“The UK advertising industry sucks £18bn ($29bn) annually from firms to make ads that are increasingly being ignored and deliver no value.”

That’s according to Tim Hunt, MD of UK-based marketing company Flexile.

At a time when companies need to save money, Hunt reckons that they should dump TV, magazine and junk mail advertising and instead embrace the Internet “where buyers now flock to find products and services”.

He has harsh words for ad agencies, claiming that they perpetuate the myth that the Internet is an immature environment. read more

Well-known high street furniture store Habitat has issued an apology (via its PR company, via a social media blog) for its misuse of popular hashtags on Twitter over the past few days.

Among fair game for whoever was posting on behalf of @TwitterUK were the hashtags #Iran, #iPhone and #Apple – all completely unrelated to any marketing efforts the retail chain was pushing on the service.

The tweets, which unsurprisingly caused quite a backlash from users, have since been removed. read more

The identity of a blogging British police officer going by the pseudonym “Night Jack” has been discovered by The Times newspaper and is soon to be published, after attempts by his lawyers to get an injunction preventing the exposé failed.

In the High Court, Mr Justice Eady ruled that blogging was “essentially a public rather than a private activity” and as such it was in the public interest to reveal his identity.

Unlike The Daily Telegraph, whose revelations regarding MPs expenses were definitely in the public interest, all The Times is likely to achieve is the loss of an interesting and insightful blog. Well done. read more

Lucozade Energy is looking for a creative journalist to take three months out this summer on an all expenses paid world trip.

The lucky candidate will follow a group of intrepid thrill seekers as they take on a set of five skilful, physical challenges set in places as far flung as the Caribbean, Zambia and the Alps. read more

In what may mark the beginnings of a turn of fortune, Shiny Media has announced that three sidelined blogs have been relaunched.

Who Ate All The Pies stopped being updated in September last year, but now Ollie Irish has retaken his role as editor-in-chief, with Anorak handling content production but (at present) with the blog still very clearly branded as Shiny Media’s. Details of the deal aren’t known (and probably won’t be made public) but I’d imagine some sort of revenue sharing and pay-per-post deal is in place to keep both the writers and companies happy. read more

The only proviso seems to be that you review the new web site of UK fast food information portal Just-Eat.co.uk.

Most bloggers won’t turn down free stuff, so Just-Eat’s latest promotion could go down pretty well. They’re offering a £15 meal for those who sign up to the service and then blog or write about their experience (with a link, of course). read more

Yesterday I received a press release about a new service available to UK-based mobile phone users called AQA2U.

Set up by the existing AQA text messaging service, it allows anyone to set up an account and then send SMS alerts to anyone who has decided to follow them.

Though it’s free for a publisher to register, it costs 98p for someone to subscribe (by texting the chosen topic name to 63336) and thereafter it costs 25p each time they receive a text, up to a maximum of £3.50 per month. The publisher can make around 7-9p per subscriber per message. read more

Tweetminster, the web service that tracks British politicians’ use of Twitter, has announced a beta version of its Adobe Air-based Tweetminster Wire desktop application.

The service is designed to make it easier to track conversations about UK politics, including live streams on MPs and PPCs (prospective parliamentary candidates) who use Twitter, tweets from all major parties, UK parliament and government tweets, relevant conversations, plus any posts including the #tmwire hashtag. read more

The UK-based Sportingo sports network has been acquired by entertainment ticket listing service Tixdaq.com.

Sportingo includes the Caught Offside football blog and the Get Sport video portal, and receives a reported one million visitors each month. It’s written exclusively by sports fans rather than journalists. read more

Micro-blogging service Twitter may be the latest rage with celebrities and their followers but it has yet to catch on as a marketing tool for British businesses.

According to the latest web analysis from WebTrends, just two per cent (one in fifty) businesses in the UK are using Twitter for marketing, while six per cent are blogging or podcasting.

Only the likes of direct email marketing, detailed web analytics, traditional online advertising and search optimisation really made the grade, with at least one-third of companies using always or often. read more