If you can’t or haven’t been kissed by someone wearing Burberry lipstick, a new interactive ad from Google’s Art, Copy & Code project might just be the next best thing. The Burberry Kisses campaign brings the universal symbol of a red kiss into the digital era by giving people the chance to snap a photo of their own lips and then send a special someone a letter sealed with their personalized virtual kiss.

“What we’re really trying to do with the concept is reimagine how luxury marketing is done on the web for Millennials and do it from the lens of beauty products,” Aman Govil, project lead of the Art, Copy & Code project, tells ClickZ. “The creative emphasis was how do you look at luxury advertising differently on the web than on traditional channels…We really wanted to leverage some of the insights around Millennials and how they engage with content on the web.”

Burberry’s team began working side-by-side with Google on the project in January. Soon enough, the ideas were flowing.

“When we started looking at different ideas through this lens of lipstick products, the thing that kept standing out most often was this beautiful image of the red kiss in a lot of advertising and what it stands for a lot of people,” Govil says. “From a storytelling standpoint, it’s a very human, deeply personal, yet universally used way of communicating and connecting with other people…Nothing says something is sent with love and care like a kiss.”

When users visit the site on their desktop, smartphone, or tablet they are encouraged to use their camera on that device to capture an image of their own lips. Once they add color to their virtual kiss with one of five lipstick colors from Burberry, they can write a short note and send their kiss-sealed letter via email. The Burberry Kisses site also features a map of the world that visually represents the location where the letters are being sent and received in real time or in an overlay that shows where all the letters have landed.

“When you send your letter it flows beautifully and gives this emotive experience of ‘my letter’s actually going somewhere,’” Govil says. Street imagery of popular landmarks, intersections, and reflections off water puddles in the street are all dynamically inserted into the short film of sorts that plays when a letter is signed, sealed, and delivered.

“We really want to partner with the industry to show creative possibilities being enabled by the modern web…A lot of this is on the cutting edge of where the industry is going today, and what’s really possible with tools today,” he says.

“Burberry’s trying to get its brand loved and shared by more people on the web and that was really a lot of where the creative was trying to go,” adds Govil. “If you look at the creative, it’s not about like ‘hey, go buy a lipstick,’ it’s more about ‘here’s a beautiful experience that hopefully adds value to people’s lives and a little bit of fun.’”

Burberry plans to promote the new campaign through a series of ads that will appear on every screen under the sun using Google’s Lightbox ad units. “The big innovation on the advertising side is how do you deliver those experiences across the web on lots and lots of ads. It’s easy to do it on a website and guild a sandcastle in the middle of the forest, but you want to get it out to everybody…So the experience on the website and the ad is exactly the same,” says Govil.

“What we do in a lot of these projects is we actually do innovation and not invention. So we try and force ourselves to have access to the exact same products everyone else in the industry has access to,” he adds. “A lot of the work that you see here is really bringing these tools that are available to creatives and advertisers together in a cohesive experience.”

Facebook’s investors got their first chance to take questions and complaints straight to the top yesterday. Barely a year after its disastrous IPO, the time finally came for Facebook’s executives and board of directors to face the music at an annual shareholder’s meeting. The range of questions and comments from stockholders bordered on the ridiculous, such as when their favorite Facebook game would be coming out of beta (an issue the company has no control over), to the more important matter of when the company will regain the value it has failed to achieve since the day of that ill-fated IPO.

“We understand that a lot of people are disappointed in the performance of the stock and we really are too,” says chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. “The real question is what are we going to do about it. We’ve always taken a pretty long-term view of this,” he says, adding that the company expects fluctuations in how the public and Wall Street perceives Facebook’s position in the market.

“We don’t think that we’re going to be the only company in this space, but we want to be the one pushing it forward,” Zuckerberg says. “This isn’t a zero-sum game. The market is expanding quite quickly.”

Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected, he adds. Facebook wants to set itself apart by building great mobile apps, a platform that brings a social element to other apps, and a strong economic engine that can fuel its vision for a long-term business.

