Boston-based Hill Holliday may be known for helping consumer marketers craft great brands, but they just announced some news related to the questionable name its own latest branding initiative, "Project Beacon." That's right, the same name that most people on Madison Avenue would associate with one of the industry's biggest digital marketing blunders, Facebook's ill-fated Project Beacon, which was shut down following howls of protests from users and consumer advocacy groups, because of its ability to target ads to Facebook users and their friends based on their personal information.

Twitter said Tuesday it will expand its mobile advertising options in connection with the latest updates to its iPhone and Android apps. With the upgrades, “promoted accounts” and “promoted tweets” will be added to the timeline on its mobile applications for both platforms. Until now, promoted trends and promoted tweets were available only through a search page when someone accessed Twitter on iPhone or Android or the mobile Web (m.twitter.com). Promoted accounts and promoted tweets have been available on the mobile Web for several months. “Initially, a small number of users may see Promoted Tweets near the top of their …

The American Association of Advertising Agencies has tapped Peter Kosmala to serve as senior vice president, government relations.

Demand-side platform Turn has released updated features for its service including brand safety controls, contextual targeting and video ad optimization. The first enhancement lets advertisers avoid placing ads next to content that doesn’t align with a brand’s goals. The contextual upgrade lets advertisers create custom rules for buying inventory next to specific kinds of Web page content. A travel advertiser might only want to place ads on Web pages about warm weather, for instance. Providing the contextual data are AdSafe Media, Crystal Semantics and Peer39. The video optimization feature allows marketers to adjust the price paid for in-stream or …

Digital agency 360i Tuesday announced a strategic partnership with social software maker Expion to provide clients with the tools to launch Facebook campaigns spanning earned and paid media. In connection with the alliance, 360i parent company Dentsu Network West is taking a minority stake in Expion. By teaming with Expion, whose clients include H&R Block, Applebee’s, and Barnes & Noble, 360i says it can offer brands a more holistic platform allowing brands to align advertising with content development on Facebook to encourage deeper interaction. Besides giving brands the ability to publish and share content on Facebook and other social …

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 …