text on the front explaining whether the drink contains calories or sugar.
3. Coke pulled an ad that suggested Nazi Germany was "the good old times." The ad was meant to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Fanta.
4. British smartphone brand Kazam talked to us about the awful couple of weeks it has just had. The company has had a TV ad banned for "objectifying women," which led to one of its brand ambassadors quitting.
5. Instagram is going to let brands advertise and link out of the app. It has introduced carousel ads that lets brands showcase more than one photo at a time, which users can choose to swipe through, and click on links.
6. We had a go on Vive, the new virtual reality headset created by HTC and gaming company Valve. It's mindblowing.
7. A group of female Twitter execs and alums have joined up to advise and invest in startups. The #Angels group includes two ex-Twitter employees who left specifically to invest in startups: April Underwood, who was the director of product until she just left, and Chloe Sladden, former VP of US media, who left in August 2014.
8. Craft marketplace Etsy just filed for an IPO. The decade-old, Brooklyn-based company generated $195.6 million in revenue in 2014, up 56.4% from $125.02 million in 2013.
9. There were smartly-dressed businessmen trying out virtual reality goggles everywhere you looked at Mobile World Congress. VR was the big theme of the show this year.
10. Some 46 million people in the US are listening to a podcast each month, according to Edison Research. And advertisers are spending big to reach them.