Hasta La Creative!

Netflix will stop running messages blaming slow streaming speeds on broadband providers’ networks next week.

The company displayed at least one of these messages last week, aimed directly at Verizon. That error message — “The Verizon network is crowded right now. Adjusting video for smoother playback” — made its way around social media this after Vox Media developer Yuri Victor posted an image of the message to his Twitter feed.

In a blog post on Monday, a Netflix spokesman said this “transparency campaign” will end on June 16. Netflix launched the test in early May on a small scale. While Netflix will halt the campaign, it left the door open to roll it out more broadly at a later date.

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Today Seattle design/ad shop Creature announced that James Keblas would be its new President, effective immediately.

The most interesting part of this announcement is that Keblas does not have the background one might expect for an incoming agency president.

He spent the last nine years as director of the city’s official Office of Film + Music and, before that, he worked at the nonprofit arts center The Vera Project. Keblas has spent a majority of his career to date preserving and promoting the arts in Seattle.

So why did Creature go with Keblas?

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Shares in Time Inc., owner of People, Sports Illustrated and Time magazines, were off nearly 1% to $23.30 Monday, its first day of trading as a public company.

The company’s share price had tumbled about 4% after trading began but regained much of the lost ground during the afternoon.

Time Inc. is the nation’s largest magazine publisher and the only pure-play magazine company to trade publicly after parent Time Warner decided to spin off the underperforming publishing unit. Time Warner now plans to focus on its entertainment properties, including HBO, Turner networks and CNN. Shares of Time Warner were up more than 1% Monday to $68.99.

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72andSunny has named Group Creative Director Matt Murphy a partner at the agency. Mr. Murphy joined 72 in 2009 after serving as a senior art director at Wieden + Kennedy. He went on to lead some of the shop’s most notable work, including the K-Swiss Kenny Powers MFCEO campaign and work for Nike, Activision and Google. As partner, Mr. Murphy will continue to lead on Google and the agency’s work in experimenting with art, technology and entertainment.

McCann has hired James Dawson-Hollis and Bill Wright from Ogilvy West, LA, as global executive creative directors, reporting to global creative chairman Rob Reilly. The pair were co-chief creative officers at Ogilvy West, working on Qualcomm, HTC, Nesquik, Arco gasoline, and am/pm convenience stores, among other accounts. Before Ogilvy, the pair worked at Crispin Porter + Bogusky on the Kraft business, with work including the 2011 Kraft Mac & Cheese “Ted Williams,” campaign about the homeless man with the golden voice.

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Os sites de resenha são provavelmente uma das piores dores de cabeça dos gerentes e proprietários de locais que prestam serviços. Se o cliente sai descontente, ele não deixa mais aquele bilhetinho, ou chama o responsável para conversar, mas rapidamente segue para algum site ou rede social e espalha a sua avaliação pessoal para os amigos e quem mais possa ler.

Com a indexação do Google, os seus futuros clientes acabam ficando a uma rápida pesquisa de distância de comentários que falam coisas que você não gostaria de ver divulgadas por aí. Nesse caso, o que fazer?

As estratégias são diversas, mas uma que não pode ser considerada é tentar ‘apagar’ esses comentários negativos, já que o ricocheteio dessa iniciativa pode ser ainda pior e alcançar uma audiência ainda maior do que a simples resenha negativa inicial.

Foi basicamente isso que aconteceu com o caso do Spa Grand Village nos últimos dias. Circula nas redes uma suposta notificação enviada a Flavia Carvalho, uma cliente do local, solicitando a remoção de “comentários negativos e infundados” publicados no site TripAdvisor.

A resenha da cliente

A carta, que segundo a cliente foi recebida por Sedex, ainda estipulava um prazo de 5 dias para que os comentários fossem removidos por ela, período após o qual a empresa teria que “tomar as providências cabíveis, ingressando com uma ação judicial de ressarcimento de dados morais sofridos e por difamação”.

Irritada, Flávia fotografou e postou a notificação no seu Facebook, gerando um elevado número de compartilhamentos de gente que também se indignou com a postura do Spa, que tentava ‘limpar’ sua imagem ameaçando seus consumidores com processos legais.

