Avios, the travel rewards scheme, has hired Tribal Worldwide to handle customer experience activity after a competitive pitch. It is a new brief and no intermediary was involved. Last year, 101 created a campaign for the brand encouraging people to spend points on their friends. Earlier in 2015, Avios named Holler (since rebranded as Leo Burnett London) as its first social media agency. The shop beat TMW Unlimited and Amplify in a pitch.

Mail Online boosted its ad revenues by 27% in the final three months of last year, as it announced that the paper is to increase its cover price for the first time in three years. Mail Online, which missed its GBP80m annual revenue target last year, had a growth rate of 16% in the year to the end of September. Mail Online's 27% boost in the final quarter is a promising sign, particularly when considering that at one point last year its growth rate fell to single digits as the entire digital newspaper ad market faltered.

It is a sign of the high expectations for Apple that it was seen as disappointing that total revenues are up by just 1.8% compared to growth of almost 30% in the same quarter a year ago. There is also a sense that Apple is failing to persuade consumers to buy. Neil Saunders, CEO of Conlumino, says: " While there is no doubting Apple's technical and design prowess, some consumers simply overlooked its new iPhone, seeing too few benefits over and above their existing models to convince them to upgrade."

Media agencies drove overall advertising industry growth of 1.9% in 2015 while staff numbers at creative agencies fell last year, according to the IPA's 2015 Agency Census. The total number of those employed in the industry was 23,662 in 2015, up from 23,231 in 2014. One driver has been media agency growth, up 6.4%, compared with a 0.7% decline in creative and other non-media agencies. There has been an increase in women in senior positions.

Apple has successfully resolved a major outage of its popular Safari browser, used by iPhone, iPad and Mac owners to navigate the web, after the software unexpectedly crashed for many users globally. The problem arose when users opened a new tab and attempted to type in a new search term in the address bar, a simple task that caused the built-in browser to crash and revert back to the home screen.

The privatisation of Channel 4 appeared to be a step closer yesterday when the broadcaster appointed a chairman with a track record of company flotations and disposals. Charles Gurassa, the deputy chairman of easyJet, sold Thomson Travel to TUI when he was chief executive of the travel group. He also led the float of Virgin Mobile, which Sir Richard Branson later sold to NTL, now Virgin Media. He moved to chair Lovefilm, the DVD hire business, which was eventually was sold to Amazon.

Apple is working to make subscription content available through its News app, giving publishers with paywalls a new way to control who sees their articles, two sources familiar with the matter said. The move would differentiate Apple News from Facebook's Instant Articles news offering, which does not offer subscriber-only content, and would probably give Apple a boost as it seeks to distinguish itself from a growing crowd of online news apps.

Change4Life's Sugar Smart app has topped 1m downloads, and remained in the top ten most downloaded apps in the UK across Android and iOS. Released this month as part of Change4Life's wider Sugar Smart campaign, the app took the number one spot on both the App Store and Google Play during its first week, according to data from App Annie. According to public health minister Jane Ellison, the app saw 800,000 downloads in its first 10 days.

Nike has tapped into the twin trends of fitness selfies and YouTube celebs for a new content marketing venture -- an original YouTube series designed to appeal to young female consumers. Called Margot vs Lily, the eight-episode series will air on Nike Women's YouTube channel weekly from the beginning of February, with Nike+ members given early access to the shows. According to the trailer, the series will follow Lily, a (fictional) fitness-obsessed YouTube celebrity, and her "exercise allergic" sister, Margot.

Despite numerous warnings, marketers are continuing to waste billions of dollars on digital advertising that never gets seen. According to research commissioned by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), advertisers will lose $7.2bn to bot fraud this year. That is up from $6.3bn in 2015. More valuable ad inventory -- video ads and display targeted at specific demographic groups -- are more susceptible to bots. Programmatic is a particular problem; the ANA found that it attracts 73% more bots than direct buys.