EasyJet slashes marketing spend but ‘increases effectiveness’

EasyJet has cut its marketing budget by 15% over the past two years in the face of rising fuel costs, its chief executive has revealed.

Rajar Q4 2012: Agency views on Absolute’s growth and the digital boost

Absolute Radio, Magic 105.4 and the growth of digital listening in the fourth quarter of 2012 have all been praised by radio buying from Mindshare, MediaCom, Carat and RadioWorks.

Sony seeks more inclusive PlayStation Network image

Sony is launching a campaign that sets out to disprove the notion its PlayStation Network online gaming platform is exclusive to hard-core gamers.

52 BlackBerry Innovations – Innovations Leading up to BlackBerry 10, From Keyboards to Cases to Apps (TOPLIST)

(TrendHunter.com) With the BlackBerry 10 release finally upon us, it seems that the rumors of Canadian BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion’s (RIM) death have been greatly exaggerated.

Research in…

Rajar Q4 2012: Absolute and Kiss grow but TalkSport falters as execs leave

Absolute Radio, Global’s Classic FM and Bauer Media’s Kiss network expanded their reach in Q4 2012, while TalkSport’s audience declined 5% ahead of the departures of Moz Dee and Adam Bullock.

Minimalist Monochromatic Logos – ‘Made in Japan’ by Antrepo Strips Down Branding Aesthetic (GALLERY)

(TrendHunter.com) The ‘Made in Japan’ by Antrepo series utilizes sleek Japanese minimalist to re-imagine some of the most iconic logos of today.

Inspired by the uniformity of vintage 35 mm cameras seen…

Forbes Magazine: Puppets

“Real insights from the business world.”

Advertising Agency: JANDL, Bratislava, Slovakia
Creative Director/ Art Director: Pavel Fuksa
Associate CD / Copywriter: Eugen Suman
Art Director: Alexis Blanco
Account Manager: Marek Wilhalm

Facebook mobile revenues double

Facebook beat Wall Street’s expectations and revenues climbed 40% in the fourth quarter with a doubling of mobile revenues.

Skintight Middle Earth Apparel – Reveal Your Geeky Side with Black Milk’s Lord of the Rings Apparel (GALLERY)

(TrendHunter.com) Lord of the Rings apparel by Black Milk Design is a fashionable way to show your love for the fantasy franchise.

The garments, which are made primarily made out of body hugging lycra and polyester…

Eric Cantona stars in ad to reinvent ‘self-confident’ Kronenbourg 1664

Heineken is to position its Kronenbourg 1664 brand as a “reward for self-confident men”, with a new multimillion-pound campaign starring former Manchester United footballer Eric Cantona.

Paris Traveler Series

Le duo d’illustrateurs Nichole et Evan Robertson ont réalisé ces superbes posters à la suite de leur voyage à Paris. Avec une approche graphique très réussie, ces derniers nous plongent dans les rues de la capitale française avec des visuels originaux à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.

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Paris Traveler Series

Sky’s pre-tax profits rise 7.5% year on year despite 3% ad revenue decline

BSkyB has reported a profit of £487m for the six months to 31 December 2012, an increase of 7.5% year on year, despite revenue from advertising declining 3% to £215m.

Sainsbury’s teams up with Channel 4 for cookery show

Sainsbury’s and Channel 4 are teaming up to air a new ad-funded TV show, called ‘What’s Cooking? From the Sainsbury’s Kitchen’.

Lucozade unveils trio of new brand ambassadors for Six Nations campaign

Lucozade is running a campaign to showcase a trio of its new rugby brand ambassadors, England’s Chris Robshaw, Scotland’s Richie Gray and Wales’ Leigh Halfpenny, ahead of this weekend’s start of the Six Nations championships.

#A.I.L – artists in laboratories, episode 18: Zoe Papadopoulou

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Zoe has spent the past year exploring the scientific and technological developments in Artificial Reproductive Technologies. She particularly looked at questions such as “Will the techniques themselves have the potential to fundamentally change the way we perceive parenthood and reproduction? How will the stories we tell children evolve?” In the show, we will be talking artificial uterus, the orphan child who had 5 parents, artificial gametes, and premature babies exhibited in freak shows continue

The biggest wake up call in history

From where will food and freedom come?

