Hasta La Creative!

LONDON – Social network Facebook is rolling out extended privacy measures and an instant messaging service.

Russia, and former eastern bloc specialist the PBN Company has brought in Jeanette Hamster to join its global management committee.

LONDON – British newspapers need to revamp their online advertising models in line with Google and steer away from giving away free CDs to shore up their future, according to a new report by consultants Ernst & Young.

LONDON – Men’s monthly Arena has parted company with its editor Giles Hattersley, who is returning to the Sunday Times a year after joining the Bauer title.

LONDON – Media buying and market research group Aegis has reported 17.6% growth in its annual pre-tax profit to £133.5m for 2007 as it outperformed the industry with strong organic growth.

LONDON – Apple is talking to the big music companies about giving customers unlimited access to the entire iTunes library in exchange for paying a premium for its iPod and iPhone devices.

Some time ago, I came across and posted a quick note about Balihoo, a tool for media planners and buyers, then still in beta. The company now is back to AdLab with a series of guest posts by Balihoo’s Shane Vaughan explaining how to use the tool’s many features. The first installment follows.

What is Balihoo?

Balihoo is the only on-demand media buying and planning platform that provides intelligent software-PLUS-services to media professionals across all mediums.

So what does that mean?

Balihoo makes the lives of media professionals easier.

Media buyers use Balihoo because it streamlines the media research, selection, and request-for-proposal processes and then aggregates that information into one easy-to-use location that’s sharable across their organization.

Media sellers use Balihoo to communicate with buyers in one standard interface and increase sales through enhanced visibility of their media properties.

Balihoo is designed to take the frustration out of managing the exchange of data between media buyers and sellers and reduce administrative burdens: no more wading through an overwhelming choice of advertising opportunities, cutting and pasting from several documents into one, and time-consuming attempts to harness data.

Balihoo allows media professionals to:

• Build a consideration set by searching the world’s largest collection of cross-medium advertising opportunities
• Do more with less. Fully-customizable RFI / RFP modules provide a common interface for data gathering; responses auto-flow into online worksheets for analysis; Balihoo’s on-call data services team acts as an extension of your organization
• Centralize knowledge and securely store data for sharing across teams and offices for improved decision making and reduced turnover costs.

Balihoo’s comprehensive media database, robust efficiency tools, and data archiving capabilities increase return on invested time and effort; test-drive it now.

In the next post, we’ll discuss Balihoo’s solution in greater detail. Stay tuned.

[The above is a post by AdLab’s advertiser.]

LONDON – The Publicis agencies Starcom MediaVest and ZenithOptimedia are to launch a group trading unit, with the intention of having it in place for this autumn’s trading season.

LONDON – COI agencies will be forced to implement green policies from this autumn when COI plans to adopt a policy of “sustainable procurement”.

LONDON – The Dubai Department of Tourism has appointed Initiative to handle its UK media planning and buying account.