While Facebook’s stock price languished over the last year, the company undertook an all-too-familiar transition from desktop to mobile. It hasn’t been easy, but Zuckerberg says the company made a lot of progress on that front, particularly with its entirely rewritten apps for iOS and Android. “More people are coming to mobile apps on any given day than desktop, which was a really big shift for the company,” he says.

Zuckerberg adds that he’s especially excited about what Facebook can do with location and other attributes of mobile that it couldn’t do with desktop. “We’ve started to plant some seeds with products like Home that can really be future versions of how people use Facebook,” he says.

“Home is a product that we were working on for a while, for months. The idea is to create the mobile-first version of Facebook,” adds Zuckerberg. “Home is the first version of Facebook that was really designed from the ground up to be a mobile product.”

He chose to get in front of some of the criticism that’s been lobbed at Home as well. “There was no real way that we were going to get everything right the first time,” he says. “We haven’t really made our big push for it yet…Until we do that, we’re still kind of in tweaking mode.”

Zuckerberg says Home will see more improvements before Facebook begins to encourage about 100 million active users on Android to make the switch. The transition from desktop to mobile has also forced Facebook to rethink its advertising business, he adds.

“One of the big shifts that we’ve had to make is so that the ad formats that we have work on desktop as well as mobile,” he says. “Now, as of last quarter, 30 percent of the revenue of the company comes from mobile ads, up from roughly zero a year ago.”

COO Sheryl Sandberg says Facebook has also made important strides in answering the question of measurement and proving the value of the platform as a marketing vehicle. “We are a social ad spend and we have worked increasingly to help our advertisers increase their return on spend,” she adds.

In other news, Facebook took yet another play out of Twitter’s playbook and announced that it too will be a haven for hashtags. Facebook is making hashtags searchable and clickable to help marketers join and drive conversations about their business. And it will all be organized just as Twitter does it, via the omnipresent hash mark.

Apple is introducing a new vehicle for advertisers to reach iOS device users in a musical setting. ITunes Radio, a free music streaming service announced by Apple today, will be supported by ads delivered on the company’s mobile ad platform. Apple has been relatively quiet about the iAd platform that it launched three years ago, but now the company appears to be reorganizing its advertising business to sell and deliver audio ads on a service that’s been long anticipated by industry watchers.

ITunes Radio will be built into Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 7, making the service available on the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV, and iTunes on PCs or Macs. ITunes Radio will also be available without ads to subscribers of iTunes Match, a service that makes users’ entire iTunes and other music libraries available via iCloud. The music streaming service, which strikes many similarities with Pandora, will launch in the U.S. this fall and Apple plans to add more countries over time.

Apple announced the new ad-supported service during the kickoff keynote at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, where the company also revealed its latest operating systems for iOS and Mac devices, a new MacBook Air lineup, iCloud updates, and a sneak peek at the next Mac Pro.

Apple made the biggest splash today with the introduction of iOS 7, the latest operating system for Apple’s family of iOS devices. Apple CEO Tim Cook calls it “the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone.” The refreshed operating system provides users with a more lively, simple, and coherent experience across the entire platform of apps and services. A new grid-system achieves a more “harmonious relationship” between different items and the use of translucency gives users a sense of context, depth, and vitality, says Jony Ive, SVP of industrial design, in a video Apple played to showcase the changes.

“I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It’s about bringing order to complexity,” Ive continues in the video. With iOS 7, Apple wants to create an interface that is “unobtrusive and differential,” he says. “We see iOS 7 as defining an important new direction, and in many ways the beginning.”

Apple’s iOS 7 also brings a new “liveliness” to iOS devices, says Craig Federighi, SVP of software engineering. “As you move the device in your hand, it actually tracks your motion” and a new design feature called Parallax lets users see behind the icons on the display with improved scrolling, he adds. Twitter, Wikipedia, and Bing search results are also being integrated into the next version of Siri in iOS 7.