From Adbusters #105: The Big Ideas of 2013


REUTERS

A few friends sat around a table in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, and started to get to grips with the oncoming whirlwind. “I’ll be frank,” moaned the climate change correspondent, rattling a bunch of academic papers, “we’re fucked.” Most agreed. As the world is hell-bent on building fossil-fueled power stations over the next five years, it will be impossible to hold global warming to safe levels. The last chance of combating dangerous climate will be “lost forever.” End of story. Well, not quite.

A handful of geo-engineers, including the 2007 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, suggest sulphur could be inserted into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays and slow global warming. It sounds like futile wizardry, but Flannery maintains it’s “the last resort we have – cutting emissions is not enough.” The sulphur would change the color of the sky.

It seems the possibility of outwitting climate change is slipping through our fingers. Yesterday’s big ideas made sense: tax the polluters, reduce human-generated gas emissions and keep the global average temperature below two degrees Celsius. Now scientists, scholars and environmental activists openly discuss the urgent need to prepare for the dramas ahead – wars, food shortages and the likely displacement of millions of humans as sea levels soar.

Every nation has its dark and dangerous secrets, and Australia is no exception. It is a more confident and transparent country now than it was at the dawn of the sixties, when Baby Boomers took to the streets and rattled the establishment, chanting praise for Ho Chi Min. Remember him? I didn’t think so. Half a century later, millions of Aussies seem quite pleased with themselves. We’ve got laptops, Pirate Bay, The Opera House, iPhones, non-stop TV, brilliant beaches, writers’ festivals, gay parades and food, fabulous food, choking up garbage bins, accelerating obesity. But who are we really? Something doesn’t sit right. There’s too much we don’t know, and our minds drift to sport, booze and having fun. Why not?

Half the Great Barrier Reef’s coral has disappeared in the past 27 years and less than a quarter could be left within a decade unless action is taken. Our huge mining industry exerts its power over Australia’s environmental policy, and their sweeping plans are rarely refused. UNESCO has advised that the Great Barrier Reef could be listed as endangered if current extraction projects proceed. Our mineral barons praise the work ethic of African laborers who toil the land for two dollars per day. They dream of a trickle-down utopia where the rich who inherit their wealth do as they please and the poor get what they deserve.

Because of our extensive use of fossil fuels, Australia has been the highest per capita emitter in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for most of the two decades since the first UN Earth Summit at Rio. We talked the talk, drank the wine and signed the bullshit. Now we are heading the wrong way on virtually all indicators. Since then the number of listed threatened fauna has risen by 249 and the number of threatened plants by 417, leading to a total of almost 1700. A host of other species is in steep decline.

Many things about the future and the natural world that we’ve been rambling on about since my student days are coming to pass. Lean across a dinner table to nab a cutlet, and someone says that an iceberg the size of Manhattan has dropped into the sea. Inevitably, the imminence of a food famine is raised. Then someone cracks a joke about Earth burning up like the sun. We seem to be approaching that terrible point where climate change skeptics have ceased being skeptical. Huge ethical dilemmas face every continent and some academics in the fields of climate science and futurism are whispering hints of an apocalypse.

Back home on an Australian mountain range, I can see the distant city of Sydney right on the horizon, the size of a toy town. Dark thoughts. What hope is there? And then a sense of relief … Hey – the next generation … let them worry about this. Time for me to slow down and learn how to compost and shut up with the ranting. Let the young ones knock sense into the corporate elite, the bankers, the masters of war and the planet fuckers. The catastrophe is a long time coming. Fifty years ago the Situationists suggested the project of capitalism was the annihilation of nature, but no one believed them.

No one in Australian politics is up for the challenge, apart from the Greens, who are outnumbered. Australian scholar Richard A. Slaughter rightly says we’re facing “the biggest wake up call in history,” though many of us are focused on Facebook, YouTube and Doggie Diets. In its plodding way the Julia Gillard government makes a stab at reducing emissions, while being hounded by the mining magnates, and blow-torched by Rupert Murdoch’s media.

