P&O Ferries has appointed Starcom to its European media planning and buying account, while handing its creative brief to MRM Meteorite following competitive pitches. Starcom beat off competition from UM London, Maxus and the incumbent Havas Media to earn the GBP5m account. MRM Meteorite won against Lida and Kittcat Nohr, following an agency review announced in April.

Commonwealth Games sponsor Ford has told "Marketing" the games were a useful brand positioning exercise to reaffirm the marque's commitment to UK. Using the hashtag #playyourpart, Ford activated its sponsorship throughout Glasgow and Scotland with a combination of outdoor, experiential, digital and social media marketing which featured twenty home nations' athletes, including Scottish swimming gold medalist Hannah Miley and English gymnast Kristian Thomas.

Outdoor has returned to growth in the second quarter of 2014, driven by transport and digital spend, figures from the Outdoor Media Centre reveal. Digital saw a 30 percent year-on-year rise in spend -- up to GBP68.3m, accounting for a quarter (26 percent) of the outdoor market. According to Nielsen, categories that spent significantly more in the quarter on outdoor than last year include Media, Government, Property, Retail, and Travel and Transport.

BT's gamble on launching sport channels appears to be paying off after the company said that it won more broadband customers than archrival Sky for the fourth straight quarter. BT added 104,000 new customers in the first quarter compared with 50,000 for Sky and 10,000 for TalkTalk. It said its customer growth has now outstripped that of Sky in the four quarters since it launched BT Sport. That has reversed a trend that had seen Sky outstrip its rival's growth rate for seven straight quarters prior to the launch.

Mondelez International has scrapped the CMO role and folded global marketing oversight into the responsibilities of a new chief growth officer. The company also announced that it will switch to the region category-led operating model from next year. The global setup will mirror that a structure adopted by its biscuit division which sees marketing strategy for its biscuit brands set globally and adapted locally.

The government is likely to miss its target of superfast broadband access in 95 percent of the UK by 2017, research from thinkbroadband.com has warned. The research was carried out by the broadband news and information organisation following concerns about the government's rollout, and results suggest the government will miss its target and broadband speeds will vary significantly between regions.

DLKW Lowe has won a competitive pitch to win the brief to handle the Government's selloff of bank shares. The agency beat FCB Inferno and Kindred to land UK Financial Investments, which manages the Government's shareholdings in Lloyds Banking Group and the Royal Bank of Scotland Group. The Crown Commercial Service handled the process, which was only open to government roster agencies. UKFI is prepared to spend between GBP3m and GBP4m on media.

Rival fizzy drinks marketers should work together to educate consumers on low and no-sugar options or risk sales falling flat as consumers become increasingly health-conscious, according to analysts at Mintel. Ad spend among carbonated soft drinks brands surged to a four-year high of GBP36.4m in 2013, driven by seven of the top 10 brands upping their outlay by more than 25 percent year-on-year. However, the increase in spend has not been enough to arrest a decline in the consumption of fizzy drinks.