Shrinking marketing budgets and the use of short-term metrics to measure success have resulted in a sharp drop in creativity, according to the latest IPA report 'Selling Creativity Short: Creativity and effectiveness under threat'.

Unilever, the owner of brands including Dove and Lynx, has pledged to drop all sexist stereotypes from its advertising after research suggested that just 2% of ads show intelligent women. The world's second-biggest advertiser, which spends EUR8bn (GBP6.3bn) a year on more than 400 brands from Sunsilk to Knorr, will unveil a global strategy to "unstereotype" its advertising.

Photo-sharing app Instagram now has a staggering 500 million users, with more than 300 million people using the photo-sharing app every day. New stats from the the Facebook-owned company reveal that Instagram's monthly user base has more than doubled in size over the past two years.

England's goalless draw with Slovakia was the most-watched game of Euro 2016 to date with almost 14 million viewers. The draw, which secured England's progress to the knockout stages of the tournament, had a match average of 12.8 million viewers on ITV and another 1 million viewers on ITV2, with a combined five-minute peak of 15.1 million.

Vine has revealed that it is testing rules that will allow the six-second looping videos to actually get much longer --- as long as 140 seconds. It made the announcement along with a range of other changes intended to change the platform. Twitter videos will also become much longer, with a maximum length of 140 seconds -- previously normal users could only upload 30-second videos.

Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP, said she alerted police after receiving a tweeted death threat against her children and grandchildren. The former Cabinet minister received the sinister message on Tuesday from an account that accused her of sending pro-EU "propaganda" by email, adding: "Please stop or I will kill your kids and grandkids".

An iPhone app set up to help rescue lost migrants at sea has been removed from Apple's App Store after it emerged that the version available to download was not actually capable of tracking refugees. The free "I Sea" app was developed by WPP's Grey and won an award at the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising festival and was supported by Malta's Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS).

Speaking at an event held at the YouTube Beach in Cannes, Aaron Luber, head of Google VR partnerships, said one of the biggest mistakes that brands, and other content producers, make is to overthink VR. "Lots of brands think they need to do [a video] in VR just to say they are doing it in VR. They need to think about why they are making a VR video in the first place," he said.

Facebook has withdrawn the ability for video creators to embed links into their clips. The call to action [CTA] feature had been popular with broadcasters, who used it as a way to steer users to their own sites. The change in policy was made earlier this month without warning. Experts say the decision is another illustration of the power that is Facebook.

The publisher of the Sun and Times is to invest millions in boosting the amount of video it runs across its newspaper Web sites. Rupert Murdoch's News UK, which made the announcement at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, said that the multimillion-pound investment will see thousands of videos a year created for the Sun and Times Web sites.