Vicki Lins has been named executive vice president and CMO for Clear Channel Outdoor Americas. She most recently was senior vice president-CMO of now defunct cable industry initiative Canoe Ventures.

The vast majority of Facebook’s traffic has long come from outside the U.S. With that in mind, Facebook on Wednesday announced a new service to more easily localize brand pages for different countries. Through the new Global Pages offering, “Facebook users will now be directed to the best version of a Page based on the country those users reside in with localized features such as cover photos, Page apps, milestones, and news feed stories from Pages within the global brand community,” the company said. Each brand’s global page will include local pages for specific markets and a default page …

Facebook in August announced it was testing new ads in the mobile news feed aimed at driving app installs. Now Facebook is opening up availability of those ads to iOS and Android developers widely. In early results, the company said beta partners like Kabam, Fab, TinyCo and Big Fish were able to reach a more relevant audience and increase installs more efficiently. Game maker TinyCo, for instance, had a 50% higher click-through rate and much higher conversion rates compared to their current mobile channels, as well as a significant increase in player engagement, according to a Facebook blog …

Navigation services provider TeleNav on Tuesday announced acquiring mobile advertising firm Local Merchant Services, d.b.a. ThinkNear, for $22.5 million, including $18.5 million in cash. TeleNav said it would combine ThinkNear’s targeting technology with its existing Drive-To-Advertising platform to create a new solution called Scout Advertising. TeleNav says its Drive-to-Advertising system reaches 34 million customers and offers advertisers with the only platform that captures the "drive-to" rat--the number of users who viewed an ad and then clicked on it to drive to the advertiser's business location. The addition of the ThinkNear technology will help businesses better reach the right customers to …

Beleaguered social games maker Zynga has struggled to monetize the shift of its user base from the desktop to mobile devices. To that end, the company today announced what it calls its first reward-based mobile campaign promoting the 2013 Honda Accord. The effort allows people playing “Words With Friends” and “Scramble With Friends” to earn in-game currency and tips by playing Honda-related words including “new,” “tech,” and “you.” Honda’s "It Starts With You" campaign kicked off Oct. 6 on Zynga with the "Word of the Day" promotion in Words With Friends. The related “Scramble With Friends” advertising featuring sponsored words “Accord,” …

The common theme among the brand marketers on the opening panel of the DPAA's Digital Media Summit is that "elevators" are the place-based ad industry's killer app.

After years of positioning, promotion, and even Digital Media Summits, the Digital Place-Based Advertising Association hasn't convinced all marketers that it isn't out-of-home media, but it's more like TV.

Yeah, easier said than done, right, but that's exactly how Energizer Personal Care Assistant Brand Manager Ben Pagel said how he got his Playtex Feminine Care (you know sanitary napkins) brand into health and fitness clubs.

I pose that question, because David Verklin asks some tough ones worthy of a good journalist.

Omnicom Group reported a 1% revenue gain in the third quarter to $3.4 billion while net income was flat at nearly $204 million. For the first nine months of the year the agency holding company's revenue was up 2.5% to nearly $10.3 billion with net income of $691.2 million, up 1.5%. Organic revenue growth, a key performance indicator for Adland, which excludes the impact of currency fluctuations, acquisitions and dispositions, for the third quarter was 3.5% and for the first nine months was 4.5%. Omnicom executives said today they expect full year organic growth to be approximately 4%.