Hasta La Creative!

Choice Hotels International is boosting its ad budget by 13% this year, as it undertakes a brand overhaul.

Choice Hotels is spending an unprecedented amount of advertising this year, said Christine Lynn, VP-advertising and marketing communications. It is unveiling a new logo, as well as a campaign that includes prime time TV, a first for the company, print, digital, radio and social components. The company spent $54 million on measured media last year, according to Kantar Media.

McCann Erickson New York is Choice Hotels’ integrated agency of record.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

(TrendHunter.com) The top May 2015 retail ideas showcase how forward-thinking brands are making the traditional the shopping experience more informative, convenient and delightful.

Consumers who prefer service that…

(TrendHunter.com) Rustic branding is an artistic form of marketing that pays homage to an era where less was definitely seen as more.

The look and feel of a brand using the rustic theme is not as flashy as some…

It’s become conventional wisdom that Photoshopping of models creates an impossible standard of beauty. But one retoucher seems inclined to vindicate the process somewhat by peeling back the curtain on what really goes into it.

Rare Digital Art, a firm that’s worked with top fashion magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair and brands like Intermix and Yves St. Laurent, has created three 90-second time-lapse videos to show the painstaking work required to digitally polish a portrait.

The first video is arguably the most dramatic, purporting to capture six hours of retouching. Watch as Elizabeth Moss, Rare’s founder, transforms the model bit by bit, making over her hair, skin, nails, fingers, nails, lips—even straightening her teeth. In the second—covering four hours of work—Moss thickens the model’s hairline, and lightens her eyes (a fate spared the first subject, but only because she was wearing a blindfold). In the third, a mere hour and a half compressed, the model gets a new shape for her face.

The clips make for an impressive display of craft and a clever, lean-in sales pitch for a service that, right or wrong, is tangentially vilified by the popular narrative about positive body image (on which even large consumer brands like Dove are eager to capitalize). Moss tells PetaPixel she made them because “the quality of the other before-and-after retouching videos available online are pretty terrible and not at all representative of what is typically done on high-fashion editorials and campaigns.”

She adds: “With all the talk about Photoshop use or overuse, I thought it would be interesting for people to see how we actually add pores to skin (we do this in the second and third videos, sampled from the girl in the first video).”

On one hand, it’s a little thin to play off what’s essentially an ad for her company as if it’s a public-service announcement in defense of the profession. Adding what might be considered slight imperfections to an image in pursuit of making the whole a more emotionally manipulative facsimile of a real human doesn’t exactly address the core criticism lobbed at excessive retouching—that, in the end, it distorts audiences’ perceptions of themselves, and undermines self-esteem by showcasing ideals that don’ reflect reality. (Then again, when do they ever?)

At the same time, probably by design, much of the work here seems harmless. Who, other than craftspeople, cares if the creatives change the hairstyle, lighting and lipstick color in postproduction rather than in camera? Other aspects do seem more bizarre. Is it really necessary to narrow the third model’s cheeks so she looks more gaunt?

The answer, obviously, is somewhat subjective, and almost irrelevant. Even if it’s worth questioning who gets to make the decisions about what defines beauty, and to challenge them with alternates, those decisions aren’t about representations of truth. They’re about selling fashion products, or selling magazines that are vehicles to sell fashion products.

Even if more and more people acknowledge that, and view media through that filter, appealing to vanity and base desire still seems like a pretty good way to make a buck.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Matthew Weiner, resting comfortably in a brown leather armchair, shifts his weight toward a silver tray holding crystal tumblers and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. He turns the bottle to hide the label. “You don’t want any brands in the shot, do you?” he asks the photographer.

Ad Age’s cover shoot — in the penthouse of Manhattan’s Gramercy Park Hotel — and this interview mark the end of a TV series in which Mr. Weiner chronicled a period of great change, the ’60s and ’70s, through the lens of Madison Avenue. It makes sense that this master of detail is hyperaware of brands after spending the past seven years bringing “Mad Men” to life and years before that researching the real adland.

HBO surprised Mr. Weiner, a former “Sopranos” writer, by passing on the “Mad Men” pilot. Ultimately, it was AMC that was willing to take a chance on a show that didn’t look like anything else on TV. That bet invigorated the network and gave viewers a taste of an era that was “more adult and dirty and darker than you remember,” he says. “It’s not ‘Leave It To Beaver.'”

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4. All major agency disciplines grew last year, with U.S. revenue gains from 4.4% for ad agencies to 10.3% for the resurgent field of health-care communications.

5. Media agencies registered robust revenue gains in 2014, propelled by digital. That includes programmatic media buying, where in some cases agency companies account for media billings as revenue.

6. U.S. ad-agency employment in December reached its highest point (192,400) since the dot-com bubble in the early-2000s.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Basé à Portland, le photographe Mako Miyamoto a exposé, le 25 avril dernier, sa série « Speculative Hunting » à la Gauntlet Gallery, à San Francisco. Dans ses clichés, il aime mettre en scène des Wookies des temps modernes en faisant porter à ses modèles féminins et masculins des masques de Wookies. Un drôle d’hommage à Star Wars, plein de bizarreries.

La fille de Kazuo Nomura a découvert il y a deux ans, un labyrinthe dessiné par son père durant sept ans et achevé en 1983. Elle a décidé de poster la création sur Twitter et lui a ensuite demandé d’en dessiner un nouveau. Son paternel a dans un premier temps refusé puis accepté de le dessiner, 32 ans après le premier. Ce second labyrinthe a nécessité deux mois de création.

Sur son compte Instagram, le photographe new yorkais Omar Z. Robles, met en image des danseurs de ballet au coeur des rues. Les mondes de la danse et de la rue se confondent à merveille, ce qui offre des clichés inattendus et artistiquement magnifiques.