Tesco has promoted Michael Comish to the role of group digital officer as the retailer seeks to bolster its digital offering by hiring 150 people across the next year.
We arrived this morning to a flood of tips regarding the state of Translation, mainly that the NYC-based agency cut several staffers last week. While many of those on the Spy line were spouting numbers including “38,” we heard directly a short while ago from Translation founder/CEO Steve Stoute, who clarifies that he had to actually let go of 17 people across departments last Friday.
From what the exec tells us, it had nothing to do with specific client issues (and yes, we are looking into the one many of you mentioned), but that “when you grow to where we grew, [there are staffers] who are not culturally fit, are overpaid or are not qualified.” Stoute adds, “I have to keep the talent at my company at the same level as the opportunities that come our way.” We’ll keep you posted if and when we hear more.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Every year Ad Age asks young creatives from around the world to design the cover of its issue that gets distributed at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The designers of the winning cover, left, win a trip to the annual ad fest, where we at Ad Age toast them at a cocktail party at the Majestic Barriere Hotel.
To all those who entered: Thank you. And don’t give up hope. This year’s winners, Katrina Encanto and EJ Galang, were entering for the third year in a row — you never know when it’s going to be your time.
This year we had more than 300 entries from around the world. And while we had to pick a winner, we also wanted to nod to our runners up. Here, check out the 12 finalists, scattered across the globe, from Auckland to Amsterdam, Johannesburg to Toronto, Prague to Miami, Hong Kong to Brooklyn, and beyond.
Marketers rushing to cloak brands in social causes might want to chat with Daniel Lubetzky. The Mexico-born son of a Holocaust survivor has dedicated most of his career to cause marketing, whether it’s forming business partnerships between Israelis and Arabs to find "profits and peace" or launching Kind Healthy Snacks, whose mission is to inspire "unexpected acts of kindness."
But for a man whose ventures are about doing good, he is surprisingly bearish on the concept as a revenue driver. "I don’t think social purpose is what drives our company’s growth," he said about the Kind brand of snack bars. "And in most cases for real sustainable brands, that’s not what drives sales or long-term success. The product has to stand on its own merits and it has to be the best product in its category."
The 10-year-old, Manhattan-based Kind has grown retail distribution from 1,000 doors in 2004 to 80,000 doors this year, according to company statistics, appearing in outlets such as Starbucks and Walmart. Competing with behemoths like General Mills and Kellogg Co., privately owned Kind claims sales of more than $125 million last year, double its 2011 revenue.
Tobacco advertising, once nearly a $1 billion ad category, may seem as much a relic as Peggy Olson’s typewriter. But with the three largest U.S. tobacco companies entering the electronic-cigarette market, Big Tobacco is poised to once again become a significant spender.
The e-cigarette industry is projected to roughly double in size this year to an approximately $1 billion market in 2013 from a $500 million market in 2012, and to grow at a 50% compound annual rate over the next few years, according to a Citibank report. “It’s an exciting time to be in U.S. tobacco,” said Citibank analyst Vivien Azer.
R.J. Reynolds, the second-largest tobacco company in the U.S., last week held its first press conference in two decades to launch Vuse, its “digital vapor cigarette.” Marketed by its R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co., Vuse will next month begin marketing in Colorado — the first state in an eventual rollout — with print, TV and direct mail marketing from CHI, London.
Facebook is one of the digital world's great shape-shifters — it's endlessly changed its user interface, its business strategy and (notoriously) its privacy policies over the years — but one thing that's remained constant: We all love to complain about it.
In fact, hinting at, or outright predicting, the eventual demise of Facebook has become something of an obsession for a lot of the media. Business Insider, for instance, recently ran a post titled "You Have to Believe This Chart Makes Mark Zuckerberg Slightly Anxious." The graphic came from Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker and it plots the results of a survey of 2,000 social-media users, age 12 to 64, who were asked in 2011 and then again in 2012 which social-media products they use. YouTube, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Foursquare and even MySpace all gained. But Facebook actually shrunk a bit.
Though surveys about self-reported media usage obviously should be taken with a grain of salt, the chart still would seem to jibe with data Nielsen released last month, which said that Facebook shed more than 10 million U.S. users from March 2012 to March 2013 — going from 153 million monthly uniques to 142 million.
It’s harder to make a pixelated paper cube head than you might think. For inspiration, the winners of Ad Age’s fourth annual cover contest — Bangkok-based young creatives Katrina Encanto and EJ Galang from Lowe and Partners in Thailand — asked themselves the question “Who is the creative of 2013 and of the future?”
Their winning entry “Portrait of a Creative in the Digital Age,” envisioned an explosive creature constructed from brightly-colored paper cubes with a deliberately random, ambiguous face that can be interpreted as evolving (they deliberately left a lot to the imagination).
“We were inspired by people who prevail because of their openmindedness about change,” Ms. Encanto said. “We tried to create a face that looks like it’s evolving. It’s a bit open to interpretation. Everyone has their own take on it.”
Creative executives are a hot commodity at a time when every marketer is looking for big ideas that can boost sales. All that demand means agencies are digging deep in their pockets to compensate the creative department, according to recruitment firm 24 Seven’s annual Salary and Job Market study.
The poll of more than 2,000 ad professionals found that 72% of creative execs surveyed saw their total compensation increase in 2013, compared with 69% in 2012. Salaries rose 5.5% on average, compared with last year’s lift of less than 4.8%. And more creatives got bumps than those in other roles this year — a shift from 2012, when there were fewer salary increases for creative executives in comparison with other positions such as account planners or strategists.
