The media watchdog Ofcom will today reject an attempt by Virgin Media to block the Premier League's multibillion-pound auction of live broadcasting rights, it is understood. The regulator is expected to spurn an application by the cable operator to use its emergency powers to block the sale, in which BT and Sky are battling for footballing supremacy. Sources said that the regulator will announce on Wednesday that it found no grounds to intervene.

The agency won a competitive pitch process believed to have involved incumbent MediaCom North, Goodstuff and John Ayling and Associates. The creative ad business is handled by Kamarama and has spent much of its marketing budgets advertising and sponsoring ITV shows in 2014, including "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here" and "The Paul O'Grady Show." Its last campaign starring popstar turned reality TV celebrity, Peter Andre, was among the most-recalled ads in November 2014, according to research from TNS and Ebiquity.

Twitter yesterday announced in a company blog post announced that the platform's first partners will be Flipboard and Yahoo Japan. The news comes after it was suggested that Twitter would use third-party sites for ads earlier in the year. "Promoted Tweets," or ordinary tweets purchased by advertisers, can now be seen by users within Twitter content sections on a publisher's platform. It is not yet clear which brands will use the service. Twitter used Nissan to highlight how Promoted Tweets would work on third-party sites.

A set of guidelines has been published to inform brands how to make the most of social media when looking beyond counting the "clicks." The #IPASocialWorks project is an industrywide initiative that looks to provide clear measuring guidelines for marketers of social media impact. The Institute of Practitioners (IPA), The Marketing Society and the Market Research Society (MRS) collaborated to produce key guidelines for marketers, designed to improve the measurement of return on investment.

Google has released details showing the measures it took last year to combat counterfeiters, which led to it banning 214,000 advertisers and disabling more than 524 million bad ads. It banned a total 7,000 advertisers for promoting counterfeit goods -- down from 14,000 in 2013, and 82,000 in 2012 -- a reduction that Google attributes to its advancement in policing this kind of illegal activity. Weight-loss scams were also rife last year, according to Google.

Social media selfie campaigns such as #nomakeupselfie and #IceBucketChallenge have had the effect of boosting charities' appeal to young people. According to a study by researchers Mintel, 16- to 24-year-olds donated an average of GBP40 in the three months to July 2014. In comparison, over the same period those aged 35 to 54 had the lowest average (GBP33), while donors over 55 were the most generous, giving an average of GBP52. The support that charities have built on social media provides the perfect environment for selfie-esque campaigns to flourish.

Laura Schwab, marketing director at Land Rover UK, which is currently using augmented reality within its showrooms to showcase a 3D preview of its new Discovery Sport car, says augmented reality will be "crucial" to all future car launches. The iconic 4x4 car brand launched the AR campaign back in December in collaboration with digital marketing firm LIDA. It provided showroom customers with headsets to create the illusion of a life-sized digital preview within dealerships that did not yet have a model on display.

A British entrepreneur is making the kind of machine learning used by Amazon to suggest products "you might like to buy" available to business of all sizes, creating an "app store for algorithms." Alex Housley, 31, is the founder of Seldon, an open-source platform that generates user recommendations for any kind of company or industry. The company's platform will allow anyone to see how the technology works and users will be able to create their own recommendation engines to boost basket sizes and reduce customer churn.

Facebook, Nasdaq, and the International Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced today that they will partner with the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to host a full-day conference dedicated to mobile marketing and advertising. This is the first time the conference will approach this topic having previously focused solely on technology. The invitation-only event will explore "the finest work in mobile advertising and examine new trends and technologies that are destined to influence the mobile landscape in years to come."

Budweiser has retained its Super Bowl ad supremacy for the third year running after "Lost Puppy" mustered 2,168,530 shares across Facebook, Twitter and blogs in the hours after the game, according to Unruly Media. The beer brand's ad surpassed its previous two top Super Bowl entries including 2014's "Puppy Love," which managed 1.31 million shares and 2013's "Brotherhood," which snagged 1.5 million shares. Lost Puppy is set to usurp Budweiser's 2002 Super Bowl "9/11 Commercial" (shared 3.48 million times) as the most shared Budweiser ad of all time.