Jeff Zucker, former chief executive of NBCUniversal, could be nearing a deal to head CNN, according to a number of reports. CNN has had its ratings troubles over the last few years -- but rebounded somewhat during the Presidential election. Outgoing CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton cited the cable news network needed "new thinking" when he announced his departure in July of this year. Zucker has a strong resume of senior executive TV news positions, early on …

Amid the deluge of data on early holiday sales, Facebook on Tuesday chimed in with its own retail-related figures on the social network. The company said referral traffic to retail sites from Facebook on Cyber Monday increased 240% compared to the average for the last several Mondays. Seeing especially big spikes in referral traffic were businesses including Harry & David’s, up 11,425%, 1-800-Flowers (5,477%) Finish Line, (1,213%) and Coldwater Creek (1,084%). Among U.S. retailers, Walmart, Toys “R” Us, Macy’s, Amazon and Converse were the five most talked about brands on Black Friday, according to Facebook’s People Talking About This metric. …

Steve Wadsworth, former president of the Disney Interactive Media Group, has been named president-CEO mobile ad firm Tapjoy. Wadsworth, who had been a member of Tapjoy's board, replaces Mihir Shah, who resigned.

BlueKai in September extended its Data Activation System to the mobile realm, allowing marketers to tap into first- and third-party mobile data for ad retargeting. On Tuesday, the company and Jumptap announced a partnership under which the mobile ad network will add BlueKai as a third-party data provider to target advertising across segments including purchase intent, past purchases, geographic and demographic data, interests and lifestyle. “Through this partnership, we’re expanding our tool box significantly to enable advertisers to go beyond network-specific data to promote better ad relevancy and ROI,” said Adam Soroca, chief product officer and GM, at …

Cyber Monday sales jumped 30.3% from a year ago, making it the biggest online spending day to date, according to new data from IBM. Mobile continued to play a growing role in holiday shopping, with 18% visiting a retail site via mobile, up 70% from a year ago. Mobile as a percentage of online sales on Cyber Monday nearly doubled to 13%. Mobile sales and traffic, however, were both down more than 20% from Black Friday as people went back to work and did more shopping from their desktop PCs. As with Black Friday, the iPad generated more traffic than …

With no Olympics, U.S. Election or other major event, the ad industry will take a hit next year, according to Warc's latest International Ad Forecast.

Facebook Gifts has a big new retail partner: Apple. The social network has added the ability for people to send iTunes digital gifts through its own gifting service in the latest integration effort between the two tech giants. Through the partnership, Facebook users can recommend albums, movies, games, apps and iTunes credits in denominations of $10, $15, $25, or $50. Facebook already sends users from its App Center to the iTunes App Store to download iOS titles, and Apple has tightly integrated Facebook into iOS 6. The latest step to incorporate iTunes into Facebook Gift should help to further …

More figures highlighting mobile shopping growth: Page views on the iPhone and iPad increased 35% during the Thanksgiving weekend compared to a year ago, according to Compuware’s E-commerce and Retail Real User Index. For Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, page views on the Apple devices jumped 250%. The increase is driven in large part by the proliferation of iPhones and iPads in the last year, with overall smartphone penetration surpassing 50% in the U.S., and tablets at 15% to 20%.  The Compuware findings also underscore the popularity of the iPad in particular as a shopping tool. Earlier …

Walmart was by far the retailer generating the most mobile searches on Black Friday, according to findings released Monday by GPS app developer and mobile ad platform Telenav. It had three times as many searches as the next closest retailer—Best Buy—based on a representative sample of million of Telenav’s users. Despite not opening until Friday, Best Buy still had double the number of searches of all the other top 10 retail brands combined except for Walmart and Target. Rounding out the top five were Sears and Kmart. See the full list here.

AOL earlier this month reported higher than expected revenue and earnings for the third quarter on its highest advertising growth in seven years. The latest home page ad-tracking report from Macquarie Securities suggests AOL’s ad improvement from the latter half of the third quarter is carrying over into the current quarter. The study found sales of oversized/custom units on the AOL home page in the first half of Q4 were up 47% from the year-earlier period, and 19% from the first half of the third quarter. The home page also featured a much higher share of purely brand-focused ad units, …