ZenithOptimedia has retained the GBP15m UK media planning and buying business for Molson Coors, which owns Carling, Coors Light and Cobra beer brands. The Publicis Groupe agency defended the account it has held since 2009 against WPP's Mindshare and IPG Mediabrands' Initiative. Ebiquity handled the pitch. The reappointment follows a six-month global review of the business. As part of the process, WPP's Kinetic has retained Molson Coors' out-of-home business, an account it has serviced since 1968.

DigitasLBi has relaunched its social agency MRY as Lost Boys in the UK as it looks to reinforce its commitment to smaller clients looking for brave, provocative creative work and test new grounds. The Publicis-owned agency launched MRY last year and has since won clients including Ugg and Honda, but will now operate under the Lost Boys brand -- the name of the Netherlands-based agency originally incorporated to form LBi, which was later bought by Publicis and merged with Digitas.

While the opportunity associated with the new product may seem appealing to advertisers, the emphasis on creative suitability presents itself as a blessing and a curse. Even if brands are willing to invest the time and effort, even with Instagram's creative input and guidance there is no guarantee a brand's ad unit will resonate with the target audience who have, to date, been vocal about their thoughts on the new ad product. Instagram itself experienced a fair amount of stick when announcing the new ad units.

Simon Cowell's 'The X Factor" is the most tweeted-about series on UK TV, according to new research by Twitter. The ITV talent show generated 9.4m tweets in the 12 months to the end of May this year, nearly twice as many as the second-place show, Channel 5's "Celebrity Big Brother," and 13 times its Saturday night rival on BBC1, "Strictly Come Dancing." An "elite" top 30 shows accounted for 50% of all TV-related Twitter activity. TV accounted for around 40% of all UK Twitter traffic during evening peak time viewing hours.

Starbucks has begun talking to agencies about its CRM account. The coffee chain began contacting below-the-line shops earlier this month. Kitcatt Nohr has held the business since 2011, when it won a competitive pitch against Havas EHS (which was called EHS 4D at the time). It was Starbucks' first dedicated UK CRM agency and works with the company on its loyalty card and reward scheme. BBDO has been Starbucks' global creative agency of record since 2008, when it won a pitch and replaced Wieden+Kennedy.

Microsoft's group program manager for Cortana, Marcus Ash, told Marketing that the voice assistant would eventually collate information about users' personal interests and share them with external apps -- with user permission. Cortana already allows developers to "deep link" to apps, meaning that users can open apps and display specific content through voice commands. Ash sees this moving one step further, with voice assistants actively pointing to relevant apps -- something brands could take advantage of.

Drinks maker AG Barr has credited its Commonwealth Games sponsorship marketing activity for helping to boost revenue and profit in the first half of the year. Revenue rose 5.4 percent year-on-year to GBP135.7m in the six months to 27 July, driven by a 6.2 percent increase in the volumes of drinks sold, with the Strathmore water brand -- supplied to athletes at the Games -- contributing "significantly" to this performance. AG Barr added the Irn-Bru brand received "unrivalled media coverage" during the event.

In what the MIT Technology Review called "the first systematic investigation into the nature of like farms and how they operate," researchers found that the likes paid for by companies to boost their Facebook followings are likely to be fake, even the ones that are real aren't worth much, and there's no indication that any of them are human. The findings suggest that Facebook might not be an ideal medium for effective advertising, and could have implications for the social network's targeted adverts and promotion sales.

More than a fifth of Britons (21 percent) think the British brand has been damaged by the referendum on independence and the subsequent debate on devolving more power to Scotland and the English regions, according to a survey of Britons conducted by ICM for Marketing Week. The feeling that the allure of Britain as a USP has been tarnished is unsurprisingly more pronounced in England (22 percent) than it is in Scotland, where 16 percent agree 'Brand Britain' has been damaged.

Sony's PlayStation TV set-top box, which allows users to stream games and tv shows to a tv set without a games console, will go on sale in the UK on November 14th for GBP85. It will sit by a user's TV set and use their WiFi Internet connection to stream content. Three digital games will be available free at launch -- 'Worms Revolution Extreme', 'Velocity Ultra' and 'OlliOlli'. TV and movie content is planned for the future. it will also stream games played on a PlayStation 4 to another screen in the house.