Taking some jabs at Google, Cook points out that iOS 6 is currently installed on 93 percent of active iOS devices. “More than a third of Android users are using an operating system that was released in 2010,” he adds. “If you do the math, you would find that iOS 6 is the world’s most popular operating system and in second place is a version of Android that was released in 2010.”

Apple’s latest numbers indicate no loss of momentum despite the struggles the company has had on Wall Street of late. The App Store, which celebrates its fifth birthday next month, has served more than 50 billion app downloads to date, says Cook. The store has more than 900,000 iOS apps (375,000 specifically made for the iPad) and Apple has paid out $10 billion to iOS developers to date with half of that money doled out in the last year alone. “That’s three times more than all other platforms combined,” says Cook.

“We have more accounts with credit cards than any store on the Internet that we’re aware of,” he adds, noting that Apple currently has 575 million active iTunes accounts and 300 million iCloud accounts. The infrastructure that powers Apple’s iCloud services has delivered more than 800 billion messages on iMessage and 7.4 trillion push notifications.

Calling upon the places that inspire Apple’s design and software teams here in California, the next version of OS X will be called “Mavericks.” The famed spot is home to some of the world’s biggest and most extremewaves, and it’s just a 45-minute drive northwest from Apple’s headquarters.

Mac OS X Mavericks will be released this fall, but fans of the MacBook Air won’t have to wait so long. A new lineup of 11- and 13-inch display MacBook Airs begin shipping today at a starting price of $999. Apple says it has improved the battery life of the iconic and thin notebooks by nearly double from the previous versions. Finally, the new Mac Pro that Apple plans to begin shipping later this year offers a complete redesign and fresh look for the power-user machine packed into one-eighth the volume of the previous generation. “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass,” beamed Phil Schiller, SVP of marketing, as he offered a sneak peek of the product that will be assembled in the U.S.

The Mac install base is now at 72 million, double from five years ago, and 35 percent of users are using the latest version of Mac OS X. “That compares to Windows 8, which is kind of struggling to reach 5 percent,” says Cook. Mac sales growth is up 100 percent, versus a “paltry 18 percent” for the PC over the last five years, he adds.

Twitter has inked its second major deal with a global agency in as many months. WPP and Twitter have partnered to share data and analytics that will be used for marketing purposes across WPP subsidiaries GroupM, Kantar, Wunderman, and others. The deal comes just six weeks after Twitter signed the first deal of its kind with Publicis Groupe’s Starcom MediaVest Group.

Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed, but Twitter’s deal with Publicis could reportedly involve up to $600 million in spending over the next fours. Those early forecasts would suggest that the deal with WPP could be even greater, considering it has now snagged a deal with the world’s largest ad agency group.

The new agreement between Twitter and WPP is even more remarkable for what’s been left unsaid. It is unclear what specific data or metadata WPP gains through this partnership, the depth of that data, and how exactly Twitter will help WPP connect the dots to reach the consumers that its brand clients covet most.

Moreover, Twitter has not outlined how the deals with WPP and Publicis will differ. Does one agency get an earlier look at data than the other? Is the access of one agency deeper or more exclusive?

The burgeoning field of social analytics and marketing is something WPP now calls “data investment management.” The agency plans to expand its “data-driven marketing” efforts through the partnership with Twitter as it extrapolates data on user behavior for media platforms, staff training, and new programs for its clients. The premium access to Twitter’s data will help the agency drive “more effective campaigns, enhanced targeting and more real-time insight to clients.”

“Twitter’s relevance continues to grow - not only as a social platform, but also as a window into consumer attitudes and behavior in real time,” says WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell in a prepared statement. “We are delighted to announce this very wide-ranging strategic partnership and to ensure that Twitter data is a key ingredient in many of our disciplines. We look forward to leveraging the platform in a variety of ways for our clients around the world.”

Twitter and WPP plan to introduce new applications stemming from their collaborative efforts this summer.

“As Twitter has grown, marketers are leveraging the platform for brand insights, relevant real-time messaging, and customer research,” notes Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. “This partnership will benefit clients by pairing Twitter with WPP’s world-class analytics, targeting, and creative capabilities.”

