Crotch shots.

Before last month, that's one of the things Gawker Media's Deadspin was best known for, thanks in part to its 2010 story about then-New York Jets quarterback Brett Favre and his alleged electronic flirtations with a team employee.

But on Jan. 16, the sports site planted a new, phallus-free flag in media land when reporters Jack Dickey and Timothy Burke published an exclusive story revealing that Notre Dame star football player Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend -- a central figure in the athlete's he-shall-overcome personal narrative that many other sports writers had latched onto -- had never existed.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

It's only fitting that a company co-founded by Thomas Edison is an early adopter when it comes to the most-important challenge for marketers today: figuring out social media. But although GE has jumped into new channels and platforms, like Instagram, Pinterest, Vine and BuzzFeed, don't think it's not giving deep thought to measurement.

"You can't work for GE and not think about ROI," said Linda Boff, exec director-global digital marketing and the boss of GE's ad efforts in all media.

These experiments, from the fun Pinterest boards allowing Edison to do his best Ryan Gosling impression (just check it out) to an Instagram feed full of what Ms. Boff calls "industrial bling," are typically low-cost -- but they result in a big emotional connection with GE's audience.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

iPhone users found themselves in a peculiar position last September. The release of iOS 6 -- the latest iteration of Apple's iPhone operating system -- meant Apple was replacing Google Maps with a map app of its own. Apple Maps was a total disaster, and Android users gleefully mocked Apple fanboys who were suddenly unable to navigate the physical world with their expensive iPhones.

When Google released its Maps app for iOS 6 two months later, it almost instantly ascended to the top of Apple's App Store ranking for free apps. In less than 48 hours, it was downloaded 10 million times.

This would be a notable feat even if Google owned iOS software, but it doesn't -- Apple does. Rather, the popularity of Google's suite of free mobile apps on the iPhone illustrates that Google's app-building prowess extends beyond its own platform (Android). Google makes the most utilitarian, easy-to-use apps on any OS.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

When the lights went out at the Super Bowl, Oreo grabbed the spotlight with seven simple words: "You can still dunk in the dark."

That was the tweet the cookie brand sent out almost as soon as power was lost at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, thanks to a fleet-footed team that operated from a social-media war room cohabited by digital agency 360i.

The tweet, designed and approved within minutes, proved to be one of the most-electrifying marketing moments of the game, garnering more attention for the brand than its pricey TV ad. Within the first hour, the message was retweeted 15,811 times and drew 19,610 Facebook likes, while Oreo got boatloads of positive free media coverage that lasted for days.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Apple announced the release of the iPhone 5 the week of Sept. 12, 2012. But two weeks later, it was Samsung leading the smartphone conversation. The company's "The Next Big Thing Is Already Here" commercial for its Galaxy S III -- a spot released in June that mocked iPhone loyalists -- had suddenly become the most-viral spot on the internet. Samsung had turned Apple's product announcement against itself and, in turn, resurrected its own ad campaign.

The resurgent video would go on to become 2012's fourth-most-viral campaign, notching more than 71 million views over just six months. Samsung itself was named the most-viral brand of the year.

Curiously, the campaign had more to do with why customers shouldn't buy iPhones than it did with touting the S III's unique features. The commercial mocks those who have waited outside Apple Stores for hours to buy every iteration of the expensive iPhone for the most incremental of improvements.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

"Area Writers Choose Life of Poop-Smeared Bum Rather Than Move to Chicago"

So maybe it's not up to snuff as an Onion headline, but you can't blame a guy for trying, after a rash of reports last year heralded the apocalypse at the satirical news brand.

A chunk of The Onion's New York-based writing staff, as well as Editor Joe Randazzo and social-media star Baratunde Thurston, weren't relocating to the Windy City, where the company was uniting its 100-person staff, raising an unpleasant question: Could The Onion hold on to its unique place in culture while operating outside New York?

