Hasta La Creative!

Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new and trending TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, a company that catalogs, tags and measures activity around TV ads in real time. The New Releases ran on TV for the first time yesterday. The Most Engaging ads are showing sustained social heat, ranked by SpotShare scores reflecting the percent of digital activity associated with each one over the past week. See the methodology here.

Last night Macy’s and Kohl’s both brought out new springtime sale messaging, while Aloe Blacc delivered his “The Man” pump-up jam to yet another athlete, courtesy of Beats Audio. And Gary Oldman did some anti-advertising for HTC One in an ad by Deutsch L.A., which just won the account back after some of Ogilvy’s work fell flat.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

(TrendHunter.com) Arnold Schwarzschenegger was a formidable Terminator, but the Governor of California couldn’t hold a candle to Terminator Queen Elizabeth II—doodled by an anonymous Australian artist on…

An outdoor ad campaign in San Francisco is trying something novel to stop people from texting and driving: public shaming.

Graphic designer Brian Singer has furtively been taking photos of people texting behind the wheel along the 101 Freeway and posting them to a website, Texting While in Traffic, or TWIT for short. (Singer says he's always a passenger, not a driver, when he snaps the photos.) Lately, Singer has been paying out of his own pocket to put some of the photos on billboards around town, Gizmodo reports.

He says the number of offenders is outrageous. "For every nose picker, there's 20 texters," he estimates. He's not bothered by privacy concerns, either. "I don't think people driving on 101 have the expectation of privacy," Singer says. "All I'm really doing is taking photos in a public place."

Singer tried to get a road-safety group to fund the project, but is going it alone for now with 11 billboards. He says he hopes the billboards freak people out enough to stop texting and driving—and even hopes other people start taking photos, which "could have a dramatic affect on people's behavior."

A notícia da expansão do império de Mark Zuckerberg com a aquisição da Oculus VR, arrematada por 2 bilhões de dólares, não foi a única boa-nova do Facebook.

O CEO da rede social também compartilhou alguns números sobre sua base de dados, que conta hoje com mais de 1 bilhão de pessoas acessando via aplicativos em dispositivos móveis. Em dezembro do ano passado, eram cerca de 945 milhões de usuários conferindo o Facebook via mobile.

O Instagram também bateu a casa dos 200 milhões de usuários cadastrados, o dobro do que tinha quando a empresa foi comprada por Zuckerberg, há 2 anos.

Esses dados estatísticos podem ter ajudado a convencer os criadores do Oculus Rift a se juntarem ao conglomerado de empresas do Facebook, mas nem tudo são flores. O CEO da Mojang, Markus Persson, revelou em um tuíte que estava negociando uma possível versão do Minecraft para o Oculus, mas que ao saber da aquisição da empresa, cancelou o acordo.

We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.

— Markus Persson (@notch) March 25, 2014

Ele esclarece as razões em um post em seu blog, dizendo acreditar que a realidade aumentada vai mudar o mundo, mas que o Facebook não é uma empresa de tecnologia, e tem um histórico de se importar apenas em gerar ‘estatísticas sobre seus usuários’ e nada mais. Concluiu explicando que não quer trabalhar com plataformas sociais, e que não tem interesse em usar sua expertise para (indiretamente) gerar valor para o Facebook.

No entanto, a mágoa do criador do Minecraft, jogo que já vendeu 14,3 milhões de unidades, ainda não parece capaz de ofuscar o bilhão de usuários que agora podem potencialmente ser atingidos pela Oculus VR.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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Consumers and marketers have conflicting ideas about brand purpose — disagreeing on where brands should concentrate their efforts, and on which nationalities are most receptive — according to new research from the World Federation of Advertisers.

Only 40% of marketers thought that listening to and acting on customer needs was important to brand purpose, but in a parallel study by pr agency Edelman, consumers chose “Listens to customer needs and feedback” as the number one attribute that builds brand trust.

Speaking from the WFA’s Global Marketer Week in Sydney, Australia, Stephan Loerke, managing director of the WFA, said, “There is consensus that brand purpose is increasingly relevant, but people and marketers don’t seem to agree on what it means. Marketers see it as the bigger picture, but people see it as what you do in daily life.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Whatever your politics, it's hard not to like a congressional candidate who opens her campaign ad with the line, "I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm."

Joni Ernst is a conservative Republican hoping to replace Iowa's retiring Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin. She's in a crowded field of GOP contenders for the spot, so it's no surprise that she'd go for an attention-grabbing ad. If nothing else, her go-straight-for-the-goolies approach shows she's not afraid to be called a ball buster. 

Check out the ad below. Hat tip to Jenn Wallis on Twitter.

As the golf world awaits the start of the Masters, W+K Portland takes a look back at golf history for their new Nike Golf spot — way back.

The 60-second spot, directed by Biscuit Filmworks’ Steve Rogers, begins with a player admonishing another for using Nike’s new RZN balls. From there, the spot takes leap after leap back in time, showing how each progression in the history of golf was met with great resistance. This goes all the way back to the game’s formation, leading into the tagline, “Play in the Now.” While not exactly funny, the spot gels perfectly with the tagline and silences any opposition from “traditionalists” to Nike’s RZN ball by making them seem utterly ridiculous. Stick around for credits after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As programmatic trading continues to gather pace, Noel Penzer, managing director at AOL, looks at what needs to happen to cut out waste and make advertising technology more efficient

Global Radio’s LBC has partnered with Outdoor Plus to promote tonight’s eagerly anticipated political showdown between Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg and Ukip’s Nigel Farage.