The Engine Group is to be sold to the private equity company Lake Capital in a £100 million deal that will see management and staff take on shareholdings in a new combined group.
Andrew McGuinness, the founder of BMB and chairman of the PR agency Seven Dials, has been appointed the chief executive of Freud Communications.
How did the recent changes to ABC’s Regional Publication reporting come about and why were they introduced? ABC’s chief executive Jerry Wright explains.
The UK’s outdoor advertising industry returned to growth in the second quarter of 2014, propelled by transport and digital spend, according to new figures from the Outdoor Media Centre today.
This year’s Media Week Awards have attracted a record number of 563 entries from the UK’s most innovative media companies.
Satellite navigation giant TomTom has made the nascent world of wearables sexy with a steamy commercial that had millions of eyes glued to the monitors last week.
The spot, set to the theme tune of “Chariots of Fire,” features a gorgeous model, whom we now all know as Alexandria Morgan, running down a beach (in slo-mo, obviously), unzipping her jacket and revealing one of her best assets via a strapless push-up bra. Dubbed “Run Strapless,” the short is a promo spot for TomTom’s new smartwatch — the Runner Cardio GPS, that tracks your heartbeat without, of course, a chest strap.
The creative, provocative enough to be reportedly banned from TV, amassed 2.9 million views on the interwebs over the week that ended on Sunday, according to Visible Measures.
If you’re a brand marketer tasked with unlocking the maximum return on your ad dollars, chances are you don’t want to waste budget buying impressions that won’t drive sales. And you’re probably still not sure about mobile, because the actual impact is still somewhat unclear. You simply want to deliver targeted messages to the most relevant audience, who will drive sales at the shelf.
Easier said than done. Do you use purchase history data? Mobile? Desktop? Programmatic? The answer is yes.
Targeting with purchase history
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 here 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.
Among the new releases, Microsoft pits its personal assistant app Cortana against Apple’s Siri in a spot that Creativity previewed and made an Editor’s Pick yesterday, while a racy ad starring Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Hannah Ferguson and Paris Hilton has been hitting the airwaves, with, according to iSpot.tv data, appearances on 21 networks so far, including ESPNU, BBC America, History Channel and FXX. (Max Willens has the backstory on the campaign.) And Depend shows a bunch of people of all ages walking around in their underwear — and they’re encouraging you to “drop your pants for underwareness” too.
As always, you can find out more about the making of the best commercials on TV at Ad Age’s Creativity.
OKCupid, the dating site owned by billionaire Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, is the latest internet company to say it conducts psychological experiments on users.
OKCupid ran tests including analyzing the depth of conversations while users’ pictures were removed for seven hours, co-founder Christian Rudder wrote in a blog post yesterday. The website also temporarily changed its profile-rating system and told people with low compatibility scores that they were better matches than the system had really determined, he wrote.
The disclosure follows an onslaught of complaints against Facebook, which disclosed in June that experiments were conducted in 2012 to influence what users saw on their news feeds without getting permission. While the move incited concern about privacy issues, Rudder said these types of tests are needed for websites to improve their products.
Los Angeles production company Wondros has signed British director and photographer James Gooding to its roster. Gooding has directed work for brands Allianz, Samsung, Honda and Toshiba; for agencies including Droga 5, CP&B, Grey and Wieden & Kennedy; and for musical artists Dirty Vegas, U.N.K.L.E, Timbaland, RZA, Method Man, Chris Cornell and Coldplay. His photographs have appeared in such publications as The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Fast Company, Esquire and GQ. His commercial directorial debut, a multimedia campaign for Brother Europe, was shortlisted at Cannes Lions and he won a Gold at Creative Circle in 2013 for his work with Grey for the British Heart Foundation.
RSA Films has signed director Andreas Roth to its roster of filmmakers. Roth began his career working with German production company Markenfilm and then spent six months with Jung von Matt. His online viral ad for Dirt Devil won the Young Director Award in Cannes; he went on to win the YDA Award again in 2013 in the broadcast category for his work with Herbaria. Roth received a scholarship for the UCLA Film Academy Master Class, and in 2014 he graduated from Film Academy Baden-Wrttemberg with a diploma for commercial directing. He is also developing a feature film. His latest work, entitled “Sea Legend,” for Oceana, will premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Technology company GoDaddy, which is known for its provocative Super Bowl ads featuring sexy supermodels, unveils a new TV ad tonight aimed at small businesses.
The ad, called “Air Wrench,” is the latest step in GoDaddy’s brand transformation that began last year, with the aim of targeting small businesses with its suite of online services and showing that it is a serious player in providing technology services.
“This commercial marks another milestone in our brand evolution,” said GoDaddy CMO Barb Rechterman. “The ad definitely uses humor, as our past campaigns have, but this new campaign is not solely about driving brand awareness — it promotes more than domain names by plugging Website Builder.”
It looks like Twitter’s bet on the World Cup games paid off.
In its second quarter earnings, the company reported $312 million in revenue, a 124% year-on-year increase, with 89% attributed to advertising. Mobile accounted for 81% of advertising revenue.
More importantly, Twitter may have silenced the escalating concerns over its user growth slump. During the quarter, the service added 16 million monthly active users, reaching 271 million worldwide as of June 30.
Finding quality talent can be a challenge for any business in any industry, but it’s particularly top of mind for small advertising agencies. And it’s an ongoing concern for the sort of business leaders who attended the 2014 Small Agency Conference and Awards in Austin, Texas. So while there, we sent video producer Nathan Skid out to ask a sampling of adland vets what they thought was key to attracting talent.
You’ve seen the images floating around the web, the one with distinctive Detroit background, a wedding party dressed up to the nines, and a gang of rappers dressed down to the nines posing together.
Fracking is hotly debated in Colorado right now, and on one side of the issue the Environmental Policy Alliance wants people to seethe anti-fracking crowd as cheese-obsessed nutters with an unhealthy relationship to their sock puppets*.
If you’re a fan of street art and/or a Miami resident, you are no doubt familiar with AholSNiffsGlue’s work.
And if you’re a greedy apparel company named American Eagle Outfitters, you’re also familiar with his work, too. According to the Miami New Times:
This ad for Dell features one fictional character Marty Goldberg, filmmaker who practices the Goldberg method of making five second films and living in five second increments.
Everyone deserves a Dion Wired life. Even birds.
Sorry, ad agency, desperately trying to connect with hipster crowd. “Meat Sticks,” is a disgusting phrase. Your repetitive use of the word does not help, nor does a gratuitous appearance of a goat. And then using the phrase “goat sticks,” on top of it, no less.
Sexist meets gross meets stupid. Congrats, Slim Jim. You have reached a whole new level of dumb.
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