The most in-demand creative positions, unsurprisingly, were rooted in digital or mobile. Among them: user experience designer, interactive art director and mobile user interface designer.
A new class is gaining power in the left-brain territory of Silicon Valley: designers.
You could witness their rise at Google’s I/O developer conference last month, where the company introduced aesthetically pleasing versions of products such as Google Maps. Its new look for Google+ even seemed to borrow from Pinterest, with posts formatted as cards that cascade downward when users refresh the page.
But it’s not just Google. Many technology titans previously satisfied with making products useful increasingly feel pressed to make them beautiful, too. They are responding by giving design and user experience a more prominent organizational role. Startups, meanwhile, are getting hungrier for designers at the top of their games, spurred partly by the ascendance of Silicon Valley darlings like Pinterest, Airbnb and Path — all of which have co-founders who double as design or product leads.
Hugh Jackman, Kelly Clarkson, John Legend, Elton John and Tom Cruise were all special guests at Walmart’s annual meeting last week. But at the pre-meeting shareholder festivities, two celebrities who paraded around may have outshone them all by Bentonville standards: "Duck Dynasty" stars Korie and Willie Robertson.
"You would have thought Elvis was in the building," said Walmart U.S. CEO Bill Simon. With the "Duck Dynasty" finale in April garnering 9.6 million viewers, this might not be too much of a surprise.
The hirsute hunters of "Duck Dynasty" adorn the top-selling graphic T-shirt at Walmart. "You might have wondered if women would wear a T-shirt with bearded men on the front," said Duncan Mac Naughton, the retailer’s chief merchandising and marketing officer. The answer is yes, he added.
La société Uji Films a imaginé pour Applegate cette excellente vidéo proposant de découvrir en 90 secondes plus de 20 hot-dogs représentatifs de plusieurs villes américaines. Une création sympathique intitulée « Hot Dog & The City » qui ouvrira l’appétit aux plus gourmands. A découvrir dans la suite de l’article.
Joe Gebbia, one of the co-founders of accommodation marketplace Airbnb.com, talks to Marketing about how brands can capitalize on the shift to collaborative consumption.
Attraction’s victory in the ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ final helped ITV to a peak audience of 13.1 million viewers on Saturday night, down by more than a million from 2012.
Sponsor the UK’s biggest and most prestigious technology awards celebrating the very best in consumer technology.
The Direct Marketing Association is calling on the Government to provide regulators with greater resources to help clamp down on nuisance calls.
The future of media is tied up with a shift in power towards mobile away from PCs, with Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook driving today’s agenda, according to Benedict Evans, a consultant at Enders Analysis.
(TrendHunter.com) Polish photographer Sarah K. Byrne has taken some of the most beautiful double exposure photos. Combining side profile shots of young women with flowers and trees, these double exposure photos are…
The campaign is to reveal the horrific truth about Chinese fur farms. The life-like sculptures created by Shenyang University Art Department portray the animals suffered in fur trade, such as rabbits, minks and foxes â in 550 thousands of tiny needles. In Mar. 27-28, 2013, The installation exhibited at the Zhuozhan Shopping Center in Shenyang as an invitation to make a pledge against buying fur.
Three respective 3D outdoor billboards are sculpted with sewing needles, bearing information and showing around Beijing and chilly northeast provinces of China where fur demand is high. We also built a site where people could pledge never wear fur and share their thoughts on a social platforms. For each pledge collected, a needle will be removed from and replaced with a strand of fur. Chinese celebrities like movie star Sun Li joined the cause, her promo video and Weibo tweet also grew an outrage against fur industry.
After over 5 mainstream TV news, 30 digital media and 40 Chinese artists spread this campaign in various channels rapidly, more than 300,000 people pledged to give up fur and acquired 20,564 Weibo retweets, 44,541 clicks in promo video within only one week.
URL: http://furhurts.petaasiapacific.com/
Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Shanghai, China
Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Beijing, China
Chief Creative Officer: Graham Fink
Executive Creative Director: Juggi Ramakrishnan, Wilson Chow
Creative Director: Xingsheng Qi
Senior Creative Director: Morris Ku, Peggy Wang
Art Director: Ashley Chen, Hang Qi
Head of Copy: KweiChee Lam
Associate CD / Copywriter: Paul Bo, Awing Chen
Associate CD / Art Director: Ming Law
Business Director: Uma Wang, Canna Jiao
Head of Digital: Peony Wu
Social Marketing Manager: Olivia Fang
Photographer: Zhong Shi
Account manager: Freya Yan
Senior Account Manager: Iris Huang
“Stop treat your dog like a trashcan.”
Advertising Agency: Publicis, Bogota, Colombia
Chief Creative Officer: Jairo Lezaca, Rodrigo Tarquino, Francisco Castillo, Héctor Fernández
Executive Creative Director: Erik Vervroegen
Art Director: Bastien Grisolet
Copywriter: Jairo Lezaca, Arturo Suárez
Art Director: Rodrigo Tarquino, Cristhian Ramírez
Visual Effects: Sparklink
Agency Producer: Jean-Luc Chirio, Lauriane Dula
Photographer: Ben Sandler
Account manager: Jacobo Álvarez, Juan Carlos Tapia
Le studio Zimoun présente leur première installation permanente, une intervention sonore à l’intérieur d’un silo de 1951 abandonné. Située en Suisse, cette création propose un espace blanc dans lequel 329 moteurs permettent d’enclencher le mouvement de boules de coton, créant ainsi une atmosphère sonore déroutante.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
