BBC
In a bid to put a stop to false feedback, people can now write only five reviews a week of items not bought via the online store. The change applies to most products and is part of efforts to clamp down on people selling positive comments. The change is Amazon's latest step in its battle to ensure users trust its listings.
Campaign
Havas is bringing together its creative and media divisions with a group chairman role for each of its four major regions. In the UK, Chris Hirst, the European and UK group chief executive, will take on the additional role of chairman for Havas Group UK.
Campaign
Programmatic advertising will grow 31% next year -- faster than any other digital channel, according to Zenith's Programmatic Marketing Forecasts. The report predicts that programmatic will grow ahead of both social media, at 25%, and online video, at 20%. Programmatic this year will account for the majority of digital display expenditure (51%) for the first time.
The Drum
Streaming service Spotify has become the first big brand to mark the passing of 2016, a full five weeks before the calendar changes, by launching "Thanks 2016, It's been Weird" across 14 territories -- its biggest global campaign to date. The data-driven outdoor campaign will seek to draw a line under the year that gave us Brexit, Trump and a string of celebrity deaths.
The Telegraph
Samsung has pushed back the UK release of its mobile payment service until next year -- a blow to the Korean group's hopes of challenging Apple and Google's rival offerings. The company, which first launched its Samsung Pay service in the U.S. and South Korea last year, had promised to bring it to Britain in 2016. A spokesman confirmed that the service would now launch in 2017.
Sky News
Black Friday failed to deliver a double-digit surge in online sales growth, while high street shopping visits unexpectedly rose, according to industry figures. Online purchases climbed by 6.7% compared to last year -- but this fell well short of a forecast for 25% and was a big slowdown compared with a rise of 31% in 2015. Footfall was up by 2%, with high street growth at 2.8%.
The Times
Black Friday appears to have been the shopping bonanza that wasn't, with online sales growth falling significantly short of what experts had predicted. Purchasing online was up by a mere 6.7% against the same day the previous year, compared with forecasts of a 25% leap and an even more explosive rise of 31% in 2015, according to figures from PCA Predict.
Press Gazette
The UK is likely to slip further down the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index when it is published next year, according to the charity's UK bureau director, Rebecca Vincent. She was speaking to Press Gazette ahead of the launch of the organisation's first UK office in London next month.
Campaign
Drinks giant Diageo has signalled its belief in the importance of programmatic by hiring its first executive to head up the format, Nestle digital marketer Gawain Owen. Owen has been with Nestle for four years, and has been in a programmatic-specific role since January. Before this he was a direct-response media manager, and then UK digital lead.
The Drum
Is Uber a digital service or a transport company? This is the question European judges will answer later this week as Uber looks to prove it is a digital company and thus exempt from strict laws that govern regular transport businesses. Uber will argue to a European Union Court of Justice that it is a digital service that connects drivers with passengers rather than a transportation firm.