The Advertising Standards Authority has appointed Roisin Donnelly and Alan Bookbinder to its ASA Council, responsible for adjudicating on complaints about ads.

Donnelly is the corporate marketing director at Procter & Gamble for the UK and Ireland, and will sit on both the non-broadcast and broadcast councils as an industry member.

Bookbinder is director of Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, a management and advisory role in the UK’s largest charitable family foundation.

Both will assume their positions with immediate effect and replace Boots’ Elizabeth Fagan and professor Gareth Jones, who have both served their maximum term of six years. Read full story here

RCL Cruises, the owner of Royal Caribbean brand, has appointed Omnicom’s OMD UK to handle its social media and search engine optimisation (SEO) business, following a competitive pitch.

OMD will work on tailored social media and SEO campaigns to promote RCL Cruise’s three cruise lines – Celebrity Cruises, Azamara Club Cruises and Royal Caribbean.

OMD was appointed after a pitch against a number of undisclosed specialist digital agencies at the end of March. The incumbent was Leeds-based Bloom.

A spokeswoman for OMD said the combined appointment for SEO and social media reflects the growing demand among clients the two services to be integrated.

RCL Cruise’s media account is handled by the independent agency AMS. JWT was appointed to the creative account for the Royal Caribbean International in January . Read full story here

The agency won the business after a competitive pitch last month.

Hypernaked will be responsible for developing Actimel’s approach to engaging consumers online, following its repositioning in January as the ‘Little bottle with a lot inside’.

The repositioning included a new TV ad created by Actimel’s advertising agency, Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R, and was followed in-store earlier this month with revamped packaging. read fulll story here

Tesco’s agency The Red Brick Road has pulled out of the pitch for its £110 million advertising account.

The agency said that it has resigned the account in order to focus on “other clients and new business opportunities”.

Tesco was a founding client of the independent agency, which launched in 2005, but earlier this month called a pitch for its brand advertising in a bid to reinvigorate its fortunes.

It is using the intermediary Oystercatchers to build a shortlist of agencies ahead of a pitch for the account.

The supermarket’s business accounts for roughly two-thirds of The Red Brick Road’s billings. Its other clients include Magners and Suzuki.

Last week, Paul Weinberger, the creative partner at the agency, resigned. He has worked on the Tesco business for 22 years at The Red Brick Road and, before that, Lowe London. read full story here

Engine beat DDB in a final shoot-out, which earlier included Ogilvy & Mather and McCann Erickson.

The account will be handled by Engine’s advertising agency WCRS and its direct marketing agency, Partners Andrews Aldridge, which is also expected to oversee its digital activity.

Yell’s first global chief marketing officer, Jenny Ashmore, oversaw the review, which began in February.

Rapier is the incumbent agency on Yell’s £4 million UK advertising business and has worked with the brand for four years.

The agency, which created last year’s “Dave V Lately” campaign that updated the famous “JR Hartley” scenario, repitched for the business but was unsuccessful in making it to the pitch stage. Read full story here

Glue Isobar, AKQA and Dare are among the 14 UK companies to join Facebook’s new global Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) programme.

The revamped PMD has been formed from the combination of the Preferred Developer Consultant (PDC) and Marketing API (MAP) programmes. It offers certifications for high-quality apps, page management, ads, and insights tools and services.

The 14 UK-based companies have joined 233 global firms on the list. Read full story here

Stricken retailer Game Group, which went into administration last week, has been given a new lease of life by investment firm OpCapita. The firm will acquire Game’s UK assets, retain its remaining 333 UK stores and safeguard more than 3,200 jobs.

OpCapita has “no plans for any further store closures”, the company said in a statement on Sunday, and will seek to rehire a “small number” of staff made redundant from Game’s head office last week.

Former Halfords Group chief executive David Hamid, now a partner at OpCapita, has been appointed chairman of Game. A chief executive is expected to be named shortly. Ian Shepherd held the role until last week, when he resigned with immediate effect after a two-year battle to turn the company around. Read full story here

TrueView offers users the option of skipping pre-roll advertising after five seconds. Advertisers don’t have to pay for the slot if the user decides not to watch it.

If the viewer has already watched the Irn-Bru ad, they will have the option of watching the next spot in the series.

There are three 30-second in-stream Irn-Bru ads in total on YouTube – repurposed from TV ads by The Leith Agency for the brand’s £2.5m campaign that launched this week.

The tongue-in-cheek ads illustrate how the drink give people the strength to get through the “most cringeworthy” of situations, such as walking in on your parents in the bedroom.

They are based around the strapline, “Irn-Bru gets you through” and will run for three months, across cinema and TV. PHD North handled the media and the ads were produced by MTP. Read full story here

BMW, Peugeot, Famous Grouse and Virgin Holidays were among the brands playing pranks for April Fool’s Day yesterday.

Serial offender BMW took out press ads for a new technology for runners inspired by its partnership with the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The ads read: “The new driverless Running Coach feature uses a combination of ConnectedDrive technologies and surround view cameras to enable your BMW to follow you at a safe distance while you pound the streets … Alvin Alaff, BMW’s Head of Innovation, said ‘It’s a car gym but not as we know it.’” Read full story here

Britain’s biggest video game retailer, Game Group, has gone into administration.

The group employs about 10,000 staff at its 1,300 stores, 609 of which are in the UK and Ireland.

The administrators from PricewaterhouseCoopers said that the retailer had suffered from high fixed costs and an ambitious international expansion.

Its business has been hit by competition from online-only retailers.

“Despite these challenges, we believe that there is room for a specialist game retailer in the territories in which it operates, including its biggest one, the UK,” said one of the administrators, Mike Jervis.

“As a result, we are hopeful that a going concern sale of the business is achievable.” Read full story here