More than half (54%) of smartphone owners and 40% of tablet users are using their devices to listen to music. Among smartphone users, 39% listen to music once a day and 54% said they’re listening to music on their phone more now than a year ago, according to new data from NPD Group. Internet radio services such as Pandora are by the far the most popular way to access music, with 65% of smartphone users going that route, with 30% turning to on-demand offerings like Spotify or Rhapsody. Many (60%) also bring their own music to the device, …

Harold Dawson has joined Starcom MediaVest Group's Spark unit as executive vice president-managing director. He joins from Interpublic's Initiative unit, where he was senior vice president-group media director.

Interactive TV advertising campaign developer BrightLine has named Chris Woods Chief Revenue Officer. He was "internal sales leadership consultant" for Google.

The series version of the Stephen King sci-fi thriller will be available four days after its CBS airing.

Smartphone penetration across the world's top 19 digital markets will double by 2015 to nearly 72% according to a new study by Publicis Groupe's ZenithOptimedia. Adoption of tablets and internet-enabled TVs will expand more slowly in terms of overall penetration, according to the new report, titled New Media Forecasts. Penetration of tablets will climb to 13% in 2015 from nearly 5% in 2012. During the same period adoption of Internet enabled TV sets will climb to 9% from 6.6%.

Nearly one-third of viewers to the Super Bowl were so taken with commercials during the game that they watched at least one of the spots again online afterwards, according to a new survey from media shop Mindshare. The agency survey polled nearly 2,200 adults in the days following the game (Feb. 4-6) and 31% of those who watched the game indicated that they watched a Super Bowl commercial again online. The survey also found that viewers to the game engaged in a substantial amount of social media chatter about the commercials during and after the game. Nearly a quarter of …

Havas direct response unit Havas Edge has agreed to use Rentrak's TV Essentials and Station View Essentials ratings.

Zite on Thursday released an updated version of its personalized new reader app for iOS devices. Among the new features, Zite 2.1 allows users to see a history of articles and topics they’ve read and shared and made overall design changes to improve readability. The upgraded app also lets iPhone users swipe to change topics and iPad owners to swipe to close articles instead of having to click on an “X.” Zite also brought back sharing on LinkedIn and Google+ as well as expanding sharing capabilities via Evernote. The CNN-owned company said the improvements were based on user feedback …

South Korea-based consumer electronics giant LG confirmed today earlier reports that it is conducting a multimarket media agency review. "Without going into too much detail, we are currently in the process of reviewing our media processes across various markets," a company rep wrote in an email response to a query about the review. "This is a very internal review and is in no way a reflection of our current partner's performance. This is common practice at LG." As reported earlier, Mindshare is the incumbent on the LG media assignment, and it's understood that the WPP media shop is defending its …

With more advertising on Facebook shifting to mobile, social media marketing firm Nanigans said it has extended its measurement and ad optimization tools for Facebook campaigns from the desktop to mobile. When clients run app install ads on Facebook, they can now use Nanigans’ AdEngine platform to track in-app actions like purchases and items added to shopping carts to automate future ad buys targeting profitable customers. Until now, advertisers could only see the impact of their ad spend on app installs but not post-install activities. Nanigans said more than 20 developers are adopting its mobile ad solutions for Facebook …