Hasta La Creative!

In today’s crowded marketing arena, webinars are an increasingly important part of the sales cycle for brands vying for attention.

A key reason for their growing popularity: Webcasts have seen a 47% increase in average viewing time, from 38 minutes in 2010 to 56 minutes in 2013, according to ON24’s annual Webinar Benchmarks Report.

While it is generally assumed that people’s attention spans are shrinking drastically in this era of texts and tweets, this increase in viewing time suggests that when people are making serious purchasing decisions, they are more than willing to invest the extra time to educate themselves and consume targeted, relevant content as long as it resonates with their needs and position in the buying cycle.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

This week Sarah Skinner, managing director of global executive search firm Grace Blue, provides a rare glimpse into life as one of the industry’s top talent scouts.

Intersnack, the German food manufacturer, is believed to have split its €50 million pan-European media business between Vizeum and Initiative.

(TrendHunter.com) The top July 2014 eco trends beautifully showcase the ways designers all over the world are creating sophisticated products with nature. Designers are proving capable of producing modern and…

Amazon.com Inc. is offering authors caught up in its dispute with Hachette Book Group all proceeds from the sale of any digital book, seeking to bypass the publisher and appeal directly to writers.

Amazon sent a letter to authors, including Douglas Preston, proposing to extract them from the spat by giving them all e-book revenue, Mr. Preston said in an interview. Mr. Preston, co-author of the Pendergast series of books, led an effort to rally writers and readers to petition Amazon to end the dispute.

The world’s largest online retailer blocked pre-orders for some of Hachette’s books earlier this year, including “The Silkworm,” a new novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Amazon and Hachette are each seeking a greater share of e-book income. While physical book sales in the U.S. are projected to fall to $19.5 billion this year from $26 billion in 2010, e-book revenue is anticipated to jump more than eightfold to $8.7 billion, according to Forrester Research. The growth is being spurred by the increasing consumer use of tablets and smartphones, through which people read e-books.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

We’ve all been there, as a father, family member or designated baby holder. Mom hands off her bundle of joy to you as she grabs four minutes of alone time in the Applebee’s bathroom. Now it’s you and Junior. Alone. And he just. Starts. BAWLING.

There’s nothing like the sound of a weeping baby to whip you into a state of panic. And you want nothing more than to find Mommy. But if Mommy’s gone, and you’re in Thailand, you grab your cellphone from DTAC in a frantic effort to distract the child with soothing technology.

Let’s just say it doesn’t quite work out as planned.

This new DTAC ad, from Y&R Thailand, is the latest in a spree of sob-fest spots from Thailand in recent years. (Man, they’re good at this stuff.) The premise is debatable—show me a living human infant who is immune to cartoon penguins—but the sentiment is a sweet one, and parents with vague underlying guilt about the smartphone as babysitter will relate.

Plus, it’s refreshing to see a tech ad where the gadget most certainly doesn’t save the day. Not every tech marketer would be OK with that.

Check out the spot below. Spoiler: Dad doesn’t eat the baby.

What’s to debate? And why is everyone debating? Just ask yourself this simple question. Even if it were physically possible to do so, do you really think the Navy is going to allow some marketer to modify an aircraft carrier so it can make a stupid ad?

This is advertising we’re talking about. Not national security. And last time I checked, the Navy falls into the category of national security, not helping marketers make stupid ads. Though, in this case, the ad is pretty cool!

Brazil’s spectacular exit from the Fifa World Cup 2014 last night attracted a peak audience for the BBC of 14 million, and generated a record number of tweets for a single sporting event.

(TrendHunter.com) Alexa Chung and Poppy Delevingne star in the latest issue of The Edit by Net-a-Porter. The two friends don Western-inspired looks as they engage in a cross-country roadtrip. The images portray the…

Brazil’s spectacular exit from the Fifa World Cup 2014 last night attracted a peak audience for the BBC of 14 million, and generated a record number of tweets for a single sporting event.