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BuzzCity reports that worldwide there has been an increased focus on mobile advertising, with 44 countries delivering monthly traffic exceeding 10 million impressions per month, 12 more countries than were reported during the 1^st Quarter.

The company claims to have delivered a massive 12,8-billion ad impressions in the second quarter of 2010 across 200 countries, so their data presents a fair indication of the world-wide mobile advertising picture.

Increased advertiser interest was noted from large players such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN, as well as sporting brands like Puma and Adidas who took advantage of the 2010 Fifa World Cup to promote their brands to consumers on the move.

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The net 13-per-cent increase in projected hiring activity is up seven percentage points from the previous quarter’s projection.

The Canadian study was based on more than 250 telephone interviews — 200 with marketing executives randomly selected from companies with 100 or more employees and 50 with advertising executives randomly selected from agencies with 20 or more employees.

Marketing and advertising executives were asked, “Does your company or agency plan to increase or decrease the number of full-time marketing/advertising personnel on your staff during the third quarter of 2010?” Their responses:

Increase: 15 per cent. Decrease: Two per cent. No change: 79 per cent. No answer: four per cent.

The comment is left hanging in the air, asking to be grasped as a metaphor for Sorrell himself, who comes with a formidable reputation but in the space of the previous hour, squeezed between meetings, is charm itself.

He laughs at being called a “beancounter” and an outsider in the advertising world; he bemoans being stereotyped as a north London Jew; he makes repeated, slightly awkward jokes about his short stature and later sends an email apologising again for turning up late. It is easy to be drawn in. But for all the easy manner and self-deprecation, Sorrell has proven time and again that, unlike Savage, he has considerable bite.

It is 25 years since Sorrell took a loan out against his shares in Saatchi & Saatchi, where he had been finance director, and bought a small company called Wire and Plastic Products, which made wire baskets, and which he would build into the largest advertising and marketing services group in the world.

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DLKW, the agency that created the adverts featuring Howard the singing Halifax manager, is expected to be sold to Lowe Worldwide, part of Interpublic Group of the US, subject to the approval of Creston shareholders. Creston bought DLKW in 2005 , for about £38m in cash and shares.

The deal helped Creston double in size, boosted its profile, and allowed it to offer a wider range of marketing services to clients.

DLKW has had a number of successful campaigns but became vulnerable after Don Elgie, Creston’s chief executive, said he was keen to focus on new growth areas, particularly digital, while reducing the group’s exposure to traditional advertising.

The growing popularity of social media, coupled with the increasing use of mobile phones, has altered the landscape for marketing, forcing many advertising agencies to rethink their models.

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The saga culminated in that ‘mutiny’ at the weekend, when the squad refused to train in protest that team member Nicholas Anelka was sent home for remarks he is said to have made to the nation coach, Raymond Domenech.

The bank couldn’t have had much faith in the progress of the team in the tournament anyway, as the campaign was due to run off on June 25th - just after completion of the Group stage of the competition.

In the meantime, The Wall Street Journal reports that Fitch has downgraded BNP Paribas’s long-term issuer debt rating one notch to AA-, citing concerns over the firm’s ‘business mix’ and asset quality. Fitch pointed to ‘a relatively high contribution from corporate and investment babnking’, saying that ‘the bank no longer fits comfortably alongside a peer group of more highly rated banks’.

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Costa Coffee has come out victorious in a ‘coffee wars’ battle that has been decided by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

Starbucks took exception to an advertising campaign by Costa which boasted that seven in ten people preferred its coffee.

The claim was based on a blind taste test and put Costa’s capuccino up against the equivalent drink sold by Starbucks and Caffe Nero.

A poster by Costa carried the headline  ‘7 out of 10 coffee lovers prefer Costa,’  while a press advertisement appeared under the headline: ‘Starbucks drinkers prefer Costa’.

The deliberately aggressive advertisement infuriated executives at the US-owned Starbucks, who complained to the ASA that the research used to back it up was full of holes.

They said the advertisements were misleading because they gave the impression that Costa was better for all coffee drinks compared to Starbucks.

And they argued that the smallprint spelling out the details of the comparison on capuccino was too small.

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As the forthcoming iPhone 4 racks up records numbers in pre-orders, Apple has released new developer terms for iPhone and iPad app developers, banning the use of cross platform compiling tools – effectively stopping apps running on multiple platforms – and blocking the AdMob mobile advertising platform.

The move has attracted the suspicions of the FTC, not least because Apple is due to launch its own iAds mobile advertising platform on July 1, but also because the US watchdog recently greenlighted Google’s acquisition of AdMob.

Telecoms.com spoke to an iPhone app developer this week who suggested that Apple’s real motivation for banning AdMob as an advertising platform was because all that data about how the iPhone was being used and by who was going straight to Google, which of course, is pushing a rival mobile platform in the shape of Android.

The developer asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal from Apple. “I’ve heard of iPhone app developers having their App Store licence revoked because they spoke out against Apple,” he said.

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M&C Saatchi, which posted pre-tax losses of 27% in 2009, scrapped bonuses last year – each executive director had received £35,000 in 2008.

However despite the advertising slump nearly all directors received a bump in basic salary of between £38,000 and £43,000 in 2009.

The top-paid director at the agency, which worked on the Conservatives’ election campaign, was co-founder Maurice Saatchi, who was paid a total remuneration package of £390,000. Saatchi’s basic salary rose from £288,000 to £331,000.

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Hacks at the WSJ discovered that Facebook, MySpace and several other social notworking websites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers’ names and other personal details.

This is despite promises that they don’t share such information without consent.

Basically the sites have been sending user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads.

After reporters asked about the practice Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes and apparently Facebook has rewritten some of the offending computer code.

The advertising companies had been receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person’s real name, age, hometown and occupation.

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