Morning Update: Pierce Brosnan’s Kia Super Bowl ad; P&G cuts marketing

AdWeek:Pierce Brosnan Drives a Whole Different Kind of Getaway Car in Kia’s Super Bowl Ad

Kia has released an extended version of its 60-second Super Bowl ad, and it’s a really fun spot with Pierce Brosnan that manages to have its cake and eat it, too—by both celebrating and poking fun at over-the-top Super Bowl spots.

In the spot, the former James Bond is getting briefed by his agent on his role for the ad, which he assumes will be standard action-movie fare. Instead, the agent keeps comically lowering his expectations. It’s not a Bond-esque escapade, he explains—just a normal car-driving-through-the-mountain ad.

The New York Times:Facebook Said to Block Pages Critical of Muhammad to Avoid Shutdown in Turkey

To avoid being banned throughout Turkey, Facebook has blocked Turkish users’ access to a number of pages containing content that the authorities had deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad, according to a company employee with direct knowledge of the matter and a report by the state broadcaster TRT.

The company acted to comply with an order from a Turkish court, the employee said on Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because Facebook had not authorized the employee to speak publicly. The court order was issued late Sunday at the request of a local prosecutor in Ankara, the capital.

AdWeek:Ad of the Day: Kim Kardashian Mocks Herself Perfectly in T-Mobile’s Super Bowl Ad

First, she rocked a controversial cover of Vogue with hubby Kanye West. Then she teamed up with Paper Magazine to break the Internet. Now, Kim Kardashian can add an amusing Super Bowl ad for T-Mobile to her list of conquests.

The 30-second spot, by Publicis Seattle, premiered Monday night on Conan O’Brien’s TBS show Conan and will air during the Super Bowl as well. Kardashian tweeted about the spot Monday afternoon, and included a photo of her on set.

AdAge:P&G Cuts Marketing But Tries to Maintain Media Amid Currency Hit

强势美元付出了代价onProcter & Gamble) Co. sales and earnings, and it’s also among factors pushing down marketing spending. Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller said marketing spending was down 0.7 percentage points as a share of sales last quarter.

Thanks to a dollar that strengthened against virtually every currency last quarter, P&G missed analyst forecasts for earnings per share excluding restructuring and other temporary factors by a fairly wide margin – at $1.06 per share vs. the $1.13 consensus analyst forecast. That came despite the 0.7 percentage point in marketing savings vs. last year and vs. fiscal 2012, of which 0.6 points came from non-media costs, Mr. Moeller said.

AdWeek:Giant Polar Bear on the Loose That Frightened London Today Turns Out to Be an Ad

New York was supposed to be the city dealing with a scary winter visitor on Tuesday, but instead it was London that was thrown off-kilter—by a giant polar bear wandering around.

The eight-foot male bear was first spotted in the Underground before walking across Hampstead Heath and along the South Bank. The beast drew quite the shocked reaction, with people posting all sorts of frightened and bemused notes to social media. They were happy to learn, in the end, that it was simply a very advanced fake bear—promoting Sky Atlantic’s new TV crime drama Fortitude, which is set in a small Arctic town.

Mashable:Facebook is rethinking how it tracks ads

Facebook announced a way to track ad performance on Tuesday that the company says is more accurate than the standard “click-through rate.”

Advertisers have traditionally tracked the success of an online ad campaign based on whether users click; generally, the more clicks an ad gets, the more successful it’s deemed.

But Facebook has argued for years that the click-through rate doesn’t tell the whole picture. In fall 2012, Facebook’s VP of Measurement and Insights Brad Smallwood made the case at a conference in New York, pointing to a Nielsen study at the time showing a mere 0.07% correlation between high click-through rates and actual sales.

Campaign:Mark Read to become global chief executive at Wunderman

Mark Read, the chief executive at WPP Digital, has been named the global chief executive at Wunderman, replacing Daniel Morel.