MENLO PARK, Calif. – Facebook wants to do for advertisers what it has done for its users since the beginning - simplify the process of sharing, connecting, and engaging with everything and everyone online. For marketers, that means less guesswork in their social advertising campaigns and a stronger focus on business objectives.

Facebook’s ad product team gathered here at Facebook headquarters on Thursday to detail plans for aunified ad structure that will see the demise of redundant ad products - there are currently 27 separate ad products up for bid on the site - and the amplification of marketing objectives that focus on the bottom line. Online and in-store sales, app downloads, promotional offers and brand awareness, and other key marketing objectives will eventually rise to the surface of Facebook’s advertising stack over the next six months.

Numerous Facebook ad products will be killed off in an effort to give marketers a more consistent advertising platform that works across all placements and objectives. The proliferation of ad units on Facebook reflects the evolution the site has gone through as it introduces new features for users, says Fidji Simo, an advertising product manager at Facebook.

“All of the right pieces were there,” she says. “Even though every single product is very good on its own, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. It really should be simpler.”

As Facebook identifies redundancies in its platform, new combined ad units are being designed to meet a greater range of objectives and make it easier for ad managers to set up their campaigns, Simo adds. The ad product team doesn’t have a specific number in mind for how many ad formats will remain after the culling this summer and fall, but Simo says the simplification process is ongoing and that Facebook will continue to iterate its ad portfolio.

“There is really no reason why sponsored stories should be a completely separate product,” she says, for example. The same goes for online sale offers and question-based ads. “We’re trying to really unify all of these ad units,” adds Simo.

Consistency across ad formats will also drastically reduce the number of creative assets required to launch a full campaign across every channel and placement available on the platform, she continues.

Facebook has been “thinking about who we are as an advertising business,” says Brian Boland, director of product marketing at Facebook. “Advertisers at the end of the day, the reason they do marketing, is to drive business outcomes…It’s about improving their business’ bottom line and that’s been our focus.”

As Facebook incrementally built products for each step of the marketing loop, it was solving business objectives for advertisers, but the solutions occurred in silos, says Boland. “All size of advertisers, agencies, [preferred marketing developers] - all will benefit from these changes” that focus on “maximizing business outcomes,” he adds.

Brands will still be able to control which ad units or placements they desire, but by selecting objectives the revamped platform will also indicate the units or placements that perform best for that specific objective, he explains. Once advertisers identify what they’re trying to accomplish and create a message or ad for that goal, Facebook will suggest the right format and then lead them through options for targeting and customization.

“We’re going to help them make better decisions up front,” Boland says. “We continue to give advertisers control…This doesn’t reduce control, it reduces complexity.”

Brands are already experts at finding their audiences, building creative, and measuring performance that can be accurately pinned to results, he says, adding that Facebook wants to make that process easier and more impactful with the power of social. “This is marketing that marketers and advertisers understand,” says Boland.

Google gathered some of its biggest agency partners, global brands and publishers on Wednesday to reveal what it calls “the biggest upgrade to our core ad server in the 15 years since its inception.”

Later this summer advertisers will gain access to the DoubleClick Campaign Manager, part of Google’s unified DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform that aims to streamline digital marketing efforts for agencies and brands.

“At the core of digital media is its ability to build connections and we’ve seen that it can be incredibly valuable in helping our partners connect across their business, offering a holistic picture of how all their marketing efforts work together,” Neal Mohan, vice president of display advertising, notes in a blog post detailing improvements to the platform.

DoubleClick is also going social, Mohan says, by building upon last July’s Wildfire acquisition and integrating those social listening tools into the DoubleClick platform, which of course also came to Google via acquisition back in 2007.

“Now, marketers can address a critical part of the customer journey and do it alongside search, display, rich media, video and mobile as part of the broader DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform,” notes Mohan, adding that 80 percent of consumers’ purchase decisions are influenced by social interactions with brands.