Among high-profile eco warriors, as Jorgen Randers and Paul Gilding describe, two conversations often take place simultaneously. The public position is: “we face serious risks, potentially catastrophic, if we don’t act urgently and strongly.” In private, often late at night, as they wonder if the battle is lost, they discuss “geopolitical breakdown, mass starvation and what Earth would be like with a few hundred million people.” On an unconscious level, this double talk may also apply to younger Australians, who want to have fun, get pissed, travel and chill out. Come midnight among friends and similar truth telling emerges. “We’re fucked.” Many Australians can sense a planetary emergency, but they also want nights off.

Over a billion people in 100 countries face a bleak future. In the nations most vulnerable to climate change, resilience is already eroded by entrenched poverty and degraded environments. Frequent natural disasters will tip communities over the edge into chronic famine and forced migration. Yet these are the counties that have contributed least to climate change. If the Greenland ice cap melts, most of Bangladesh disappears.

Australian politicians on both sides of the House are likely in for a shock, judging from grim reports raining down from climate change experts. We could be headed for irreversible climate change in just five years, according to the International Energy Agency? (IEA), which warns, “It will be impossible to hold global warming to safe levels.” Carbon emissions have risen a record amount, despite the worst recession for 80 years. The IEA’s data is widely regarded by many as the “gold standard in emissions and energy.” Five years! Are we learning to live with an unimaginable absurdity?

Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said the latest evidence shows that models have underestimated the speed at which the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets will start to shrink. It had been expected that island nations would have several decades to adapt to rising sea levels, but evacuation may now be their only option. The Pacific islands, which are only 4.6 meters above sea level at their highest point, are facing the imminent prospect of flooding, with saltwater infusion destroying water supplies. “Thousands of years of culture are at risk of disappearing as the populations of vulnerable island states have no place to go.” Well they do, actually, so long as rich nations lend a helping hand. Will Australia rise to the task?

In August 2001, the Howard government of Australia refused permission for a Norwegian freighter carrying 438 rescued refugees from a distressed fishing vessel in international waters to enter the country. During the dispute, Australian Special Forces boarded the ship. The government of Norway accused Australia of failing to meet obligations to distressed mariners under international law.

Later, another maritime controversy arose in the lead up to the federal elections, in which Howard’s ministers claimed that seafaring asylum seekers had thrown children overboard in a presumed ploy to secure rescue and passage to Australia. Stricter border protections were authorized and the Prime Minister was re-elected. Surprise, surprise: it turned out that not a single child had been thrown overboard.

Try to imagine yourself fleeing from your cultural roots, your sinking island, and forced to cross international borders, where you are classified stateless, dumped in a facility – perhaps an offshore island that isn’t yet sinking – where you have to start again from scratch. And why? Because the major players on the planet, the corporations, the climate deniers, the politicians, the bankers and most of all the VOTERS had turned a blind eye to repeated warnings of imminent tragedy.

What’s needed now are battalions of eco warriors with science degrees, gardening skills and the capacity to create zones of survival. We need to move beyond the world of the possible, and the maybe, and prepare for what may soon be urgent and imminent. Are we preparing “safe passage” documents for climate change refugees? Are the tents being tested and the food kitchens assembled? If not, why? From where will food and freedom come?

Richard Neville is an Australian writer and troublemaker.

Thinkbox TV Planning Awards: Agency and advertiser judges unveiled

Leaders from media agencies, media owners and advertisers have lined up again to join the21-strong judging panel for this year’s Thinkbox TV Planning Awards, run in partnership with Mediaweek.co.uk and Campaign.

The Corner scoops National Geographic ad brief

National Geographic Channels International has appointed The Corner to handle a global campaign for the launch of a new series.

Kitcatt Nohr Digitas lands £5m Dogs Trust

Dogs Trust has appointed Kitcatt Nohr Digitas to handle its £5 million integrated account.

Metro names Dare as lead agency

Metro, the Associated Newspapers-owned free daily newspaper, has hired Dare as its creative agency of record.