The Co-operative Group is asking consumers to help shape its strategy, including whether or not it should make political donations, how it should reward shareholders, and how it can help local communities, a move it is backing with a marketing push.
Possible, the WPP digital digital agency, has appointed SapientNitro’s Mikhail Goldgaber as its head of experience.
Publicis Groupe, the owner of Saatchi & Saatchi and Starcom MediaVest Group, had a “record year” in 2013 with pre-tax income up nine per cent despite revenue softening in the final three months.
Kickstarter, the fundraising platform for grassroots projects, has informed its members that its online community was hacked, and has recommended people change their passwords as a precautionary measure.
Havas has reported revenue of €514 million (£419.8 million) in the final three months of 2014, down two per cent year on year despite its UK businesses reporting an “excellent fourth quarter” with revenue up by 18 per cent.
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
Lao P. Xia Xiaowan
A series of psychological studies over the past 20 years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper. The reason, according to attention restoration theory, or ART, is that when people aren’t being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind.
The results of the most recent such study were published in Psychological Science at the end of 2008. A team of University of Michigan researchers, led by psychologist Marc Berman, recruited some three dozen people and subjected them to a rigorous and mentally fatiguing series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy downtown streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results.
The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at pictures of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. “In sum,” concluded the researchers, “simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.” Spending time in the natural world seems to be of “vital importance” to “effective cognitive functioning.”
There is no Sleepy Hollow on the internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its restorative magic. There is only the endless, mesmerizing buzz of the urban street. The stimulations of the web, like those of the city, can be invigorating and inspiring. We wouldn’t want to give them up. But they are, as well, exhausting and distracting. They can easily, as Hawthorne understood, overwhelm all quieter modes of thought. One of the greatest dangers we face as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is the one that informs the fears of both the scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and the artist Richard Foreman: a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.
It’s not only deep thinking that requires a calm, attentive mind. It’s also empathy and compassion. Psychologists have long studied how people experience fear and react to physical threats, but it’s only recently that they’ve begun researching the sources of our nobler instincts. What they’re finding is that, as Antonio Damasio, the director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, explains, the higher emotions emerge from neural processes that “are inherently slow.” In one recent experiment, Damasio and his colleagues had subjects listen to stories describing people experiencing physical or psychological pain. The subjects were then put into a magnetic resonance imaging machine and their brains were scanned as they were asked to remember the stories. The experiment revealed that while the human brain reacts very quickly to demonstrations of physical pain – when you see someone injured, the primitive pain centers in your own brain activate almost instantaneously – the more sophisticated mental process of empathizing with psychological suffering unfolds much more slowly. It takes time, the researchers discovered, for the brain “to transcend immediate involvement of the body” and begin to understand and to feel “the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation.”
The experiment, say the scholars, indicates that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions. “For some kinds of thoughts, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection,” cautions Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a member of the research team. “If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states.” It would be rash to jump to the conclusion that the internet is undermining our moral sense. It would not be rash to suggest that as the net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts.
There are those who are heartened by the ease with which our minds are adapting to the web’s intellectual ethic. “Technological progress does not reverse,” writes a Wall Street Journal columnist, “so the trend toward multitasking and consuming many different types of information will only continue.” We need not worry, though, because our “human software” will in time “catch up to the machine technology that made the information abundance possible.” We’ll “evolve” to become more agile consumers of data. The writer of a cover story in New York magazine says that as we become used to “the 21st-century task” of “fitting” among bits of online information, “the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information.” We may lose our capacity “to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end,” but in recompense we’ll gain new skills, such as the ability to “conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media.” A prominent economist writes, cheerily, that “the web allows us to borrow cognitive strengths from autism and to be better infovores.” An Atlantic author suggests that our “technology-induced ADD” may be “a short-term problem,” stemming from our reliance on “cognitive habits evolved and perfected in an era of limited information flow.” Developing new cognitive habits is “the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity.”
These writers are certainly correct in arguing that we’re being molded by our new information environment. Our mental adaptability, built into the deepest workings of our brains, is a keynote of intellectual history. But if there’s comfort in their reassurances, it’s of a very cold sort. Adaptation leaves us better suited to our circumstances, but qualitatively it’s a neutral process. What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become. In the 1950s, Martin Heidegger observed that the looming “tide of technological revolution” could “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” Our ability to engage in “meditative thinking,” which he saw as the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress. The tumultuous advance of technology could, like the arrival of the locomotive at the Concord station, drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection. The “frenziedness of technology,” Heidegger wrote, threatens to “entrench itself everywhere.”
It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.
Brands’ marketing work needs three main components of environmental, social and personal insights, says John Kearon, chief executive of marketing and brand consultancy BrainJuicer, and here’s why.