“This is really the first time where you’ll be able to get an idea of how your social efforts are doing right alongside your digital marketing efforts,” Mohan says at the annual think DoubleClick event. Google’s ongoing improvements to the ad management and serving process paired with plans to further incorporate Wildfire’s technology “finally allows us to take these ideas of beauty and scale and ensure they’re no longer mutually exclusive,” comments Mohan.

Cross-Sell, a new feature that will be available in DoubleClick for Publishers this summer, gives publishers an easier way to manage joint sales across YouTube channels. Google is also jumping into the native ads bandwagon by testing new ad serving capabilities with select publishers. The company says it wants to give publishers more flexibility with native formats while also ensuring that the ads remain unique to each publisher and create value for users. Google is also building its viewability measurement system Active View into DoubleClick for Publishers, AdSense and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Finally, to help brands connect with consumers as they jump from one device to another, Google is releasing a new HTML5 creative development tool called Google Web Designer. Google plans to release the design-centric platform in the coming months and further integrate the creative process into DoubleClick Studio and AdMob.

Mohan says Google will continue to invest in creative tools, measurement solutions and ad-buying platforms to help accelerate the ongoing shift in interest and resources from offline to online. After all, Google believes it can and will “accelerate and propel digital advertising into a $200 billion industry that funds and supports great content.”

Salesforce made its largest acquisition to date with a $2.5 billion deal to purchase ExactTarget.

The cross-channel interactive marketing platform began as an email-marketing provider in 2000 and went public for $161 million in late March last year. But ExactTarget only lasted as a publicly traded company for about 15 months before Salesforce came along with an offer that values the company more than 50 percent above its market cap on Monday’s close.

Salesforce says it will combine ExactTarget’s digital marketing capabilities with its existing strengths in sales, CRM and social marketing to expand its cloud marketing platform and allow brands to manage campaigns across email, social, mobile and online. The company also highlighted recent data from Gartner that concludes at least one-third of consumer technology companies’ marketing budgets will be moved to digital by 2015.

“The chief marketing officer is expected to spend more on technology than the chief information officer by 2017,” notes Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive at Salesforce. “The addition of ExactTarget makes Salesforce the starting place for every company and puts Salesforce in the pole position to capture this opportunity.”

The 10-figure acquisition of ExactTarget is the latest in a series of major deals aimed at positioning Salesforce as a comprehensive sales, CRM and marketing solution for brands across all digital channels. Salesforce acquired the social media monitoring firm Radian6 for $326 million in March 2011 and followed up last year with its $689 million acquisition of Buddy Media. The social-listening technology and real-time bidding platforms are being integrated into social.com, Salesforce’s new social marketing platform that enables marketers to “buy into the moment.”

“ExactTarget’s mission is to revolutionize how businesses connect with their consumers using data-driven digital marketing across all channels,” Scott Dorsey, chairman, chief executive and co-founder of ExactTarget, says in a prepared statement. “Salesforce’s tremendous strength in social marketing, along with its leadership position in sales and service, not only will accelerate this vision, but also provide our customers with a powerful, integrated CRM platform to transform their end-to-end customer experience.”

More than 6,000 companies are using ExactTarget’s cloud marketing platform today. The all-cash transaction is expected to close by the end of July.

Mobile advertising looks like a spring seedling underneath the massive cloud that was $216 billion worth of all advertising in the U.S. last year. While it produced almost $4.75 billion, or 2 percent of all ad spend last year, mobile is riding a wave of growth that continues to outpace online by a large margin.

Online advertising grew at a compound annual growth rate of 47.2 percent from 1995 through 2012, while mobile grew 80.1 percent from 2007 through last year, according to John Fletcher, senior analyst at SNL Kagan. During a presentation at CTIA, a wireless industry trade conference in Las Vegas last week, Fletcher highlighted the shifts, trends, and new kids on the block that are increasingly mobile and impacting the bottom line for advertising overall.

Tablet use among the U.S. population is playing a profound role as the trajectory of mobile advertising steepens. About 22 percent of the U.S. market, or 69.5 million consumers, now use tablets, Fletcher says. Tablet usage grew 167.2 percent from 2010 through 2012, according to SNL Kagan’s latest data.

