Hasta La Creative!

Without AOL’s ad-tech business, the company would essentially be a random collection of media properties subsidized by fading dial-up revenue. With it, AOL appears to be positioned for long-term success buoyed by booming programmatic ad spending.

AOL ad-tech and video (platforms) revenue grew 44% over the past year, driving an 18% increase in the company’s overall ad revenue, according to its third-quarter earnings report released today.

“We’re encouraged by progress of the platforms segment, suggesting AOL is squarely participating in market shift toward programmatic execution and video,” said Wells Fargo Securities senior analyst Peter Stabler in a research note following the release.

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In building a reality that suspends disbelief, moviemakers must pay attention to the smallest details—to make sure the world they’ve created is consistently styled. This means not only creating an engaging plot, but filling in the everyday occurances like the ads that inhabit these worlds. 

Well, Screen Junkies have done us all a solid and culled together the best of the best fake commercials in real movies. Sometimes the spots were incidental, buried on a TV in the background, and sometimes they played a more central role. 

The movies represented here include Robocop, Goodfellas, Wreck-It Ralph, Anchorman, Tropic Thunder, Jack and Jill, Jingle All the Way, Toy Story, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Serenity, Ghostbusters, Happy Gilmore, Batman, Lost in Translation, Anchorman 2, Prometheus, Punch-Drunk Love, Donnie Darko, Requiem for a Dream, Talladega Nights, The Running Man, Tommy Boy, Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Truman Show, UHF, Westworld, The Wolf of Wall Street, Total Recall, Beetlejuice, Coming to America, Dodgeball, Halloween III, I Robot, Robocop 2 and Starship Troopers.

And the results are fantastic.

Keysight Technologies, a spinoff of Agilent Technologies that provides electronic measurement equipment, this week announced its launch with a global ad campaign targeting engineers.

To mark its launch as a publicly traded company, Keysight executives rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange on Monday and kicked off a global ad campaign created by agency Hydrogen, Seattle.

Agilent is a $6.8 billion maker of testing and measurement equipment. It spun off from Hewlett-Packard in 1999, and since then has focused on two primary industries — life sciences and electronics engineering.

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A year after Johnson & Johnson brought Coca-Cola veteran Alison Lewis in as the first chief marketing officer of its consumer business, things are going well, with sales and share beating rivals from the over-the-counter drug business to skincare. Now, hoping to maintain momentum, she’s opening a whole can of Coke-style globalization on the historically fragmented company and its agencies.

The plan aims to implement a new integrated marketing communications process similar to those of such rivals as Kimberly-Clark Corp. and aimed at creating media-neutral ideas that travel around the world. It’s not about cutting marketing staff or production budgets, or even centralizing marketing decisions at the company’s New Brunswick, N.J., headquarters, Ms. Lewis said in an interview.

“The whole idea is that structure follows strategy,” Ms. Lewis said, but agencies are often left out of that process when companies reorganize. “Our agencies have been local, local, local,” she said. “With our megabrands, as we move to one idea, we’re moving to more of a global-to-region model.”

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Intel has made a very big bet on wearables, announcing plans for a set of chips designed to support the category and buying Basis Science, maker of fitness-focused Basis Bands. But the category is in trouble if it doesn’t soon move past its typical look today, said Mike Bell, corporate VP-general manager of the new devices group at Intel. Nobody wants smartphones strapped on their wrists, he said.

“Fitness is an obvious area where wearables will succeed first,” Mr. Bell said, speaking Wednesday during the continuing Web Summit in Dublin. But a lot of the so-called fitness trackers on the market are “glorified pedometers,” he said: You could strap them on a paint can and they’d be fooled.

And design remains a glaring constraint, Mr. Bell added. “I don’t particularly like square faces,” he said. Marketers need to offer watches that look like traditional Swiss pieces but with smart features inside, he said.

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