Vivant à Vienne en Autriche, Andreas Scheiger s’est amusé avec Upcycle Fetish à utiliser divers pièces de vieux vélos pour décorer une pièce en proposant ceux-ci comme s’ils étaient des trophées. Des objets étonnants, qui en plus de proposer un aspect esthétique intéressant, peut aussi servir de porte-manteaux ou encore de porte-vélo.
| THE ORIGINAL? ATFD against Domestic Violence – 2011 « Don’t let anyone speak for you » Source : AdForum, EPICA Awards BRONZE Agency : Memac Ogilvy Tunis (Tunisia) |
THE ORIGINAL? CFCV against Domestic Violence – 2011 « Don’t let your man speak for you » Source : AdForum, TOPCOM GOLD Agency : New BBDO (France) |
“This is not about advising writers; we’re in search of information,” said Michael Winship, the president of the Writers Guild of America East.
     |
Born and raised in Mumbai, Arjava has a Bachelors degree in Mass Media with a specialization in Advertising. His first stints in the advertising field were summer internships at Ogilvy and Euro RSCG. Arjava joined FoxyMoron in 2009 as a junior visualizer when the team comprised of not less than 5 people. Currently, as the Creative Director at FoxyMoron, Arjava’s responsibilities include conceptualizing and executing strategic and integrated campaigns in the digital marketing space. When not busy in front of his Mac, he can be found planning a holiday he seldom takes or in front of the TV watching his beloved Manchester United.
Why are you into Digital?
I guess it chose me more than I chose it. I originally joined Foxy as a print designer but as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. One day, our digital designer was backed up so I pitched in and made my first website layout. It was absolutely terrible, but I loved working on it.
Did you attend school for fine art or design or Communications?
I had a course on design in college but that’s about it. I’ve pretty much taught myself everything I know about design, by constantly researching, practicing, screwing up & fixing it. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but it’s the only way I’ve known.
Were there any particular role models for you when you grew up?
That would have to be my elder sister Priya, who is also a designer. I grew up seeing her do all these crazy things on Photoshop and was totally blown away. I wanted to do what she could, and today I’m happy to say I can.
Who was the most influential personality on your career in Digital?
Paritosh Ajmera, one of the 4 Co-founders at FoxyMoron. We have a great working relationship and have always challenged each other. You always need someone who questions you, who makes you think twice about whether the idea you have is the best it could be, because on most occasions it isn’t.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
I honestly don’t know, I’ve often wondered where anyone gets their inspiration from. But the simplest answer would be other people and their work. It could be anyone from packaging designers and architects to street artists and photographers. When you see great work, it always stays with you and pushes you to do better yourself.
Tell us something about the work environment at FoxyMoron…
It’s great. When I joined there were about 5 other people here. It was all about having great fun doing great work and 5 years and 175 people later it’s still about that. We’ve never had someone show us the way, that ‘this’ is the way to run an agency or approach a project so our attitude has always been “fuck it, we’ll figure it out.” We’ve gotten ourselves in some pretty tight situations with that attitude but looks like it’s worked out pretty well for us.
Do you have any kind of a program to nurture and train young talent?
I’ve always had a sink or swim approach with fresh graduates or interns. We have recently started a learning center with a dedicated resource to make the transition in agency life easier. I like to throw them straight into the thick of things because it’s really important for young people to feel like they matter, that they are equals and have clients banking on them, otherwise it’s a pretty terrible feeling doing menial work for 10 hours a day.
What about new and young film makers/photographers? Do you consciously keep looking for newer talent and try someone completely new?
You have a lot of young photographers and film makers who have grown up in the digital age, who approach their work with a focusing on consumable digital content, which adds a great diversity to the kind of work we are now seeing. I’m always looking for great people to work with; age has never been a factor.
What do you think of the state of Digital advertising right now?
While it’s certainly going in the right direction, I think clients still treat it as the less loved step child to mainline. While most are ready to pump in lakhs in online media, a lot of them still need convincing on spending that kind of money on the campaigns themselves. I don’t think too many brand managers have still understood the power Digital could have, I think in 5 years we will see brands do far more extensive and innovative work in India.
Can you give us two examples of outstanding Digital Creative from India?
‘Google Search: Reunion’ and ‘Oreo Dunkathon’. I loved the Google campaign because I think they did a great job of representing their services in our daily lives without being offensively obvious. They took a touching story and managed to weave themselves into it so intrinsically. It could have backfired massively, but they did an inspiring job. Oreo has done a great job with their message of appealing to one’s inner child through their recent ‘Dunkathon’ campaign. Their campaign was fun, witty and very well executed while still maintaining a consistent level of engagement and creativity through the course of it, which for us in digital, is incredibly hard to do.
More and more young people are web savvy and want to work on the internet or on more entrepreneurial ventures. Has that affected the quality of people digital has been getting?