“I’ve heard that tablets are growing at a faster adoption rate than any technology in history,” says Fletcher, adding that tablets are enabling workforces with new capabilities in education, retail, and many other enterprise sectors. “The barriers to purchase these things are really low regardless of your household income,” he adds, mentioning the lower price points being introduced on Android tablets such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Online advertising was still seven times larger than mobile last year, but the difference between the two channels in revenue by ad formats helps explain where mobile is complementing and augmenting marketing efforts online. Search comprised 50 percent of online ad revenue, while it commanded 56 percent in mobile, according to Fletcher. Non-video display ads and other media captured 43 percent of online ad revenue and 34 percent of mobile ad revenue.

Fletcher is particularly interested in video advertising, which is already commanding a greater share of mobile than online. Video ads generated 10 percent of all mobile revenue last year, while the online ad space carved out just 7 percent for video.

The mobile advertising space is crowded with startups, but the more familiar publishers and media companies are still dominating from the top down. “Publishers are growing much faster than the ad networks,” says Fletcher, adding that lower CPMs on mobile are impacting their slice of the action. He suggests that publishers are able to charge higher CPMs not only because of their reach, but also “because they have a Rolodex of direct relationships with these advertisers.”

Name recognition goes a long way in the advertising space too, Fletcher adds. Marketers and brands all know Twitter and Facebook, but they may not be familiar with Millennial Media, for example. Nonetheless, Millennial Media’s ad revenue grew 62 percent to $151.1 million last year, placing as the fifth largest mobile ad network or publisher. Millennial Media is running neck-and-neck with Apple, but the distance between the performance of those companies and Google is remarkable.

Sitting at the top of the mobile ad chain, Google generated $2.52 billion on mobile ads last year, according to SNL Kagan. Twitter came in a distant second with $315.6 million, followed by Facebook with $209.3 million, Pandora with $179.1 million, and Apple with $153.1 million.

The fastest growing mobile ad networks and publishers in 2012 run the full gamut. Shopkick clocked an astonishing year-over-year growth rate of 1,900 percent, followed by Shazam for TV at 425 percent, Twitter at 249 percent, Hulu at 162 percent, and Tapad at 150 percent, according to SNL Kagan.

Facebook is getting into the verification business, borrowing a feature that Twitter first introduced almost four years ago.

Facebook’s verification badges for pages and profiles will also mimic Twitter by leaving much of the process unknown and internal.

It’s unclear why Facebook is making the move to verify brands and well-known figures with large audiences on the site but it plans to begin the proactive process over the coming days. The company will “automatically verify the largest pages on Facebook that are at the greatest risk of duplication,” a spokeswoman tells ClickZ.

“Verified pages belong to a small group of prominent public figures (celebrities, journalists, government officials, popular brands and businesses) with large audiences,” the site notes in a blog post announcing the news.

“I think that it’s an issue for a lot of the luxury brands,” Raina Penchansky, chief strategy officer for Digital Brand Architects, tells ClickZ. “Social and digital is a difficult space for luxury brands,” she says, because luxury brands prefer to maintain an aura of exclusivity by limiting their exposure and access to larger untargeted audiences.

While verified pages and profiles will add some semblance of authenticity, brands aren’t exactly begging for the feature or avoiding Facebook because they don’t have a small blue badge and check mark next to their names throughout the site.

“I’ve never seen any pushback from a brand,” says Penchansky. “It doesn’t feel like something that’s been a huge barrier for entry for our brands.” Still, she says, some brands might be a little uneasy about the arbitrary verification process, particularly since Facebook hasn’t outlined the requirements for verification or the ability to request a profile or page be verified.

The blue check mark identifying verified pages and profiles will appear in timelines, stories, search results, news feed ads and while users hover over the name of a page elsewhere on the site. Brands that don’t automatically receive verification over the coming weeks are being referred to Facebook’s help center where common duplication issues can be resolved.