Hasta La Creative!

When the producers of ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” searched for celebrities to appear in the show’s 19th season, they ended up somewhere they’d never been before: YouTube.

Eager to inject new energy into a hit series that’s been on since 2005, they recruited Bethany Mota, an 18-year-old fashion icon whose YouTube channel boasts more than 7 million subscribers. Ms. Mota, who teaches fans how to decorate their rooms, style their hair or pick the right accessory, is the first star from Google’s video site to be cast on the show.

“With every day that passes YouTube stars go more and more into the mainstream,” said Rob Wade, executive producer of the ABC dance series that returned for a new season last night. “Whereas a couple of years ago you might say you’re going into a niche market, there’s no way you can say that anymore.”

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Kevin Francis Gray est un artiste irlandais qui a exposé à la Pace Gallery de New York une série de sculptures de forme humaine. La particularité de ses oeuvres faites de marbre et de bronze réside dans l’aspect brillant des matériaux et le souci du détail. A découvrir dans la suite.

(TrendHunter.com) When a person thinks of a scooter, more often than not a specific brand comes in mind; the Vespa 946 shows why that’s the case. The first updated design in six years, it is a sight for sore…

Arnold Worldwide and the Ad Council teamed up with Year Up, the Employment Pathways Project, ConPRmetidos, MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, New Options Project, and Opportunity Nation for a PSA campaign entitled “Grads of Life.”

The campaign promotes alternative hiring processes and attempts to “raise awareness and change employer’s perceptions of opportunity youth” to fill the 4 million vacant positions companies in the U.S. are trying to fill. In a spot called “Pathways to Employment,” running in both 30 and 60-second versions, an employer sits down with a candidate for an interview. She touts her problem solving skills and strong work ethic, and, while he mentions her lack of a college degree, he ultimately decides she’s exactly what he’s looking for. Then, she disappears into thin air, symbolizing that because of the way in which they look for candidates, most employers never meet these type of prospective employees.

The campaign launch was backed by Hilary Clinton at the tenth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, where she said, “The Grads of Life PSA campaign is the first effort to drive employer demand for the millions of low-income young adults that are a huge source of untapped talent in our country and through GradsofLife.org employers can now access the first-ever online platform for the information, tools, and resources they need to take action today.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

American Express changed the label on articles from its content-marketing site, OPEN Forum, when those articles appear on other publishers’ sites. The change comes after the National Advertising Division, the marketing industry’s self-regulatory body, raised concerns about the label.

OPEN Forum publishes articles geared to small-business owners and includes links to American Express services. It distributes these posts across the web using services from Taboola, which places headlines and images at the bottom of articles that link to a mix of editorial and advertising content.

You might, for instance, read an article about Nascar driver Tony Stewart on NBCSports.com, where, at the bottom, headlines placed by Taboola tease stories from New York Magazine’s The Cut blog (“Most Outrageous Gowns at the Met Gala”) and OPEN Forum (“5 Things Successful People Do That Others Don’t”).

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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, PayPal presents another spot enhanced with quirky animation — part of a continuing campaign with the tagline “People rule” — while Dunkin’ Donuts has an important message addressed “to the people of the coffee-drinking world” (spoiler: there’s a free cup of coffee involved). And Wendy’s wants you to know that “Barbeque has a new home.”

As always, you can find out more about the making of the best commercials on TV at Ad Age’s Creativity.

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