A notificação enviada pelo Spa

Segundo as regras do TripAdvisor, Flávia tinha razão em se indignar. Em contato com o Brainstorm#9, a equipe do TripAdvisor no Brasil esclareceu que está explícito nas regras de uso do site que não é permitido apagar resenhas apenas pelo fato delas serem negativas ou por fazerem críticas. A remoção de comentários só é possível em caso de fraude, quando o proprietário do estabelecimento deve solicitar uma revisão da resenha, para que o TripAdvisor possa averiguar  caso.

O Brainstorm#9 também contatou o Spa Grand Village, mas fomos informados via Facebook que a empresa ainda está avaliando a situação, e que não há um posicionamento oficial.

A diretriz do TripAdvisor para os proprietários de estabelecimentos é que eles usem as informações das resenhas para rever processos internos, melhorando o atendimento e incentivando clientes satisfeitos a fazerem também o seu comentário no site, de forma a equilibrar as opiniões. Além disso, é sempre bom lembrar que intimidar seu cliente a remover quaisquer comentários negativos pode ter uma repercussão ainda pior do que a resenha poderia sugerir, como aconteceu nesse caso.

Afinal, quantos mais comentários ruins não poderiam ter sido removidos com uma tática semelhante? Nem todo mundo tem a paciência da Flávia, e pode ter ‘achado mais fácil’ ir lá e apagar ao invés de ter dor de cabeça.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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BLT Communications, Hollywood has a new broadcast campaign for Zynga’s Farmville 2, entitled “Anytime is Farmville Time.”

The series of television spots all feature players enjoying Farmville 2 at different locations, with crops and animals from the game leaping to life off the screen and disturbing those around them. These range from the everyday — “Living Room” and “Office” — to “Spa” and “Airplane.” Each spot ends with the message that the game is “Available now, anytime, anywhere.”

“The challenge was to make it look as realistic as possible while staying true to the design and characters of the FarmVille game,” explained director Roderick Fenske. To achieve this, Fenske and his team used a combination of in-camera effects using models of the crops, and CG animation elements augmenting the scenes. “By blurring the worlds of CG and real practical effects, we’re keeping the audience guessing and hopefully amazed as to how we pulled it off,” said Fenske. Stick around for credits after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

No sooner had we shared our lament over the fact Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s had seemingly abandoned their sex sells approach, we see Kia is unapologetically illustrating the awesome power a hot woman holds over a man, or in this case, sports fans who think there are actually sports other than soccer worth watching during World Cup month.

In three David&Goliath-created spots, Adriana Lima (and her endless legs and come-hither smirk) turns men into slack-jawed putty which she then molds into World Club fans by cooing, “In my country, this is football.”

Like lemmings off a cliff, every guy is more than happy to become a soccer fan for a month. And why not? What wouldn’t you do for a supermodel in a little black dress?

Viacom today became the latest big media conglomerate to buy a foothold on YouTube.

The parent company of MTV and Comedy Central took a minority stake in online video network Defy Media in exchange for three gaming properties: Addicting Games, GameTrailers and Shockwave.

The monetary terms of the deal were not disclosed. Defy Media will add a board member from Viacom, but who takes the seat has not yet been determined.

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Is The New York Times suffering from collective amnesia? That was the question bouncing around last week when the Times introduced its latest subscription product, NYT Opinion. For $6 every four weeks, subscribers get unlimited access to an iPhone app, NYT Opinion, with Times opinion articles as well as curated opinion pieces from elsewhere on the web in a section of the app called Op-Talk.

It’s a familiar pitch from the Times, which in 2005 rolled out TimesSelect, its first attempt at an online paywall. For $7.95 a month, subscribers got unlimited access to Times’ columnists as well as the paper’s archives. The subscription package was shuttered just two years later.

The company regrouped and in 2011 introduced a metered paywall that is widely regarded as a success. At the end of the first quarter of this year, the Times had nearly 800,000 digital subscribers, and subscription revenue was outpacing that of ad sales.

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