Buddy Media Monday announced acquiring London-based Brighter Options to enhance its suite of social media marketing tools. The startup’s social ad management software allows marketers and agencies to create and track targeted Facebook advertising campaigns. The acquisition in particular is meant to bolster Buddy Media’s offerings in the area of paid advertising in social media. “We realized about six months ago that we needed a paid ad solution tightly integrated with our software suite to increase and accelerate the value of the earned and owned media distribution our customers love,” said Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow, in a blog …

ABC's “84th Annual Academy Awards” made some gains versus a year ago. The big Oscar award show grew 4% to 39.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen preliminary results. The show had the second largest audience in five years. When it comes key demographics, ABC hit the exact same 18-49 demo numbers as it did a year ago -- a 11.7 rating. It did pick up two-tenths of a rating point among women 18-49 to a 14.1 number. ABC said digitally the event witnessed rapid growth. The site, oscar.com, had 10.2 million unique visitors since the nominations were announced -- a …

Gearing up for the 2012 election season, The Washington Post Monday launched a new politics-focused iPad app featuring video, photos, graphics and animation. Dubbed “WP Politics,” the new app will offer content from Chris Cillizza’s political blog The Fix, Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog and items from The Fact Checker. But the emphasis will be on visual information including polling data and results, a heat map showing where most ads are running from which candidates and motion graphics showing how candidates’ views have changed over time. The new title is a follow up to The Washington Post’s main iPad app, which …

Facebook has joined with more than 30 phone manufacturers, wireless operators and developers to form a consortium to develop a standard for the mobile Web and mobile apps. The goal of the W3C Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group (acronym anyone?) is to accelerate the improvement and standardization of mobile browsers, according to Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, who announced the new group at the Mobile World Congress Monday. In particular, the effort is meant to speed up the push behind HTML5 by establishing a single set of standards for the programming language. Facebook is pushing wider adoption of HTML5 …

Adobe on Monday highlighted user data from 600 publishers worldwide that use the company Digital Publishing Suite to create some 1,500 tablet-based newspaper and magazine applications. Among the highlights: -68% of digital magazines and newspapers readers worldwide pay for access, with 15% single-issue purchases, 26% subscriptions, and bundled print and digital issues, 27%. -Every fifth page view in Digital Publishing Suite magazine app is an advertisement. Readers engage with nearly half (48%) of all interactive features within ads including videos, slide shows, audio clips and hyperlinks. Web views and videos are the most frequently used.  - More than half …

LinkedIn today launched a “Follow” button that member companies can add to their Web sites so people can keep up with brands through their company LinkedIn pages. By clicking on the button, someone will automatically begin to follow a company as long as they’re logged onto LinkedIn. Otherwise a box appears asking for their account login. Company status updates will then appear on a user’s LinkedIn home page. The online professional network said research shows 70% of members follow or would companies on LinkedIn. Half would do so “indefinitely.” And about half of current followers say they’re more likely …

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has named Karen Schuchardt senior vice president of digital media sales. She joins from Viacom, where she was vice president convergent ad sales, and previously she was an account executive at Google and Yahoo.

This year marks an extraordinary milestone birthday for us. Hearst has now informed, inspired and entertained people for 125 years!

Isis, the mobile payments joint venture of Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, on Monday announced Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard will place their credit, debit and pre-paid cards in the Isis wallet when it’s introduced in mid-2012. Together, the banks represent more than 100 million U.S. cardholders. Adding the three big banking partners is a key step for Isis as it gears up to compete with Google Wallet, its chief rival in the near field communication (NFC)-based payments space. Both efforts aim to replace physical wallets with the swipe or tap of a phone at checkout. Google Wallet launched in …

American Express’s Small Business Saturday campaign, created by Digitas and CP+B, won top honors in Facebook inaugural Studio Awards recognizing the best brand campaigns on the social network. In its second year, the effort helped more than 500,000 businesses used Amex promotional tools, and the Small Business Saturday site on Facebook doubled to over 2.7 million fans. Among other winners were the Juicy Fruit/Wrigley’s “Serenading Unicorn” campaign, by EVB; a blood donation campaign on behalf of Dovera Health Insurance by Zaraguza Digital in Slovakia; Intel’s “Progress Through Processors” effort by Noise; and a campaign for Nike Run Brazil by Sao …