Career News 24/7: The 10 things in advertising you need to know today

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February 12, 2015

Good morning. Here's everything you need to know before you head into your first meeting.

1. Publicis Groupe's Q4 results are out. The French advertising agency holding group forecasts that 2015 will be a growth year, following a mixed 2014.

2. People are not happy with DirectTV's latest ad campaign. It features Sports Illustrated models dressed to look frumpy.

3. The English Premier League's massive new broadcasting rights deal with Sky and BT should terrify the rest of Europe. Going forward, Premier League clubs will be able to spend significantly more on players than their counterparts across Europe, given the 70% increase in the size of the deal this time around.

4. AOL stock tanked 11% on Wednesday following the release of its Q4 earnings. The company missed on revenue, beat on EPS, and CEO Tim Armstrong laid out its 2015 plan on the earnings call.

5. Now Samsung SmartTVs are interrupting users' videos with random pop-up ads. Samsung says it is looking into the issue, which so far only appears to affect some SmartTV owners in Australia.

6. Cisco's CEO said the company plans to "crush" Facebook. John Chambers was referring to Facebook's plan to build a new "white label" network, giving its software and designs for the hardware away for free.

7. BuzzFeed has confirmed the hire of former Tumblr sales exec Lee Brown as its chief revenue officer. Brown has also held leadership roles at Yahoo and Groupon.

8. Twitter has acquired social media talent agency Niche for about $50 million in cash and stock. Niche is a startup that connects rising social media stars with big brand advertisers.

9. The third season of "House of Cards" was accidentally leaked on Netflix Wednesday night. Netflix insists it was not a marketing stunt. That said, the official "House of Cards" Twitter account had some fun over the leak.

10. PepsiCo plans to move budget into shopper marketing and digital to maintain its 2014 sales success, Marketing Week reports. But the owner of Pepsi and Doritos won't be increasing its overall budget year over year.