That’s a double-edged sword. On one hand this newfound sense of entrepreneurship means a lot of people are coming up with innovative strategies and identifying gaps in the market. The downside is that everyone thinks they can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, that they all have that million-dollar idea. When they don’t see their job heading in a direction that could help them achieve that, they tend to lose interest, which leads to higher employee turnover.
Can you give us a case study of one of your campaigns?
(Find Images Attached)
What advice do you have for aspiring creative professionals?
Never do the same thing twice. Constantly challenge yourself and never settle for ‘good enough’. You’ll be surprised with the results.
What skill set do you look for when hiring digital creative talent?
Purpose. I don’t think creative people should treat their work as a blank canvas for self-expression. Every word, every colour & font chosen should have a purpose. It’s all about finding a method to the madness.
What is your dream project?
Nike. I think the company and its agencies have done a brilliant job of owning their message and exciting their customer. It’s amazing how decade after decade they maintain their place as the coolest brand.
Mac or PC?
Seriously ?
Who would you like to take out for dinner?
Jony Ive. Jennifer Lawrence for desert.
What’s on your iPod?
A lot of everything! But while working, mostly EDM stuff. A lot of Madeon, Myon & Shane 54, Hardwell.
The post Arjava Vig, Creative Director, FoxyMoron appeared first on desicreative.
If there is a rivalry between the two, it is by many measures a mismatch. But that hasn’t stopped the salivation at the story line: Netflix, the Silicon Valley interloper, taking on HBO, the establishment player.
| |
Film
Herbal Revival
Production House:Veer Pictures
Director:Jake Nam
Executive Producer:Lee Chin Ming
Producer:Tara Tan
Director Of Photography:Feng Nian
Production Manager:Rebecca Tan
Post Producer:Tara Tan
Video Editor:Kelvin Leow
Online:Liu Qiong
Compositor Artist:Liu Qiong
Colorist:Sherlynn Chen
3d Artist:Liu Qiong
Audio Design:Joel Chua
With the Time Warner Cable deal, Comcast would not only lock up 30 percent of the cable market, but pricing leverage in all directions — with customers, networks and over-the-web providers like Netflix.
| |
Four journalists who broke news of government surveillance were among 30 reporters praised for their investigative work on Sunday.
| |
World Press Photo announced the winners of its 2013 contest while its judges lamented the proliferation of digital alterations, which disqualified several top contenders.
| |
The online news organization said it was adding at least a dozen staff members as it opens operations based in Texas and London. It also plans several regional sites.
| |
Print
Bezeq
No memory should be left out.
Advertising Agency:Acw Grey, Tel Aviv, Israel
Executive Creative Director:Tal Riven
Creative Director:Idan Regev
Copywriter:Kobi Cohen
Art Director:Ira Gimpelevich
Illustrator:Yinon Zinger
Executive Client Director:Elad Hermel
Supervisor:Michal Itzhaki
Account Manager:Natali Rabinovich
Production Manager:Meital Tzoref
Producer:Tali Sasson
Well, perhaps this is old news by now, but it does appear that John Norman is leaving his chief creative office position at TBWA\Chiat\Day LA after barely 18 months at the helm. Here’s one tip we received a few hours ago that may provide some clarification (and according to sources in the know, is legit): “John Norman will be leaving his post as Chief Creative Officer of TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles. John’s last day with the agency will be March 31 and until then he will be working with our Executive Creative Directors, Brent Anderson, Stephen Butler and Fabio Costa, to transition leadership across all our accounts.”
According to Adweek, BBH London partner/deputy ECD David Kobulsz is in talks to co-lead Chiat LA with Butler following Norman’s official departure. Speaking of Norman, the departing CCO joined TBWA\Chiat\Day LA after serving in the same role for two-and-a-half years at The Martin Agency. Prior to Martin, he held senior creative positions at the likes of W+K and Goodby.
As for the Chiat LA ECD team, Anderson has been with the agency for nearly nine years, Butler joined last summer after serving as creative partner at Mother while Costa worked with Norman at Martin before joining up with TBWA C\D LA as global GCD just after the CCO’s arrival.
Update: After the jump, you can read the brief note Norman sent to his TBWA\Chiat\Day LA colleagues earlier this afternoon that somewhat reveals his future plans, which have something to do with a certain founder of Translation.
Update 2: Yes, as has been reported, Norman will assume the role of CCO at Translation, a role we recall was last occupied by Chris Cereda, who eventually joined up with Scratch/Viacom Media Networks.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
La chaîne Ace Hotel, installée entre autres à New York et à Seattle, a rénové à Los Angeles l’United Artists Building pour implanter un nouvel hôtel. Cette ancienne bâtisse, avec son théâtre gothique, a été conçue en 1927 par C. Howard Crane et la firme Walker & Eisen. Un mélange de vinyles, et imprimés amérindiens à découvrir dans la suite.
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.
