Hasta La Creative!

You’ve never seen an episode of the fictional figurine drama “The Real Soccer Moms of Datalandia,” but you’ve probably seen a show just like it. And for anyone who has encountered the frustration of a malfunctioning TV signal or a storm-induced blackout, missing that crucial moment in whatever show you’re watching can make you want to punch your monitor until it breaks (side note: if you have Time Warner Cable, this process happens daily). Though we watch the shows, we, as consumers, don’t really pay attention to how the sausage gets made, that is: how the wires and signals connect to make sure that our real soccer moms stay on the screen.

For the past few weeks, General Electric and Mekanism have been using a series of online videos to explain this process to consumers. The newest spot, “Stormageddon,” is shown above. I’m not sure if consumers care much for big data explanations. They’d rather watch bad reality shows where women frequently toss glasses of pinot grigio on each other. Thinking about how General Electric makes the sausage feels a little like they are patting themselves on the back as their bank account gets smaller. If I liked sausage, I’d rather just eat it. Check out a second clip after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Nuts and Zoo have rejected the Co-operative’s ultimatum to hide explicit images on their front covers with modesty bags, in a move that could see both magazines removed from the retail and banking group’s stores.

For all the hand-wringing over automated ad buying systems and mobile devaluing publishers’ real estate, a number of online properties can still fetch top dollar.

The below premium placements, sourced from media buyers and sellers, span the tried and traditional to the new and so-called “native,” but industry executives identified one commonality across all cited: the ability to attract sizeable audiences and justify substantial spending.

YouTube

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WPP has pushed on with its strategy of investing in digital agencies and fast-growth markets in the wake of the Publicis-Omnicom deal, with a brace of acquisitions.

Le trio Numero 111, constitué de Sophie Françon, Jennifer Julien et Grégory Peyrache, revisite les codes du design intérieur en utilisant des formes à la limite de l’abstraction et pourtant qui forment un espace fonctionnel et cohérent. Tandem est une très belle collection à découvrir en images dans la suite.

Aldermore Bank, the online bank, has hired Equimedia to lead its digital marketing strategy and media planning and buying.

When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s modern feminist manifesto “Lean In” ignited negativity, Hyatt was forced to pull the plug on a main element of its content marketing strategy, months in the works. The quick decision was based on numbers as much as gut instinct. Hyatt’s agency Sparks and Honey was monitoring digital discussions surrounding a theme the young Omnicom shop had determined was a good one for the hotel chain to hook to its brand: “women having it all.”

“They called me up to say it’s getting a little bit dark in that space,” said Dan Moriarty, director of digital strategy for Hyatt, who said the firm originally intended to include the concept of women having it all as one of the trends around which it planned to build a campaign aimed at career-minded women. When, about two days before the activation was planned to start, Sparks and Honey showed Hyatt it had tracked 80-some negative reactions to Sandberg’s book, the partners decided to scrap the theme, despite three months of planning.

Instead, they replaced it with “travel hacks,” or digital tools for making the most of travel. Other trends that Sparks and Honey had isolated as appropriate to align with Hyatt this spring were also relatively innocuous: among them yoga and meditation, getting a good night’s sleep and maintaining rituals while traveling.

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Where art thou, David Caruso? The subhead of the announce about this reads, “DDB Canada launches arresting campaign for the Vancouver Police Foundation” and somewhere a PR intern is smiling with self-satisfaction. Initially, the Vancouver Police Foundation approached DDB for a print ad that they could distribute in local newspapers with 1950s flair. Thankfully the agency got back to them and said something along the lines of, “Today we use computers.” Thus DDB Canada’s hometown office created a social media campaign around police sunglasses, wherein community members can purchase the glasses and, if they snap a photo of themselves and share it with the hashtag #VPDPartners, win a Ride-Along experience. The Department’s website will feature the photos from the contest.

Two 30-second spots advertise the sunglasses, with the best one featuring a large man skidding on the hood of a car. We watch him, like a beached whale, for a little too long until the tagline arrives: “Wearing the sunglasses supports the cops. It doesn’t make you one.” It’s cute, and shows why we need advertising agencies. Otherwise, these spots would have been 6×9 Ariel-font jokes in the back of the Vancouver Sun.

“In the short term, the goal of the campaign is simply to raise awareness for the Vancouver Police Foundation and show support for the VPD by wearing the sunglasses,” says Martina Meckova, executive director of the Vancouver Police Foundation. “Our long term objective is to increase the membership of the Foundation and broaden the support base, so that more people in Vancouver can benefit from the work that we do in the community.” Second spot after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

MediaCom has appointed Specific Media’s Martin Galvin to the new role of trading director.

Highly addressable advertising has been a long-standing plan for the TV business, which wants to rival the ad targeting available online. While there’s no question that marketers want to make their spending more efficient, however, the biggest beneficiary of addressable commercials so far may be the TV industry itself.

Cable networks like Starz and HBO have begun trying DirecTV’s addressable advertising platform to find specific viewers who they believe would actually be interested in their shows. Cable and satellite operators, meanwhile, are taking advantage of the system to more efficiently target specific customers and get current subscribers to upgrade.

That’s not to say other industries aren’t using the system, but it could be the most effective for the actual TV operators, said Claudio Marcus, exec. VP-marketing and research, Visible World, which provides targeting technology to Cablevision.

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