Continue reading at AdAge.com

It has been used to reconstruct a centuries-dead king's face, is a player in the gun-control debate and can be used to make your kids' favorite toy -- or your own likeness in chocolate.

Three-D printing has been heralded as the "next industrial revolution," capable of changing the way we do things in just about every industry, from manufacturing to medicine to space travel. But what makes this year an inflection point for the technology is a combination of affordable printers hitting the market, consumer-adoption readiness and a maturation of the ecosystem needed to support 3-D printing.

Take New York-based MakerBot, which recently introduced the Replicator 2 printer. The company thinks the product will move the technology from being something people play with to something they actually use to create things. "What you're seeing is the hype cycle meeting the consumer-adoption cycle," said Jenny Lawton, chief strategy officer at MakerBot Industries.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Venture-capital firms are measured in funds raised and exits. But if they were measured in how well they bridge the divide between the startup world and the world's biggest marketers, First Round Capital would win, hands down.

Silicon Valley tends to view advertising as a spigot that can be turned on, and that leads to too much money funding solutions to problems that no marketers have. But First Round Capital has a different approach: It thinks about the business from the start. And that means making connections to marketers and agencies.

It started in 2008, when FRC chartered a bus and took about a dozen entrepreneurs on a tour of big agencies, including McCann, Digitas and OMD. Among the passengers were a just-out-of-college Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, who demo'd an early version of Invite Media, which would be acquired two years later by Google.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

You may need a weatherman to know which way the marketing winds blow. As the Weather Co., Weather.com hasn't just evolved from cable TV mainstay, it's looking to reshape the way marketers use geographic data by enhancing it with surprisingly insightful weather forecasting. For example, the firm is building its Weather Extender retargeting network to provide more reach for Weather.com advertisers that could bring their messages to sites like Twitter, targeting messages to searches for phrases like "perfect weather day" on Twitter.

The moves are an outcome of a string of digital hires Weather has made, including Vikram Somaya (former Thomson Reuters), Eric Hadley (former Microsoft/Bing marketer), Curt Hecht (former VivaKi chief) and CEO David Kenny (former Digitas and Publicis exec).

The company is using data to suggest which products or brands will interest residents in certain regions, depending on what the weather is doing. A forecast of 1-inch snowfall means long grocery lines in Austin, while a sunny day with an inch of snow on the ground in Buffalo could mean a run on winter lager.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

After the fall election season, Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight blogger for The New York Times, went on vacation to get away from it all. "I was in Mexico at the Aztec ruins," he said. "I'm climbing the Sun Pyramid, and at the top of it, someone says, "Are you Nate Silver? I really like your work.'"

He laughed at the memory and added, "I definitely saw that as a sign of the apocalypse. There probably have not been that many celebrity statisticians throughout history. It's a weird role to have."

The East Lansing, Mich., native with a University of Chicago econ degree grew up loving math and baseball, which led to his early career of analyzing MLB performance for media company Baseball Prospectus. When he turned his attention to politics, launching FiveThirtyEight.com in 2008, he quickly emerged as the media's go-to guy for making sense of polls.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Welcome to Ad Age's Digital A-List, where we honor the people, companies, products and things changing the way we think about digital.

Unlike Ad Age's other lists such as Magazine A-List or Agency A-List, the honorees here are incredibly varied -- from Oreos to The Onion to the Weather Co. -- so there is no ranking here real or implied. Our goal is to pick things that are inventing the future in their industries, and impacting the worlds of media and marketing.

Last year, Ad Age singled out the likes of YouTube, for its bold content experiment, Windows Phone and Pinterest. This year, we've got the celebrity face of big data Nate Silver, Gawker Media's scoop-machine Deadspin and GE, an industrial conglomerate that found a human voice in social media.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Last June, in the weeks following Facebook's botched IPO, Ad Age and CITI surveyed

marketers about their views on the

social network. The big takeaway? While the

Continue reading at AdAge.com