Achieve Lending has launched AchieveLending.com to help students find the best student loans. The online portal allows users to quickly search, find, and compare interest rates between lenders -- often in as little as thirty seconds, per the company. It aggregates loan offers for those seeking private financing for educational purposes. The site also added affiliate and referral programs.

Dan Shewan details three economic principles that he thinks will transform marketing campaigns. He believes that understanding the principles of economics and how people respond to them is crucial for marketers to stay competitive. Remember that people face tradeoffs, rational people think at the margin, and people respond to incentives. Shewan takes us through all three principles, providing examples.

East Bay Ray, guitarist and co-founder of the band Dead Kennedys, wrote an opinion piece in TheHill.com asking how Google's unsavory advertising practices, lack of transparency, and apparent efforts to silence critics have been overlooked by the U.S. government. Despite its knowledge that the bulk of Google's revenue comes from advertising, Ray believes a growing number of those who inquire require details about money generated from ads pushing illegal products on the company's properties, and believes Google's responses on this matter are too opaque.

Video ad viewability and fraud continues to taunt marketers looking to add video content to marketing strategies. It revolves around the pressure to make sure ads are served and seen. Good news for marketers: the percentage continues to rise, per studies. Digital video ads that were in-view during Q4 2014 for desktop and mobile in the United States reached 39%, up 9% sequentially, per eMarketer, citing stats from Integral Ad Science. eMarketer estimates U.S. digital video ad spending will rise by 30.4% this year, up from 56.0% in 2014. 

Alex Schultz, with a masters in physics at University of Cambridge, tells us why retention in marketing is the most important strategy for growth. Schultz has an interesting take on the topic, especially since he has no formal training in marketing, but a lot of experience with startups. Keyword research, links and technical details are the three most important elements to know when optimizing content and sites. He tells us why and how it's done.

Hundreds of employees at Apple are working to design an Apple-branded minivan-like electric vehicle under the code name Project Titan, per The Wall Street Journal. The media site reports that Apple executives have flown to Austria to meet with contract manufacturers for high-end cars including the Magna Steyr unit of Canadian auto supplier Magna International.

Google will shutter Helpouts on April 2015. The service uses video chat to connect consumers with experts online. It was designed to allow users to book and participate in video chat sessions from their mobile device. While the community had some loyal contributors, the service didn't grow as Google expected, Google said.

A fourth-quarter agency survey from media-buying agency Strata found that 53% of agencies report thinking their businesses will grow in 2015 compared to a year ago. Forty-five percent said they plan to hire more staff. About 35% said their clients plan to increase budgets from last year, representing a 50% increase from just two years ago. The study found that TV leads digital, at 44%, as the medium from which most clients will focus, compared -- with 27%, respectively, followed by digital video in third place. Some 41% said that media mix was the biggest …

Small changes in how something is presented can change a consumer's mind. Many factors, most unrelated, can influence choice. Yet while most marketers recognize this complex reality, they often work from a linear and simplified view of the consumer decision journey, per Jon Cummings, Ravi Dhar, and Ned Welch. The three lay out a road map filled with insights that can create new opportunities for influencing consumers. While packaging is one option, communicating information about the product remains another. It may start with the association between packaging and product, and move through a paid-search ad to a landing page. Read on.

It makes perfect sense that photos saved on floppy disks once inserted into a hard drive would one day become non-readable as the technology becomes obsolete. I guess not to all. Vinton Cerf felt it necessary to warn computer users that their most treasured photographs could become lost in history if not printed or reformatted to more recent versions of the software. Cert, Google's chief internet evangelist, warned attendees while speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose.