After a baffling Tweet earlier in the week from Rapper Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, claiming that he was joining the cast of Downton Abbey, the rapper has released an entertaining spoof video, announcing himself as the ITV drama’s first black cast member.

In the spoof, P Diddy appears in scenes of the show, superimposed interacting with the Downton characters – and the result really made us laugh! He can’t seem to get a grasp of the show’s title however…

Watch and tell us what you think, should ITV get P Diddy in for an audition?

The Prolific North Awards “celebrate excellence and recognise and reward outstanding campaigns and exceptional talent in the creative and media industries across the North”.

Up against Global Radio, Talksport and IPC, the fantastic win is testament to the team’s hard work, creativity and delivery across eight regional offices over the last year.

These adverts will be asking supporters to send their message telling cancer what they really think of it and to ultimately rally more participants to take part in this year’s events by sending their biggest message to cancer and signing up. Targeting Britain’s Got Talent’s 10 million viewers, the campaign aims to help rally together 580,000 women to take part in the 5k and 10k events. Race for Life are launching two TV spots during the show.

The first, 30” spot will alternate shots of individuals’ experiences with hoards of runners, to show fighting cancer does not have to be a lone battle, and we can all help beat it. It will then ask viewers to send in their own messages to cancer via dedicated website oicancer.org.

These will then be broadcast during the second, 60” spot, sharing personal experiences nationwide to inspire further viewers to register. The TV spots will be supported this in Metro inviting readers to send in their “Message to Cancer”, with a call to action on the Friday reminding readers to look out for the ITV spots.

On Monday, Metro will carry a page with some of the messages generated from the Saturday night show. Emma Hyatt, Head of Race for Life at Cancer Research UK, said: “This campaign is about enabling people to unite to defy this disease by telling cancer what they think of it.”

To send your message to cancer go to oi.cancer.org Send the biggest message you can by signing up to one of the Race for Life events this summer. Places are filling up fast for this year’s Race for Life. Sign up now at raceforlife.org

It was a really exciting project to work on because of the nature of the new and niche format it involved (See Ad Sync page) but also because of the challenges we faced in researching it.  Ad innovations and in particular mobile ad innovations are quite tricky to measure from a research point of view, so we knew we had to think differently about our approach; but equally we had to consider the fact that this is such a new format and therefore we had to ensure that the research enabled us to gain insight to further aid the development of the format in the future.

We worked closely with a company called On Device research to implement a new approach to measuring the Ad Sync format, and were really pleased with the results. Not only was it a huge success for Rimmel London – proving that targeting the right people in the right place can have a really positive effect on the brand (see Ad Sync & Rimmel Case Study one-pager); but also gave us a great case study to help sell the format throughout the rest of the X Factor series – and to bring it back for the Britain’s Got Talent app this year too.

Roll on the 6th June for the winners to be revealed - VOTE AD-SYNC & ITV!

Our ITV creative team wanted to capture the essence of the ITV3 in the latest set of idents, establishing the channel as the curator of our collection of dazzling dramas. The team have done this wonderfully by hand-crafting drama scenes, making paper models and filming animations to sit in a series of bell jars. The result is stunning – take a look at the making of the idents and the final idents themselves below.

We hope you like them as much as we do!

We’re all kids at heart, so give it some attitude and enjoy your inner bad self!

This is by far the most tweeted about drama episode we have seen with a number usually reserved for big entertainment shows (the launch of BGT got 290k and the second show 172k).

• The number of unique tweeters was 137k compared to 15k during the 1st episode.
• #closure was used over 17k times during TX and 20k times in total yesterday.
• The series in total generated over 470k tweets. See Broadchurch Summary.

We saw the bookend pattern expected for drama with the largest peak coming at the start with people excited to watch the final episode. The second largest peak came at the end when it was announced Broadchurch would return for a second series. We also see peak in line with the ad breaks.

Looking at other recent dramas we see:

• Dr. Who launch episode generated 85k tweets, with following episodes around 30k
• Downton Abbey Christmas special – 36k
• Mayday – 5k
• Mr. Selfridge – 23k

What will series two bring?

*since tracking began in June 2012

To celebrate our four-legged friends (among other creatures), ITV is premiering the first ever British Animal Honours tonight at 8pm. Hosted by For the Love of Dogs presenter Paul O’Grady, this brand new TV event celebrates the achievements of the world’s most extraordinary animals and the people who work with them.

Following the success of ‘creative breaks’ and to amplify the impact of British Animal Honours, the ITV commercial team have created an entire break featuring animals. Cats, dogs, monkeys and of course meerkats will all be featured in the centre break at 20.15.

Be sure to tune into this new programme to see who walks, flies, swims or trots off with the awards and even cast your vote for your favourite animal advert, below!

Woof, woof.

Watch our ITV: Where Laughter Lives promo, below and share your favourite ITV comedy moment on our Twitter page #wherelaughterlives to spread the cheer!

Our current favourite? Ant & Dec’s amazing version of Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble!

This is the first official photo of the new 7.7 acre Coronation Street site, currently under construction at MediaCityUK.

The build of the new lot continues apace and you can clearly identify Corrie’s new footprint. Whilst replicating the current set the new set is bigger allowing greater production flexibility.

Construction is expected to continue until the end of 2013. The programme continues to film at Quay Street until they move to their new home at a date to be agreed in due course.