Tapping into the power of music, Hyundai has joined forces with music’s biggest brand—The Recording Academy (internationally known for the GRAMMY Awards)—to become its ‘Official Vehicle Partner.’ The multi-year partnership extends well beyond the annual GRAMMY Awards and will result in original music projects sure to please music fans across many genres and categories. In addition to being the exclusive GRAMMY vehicle partner, Hyundai is working directly with The Recording Academy to identify and support new projects reflecting the brand’s creativity and desire to celebrate music year-round.

Benetton, the international apparel brand, which is spreading the idea of love and unity across the globe with its hilarious promotional projects along with selling brightly colored sweaters and dresses, is now rolling out a new international campaign entitled UNHATE and launches a foundation of the same name to cultivate the principle of love and tolerance despite all religious, cultural, governmental, national and individual differences. The new multiplatform campaign developed by Fabrica Italy and 72andSunny includes a series of posters featuring modern political leaders from different ‘camps’ kissing each other (remember the legendary Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker’s smooch?) and an impressive 60-second spot by French director Laurent Chanez, which showcases the moments of love, kissing and embraces closely entwined with aggressiveness, fights and blood.

Delicious food is just one side of gastronomy, which also has a much more unpleasant facet, waste. Unilever Food Solutions commissioned a new World Menu Report entitled ‘Sustainable Kitchens: Reducing Food Waste’ (download it here) revolving around one of the most disturbing issues in the field of restaurant industry. The team behind the research investigated the problem and surveyed 4,000 diners in the U.S., UK, Germany, China, Russia, Poland, Brazil and Turkey. This research unveils consumers’ attitude towards the methods of food waste disposal used by restaurants and diners as well as sustainability practices these venues adopt. In fact, the problem now is really huge considering the fact that “a single restaurant in the U.S. can produce approximately 25,000-75,000 pounds of food waste in a year depending on the size of the establishment, according to an extensive analysis of restaurants by the Green Restaurant Association (GRA),” as Unilever states in its press release.

The ‘I (you) can do everything’ motif has been heavily employed in a range of recent campaigns including Old Spice’s hilarious promotion ‘The man your man could smell like’. But this theme is still not exhausted (and doesn’t seem to be in the coming centuries). In its latest multiplatform ‘Yes you can’ campaign, developed by Dare, Diageo GB alo uses it, promoting the Premix range by demonstrating how fun it is to mix things up—at least the protagonist, wearing long hair and mustaches, and his friends can multitask easily.

Starbucks is officially kicking off its Christmas campaign by introducing the whole pack of festive offerings. Last week, the brand introduced its Cup Magic application, encouraging consumers in the U.S and Canada to animate the characters on Starbucks Christmas cups by pointing mobile devices on them. Now, the brand has launched the dedicated mini website merry.starbucks.com to help its consumers “make the season merrier with the ones they love”—in the online hub, one can learn more about the company’s winter offerings, get the link to the AR application for iPhone and iPad (it will be also available Android-powered devices soon), create an e-card and send it to family and friends via e-mail or Facebook.

Mixology and bartending are art just like painting or photography, and this notion is proved by the fact that global alcohol drinks brands and companies like Stella Artois, 42BELOW, Pernod Picard, Belvedere Vodka launch cups, competitions and communities to celebrate the best professionals in the field. Brown-Forman’s Finlandia Vodka brand is hosting another competition, the 14th Annual International Finlandia Vodka Cup, on February 1, 2012 to pay tribute to bartenders who reached perfection in what they do. The brand is calling the industry representatives to join the competition by submitting an application online at www.finlandia.com—the brand will shortlist 19 entrants and the global audience will choose another one, and all of them will head to Finlandia to fight for the title of the champion and win a total of $25,000.

The less time is left before Christmas, the more campaign and projects roll out to celebrate one of the most waited holidays of the year around the globe. But on November 12, Smirnoff shifted the attention of global audience to another large-scale event, announced back in August. The world’s number one selling vodka arranged a series ‘swapped’ parties across the globe as part of The Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project, which also included an exclusive international high-profile dance competition to select one major winner to join Madonna’s dance crew.

Coca-Cola is rolling out the U.S. initiative to support polar bears, a multi-platform campaign with a range of elements including QR codes, which can be spotted on dedicated Coca-Cola cups distributed by 7-Eleven. This is the first QR program launched by Coca-Cola in the USA (previously, the company launched QR code programs tied to other campaigns in Japan and Germany), and it helps promote the message of the initiative, launched by Coke and WWF earlier this month to raise awareness about the need to protect polar bear’s Arctic habitat.

Bacardi Limited launches an international free prize draw competition to meet its Global Social Responsibility Ambassador Rafael ‘Rafa’ Nadal as part of the award-winning ‘Champions Drink Responsibly’ social responsibility campaign.  Starting November 11, legal drinking age consumers and fans from around the world will get the opportunity to ‘Ace Rafa’ in an online virtual reality video game created by Bacardi Limited.

To promote its social network Google+, the Internet giant Google is launching a new competition for up and coming photographers, inviting them to upload their visual works to the new platform. For the contest entitled Google Photography Prize the company has teamed up with Saatchi Gallery, London, which will provide the finalists and the winner with hilarious prizes, which are sure to help them boost their photography career.