Hasta La Creative!

The Atlanta, Georgia offices of Doner, which holding company MDC Partners rebranded after an acquisition several years ago, will be closing this summer as the company moves all related operations to Detroit. (As late as 2008, the agency was considered America’s largest indie shop.)

MDC’s Atlanta-based media and research units–named Assembly and SEE Insight, respectively, and formed in 2014 and 2013–will remain open. But all creative operations in the Atlanta area will be relocated to the agency’s headquarters in The Motor City.

Here’s the official statement from MDC:

Given current client demands and the need to focus resources against our strategic growth initiatives, we will be consolidating most of Doner’s resources based in Atlanta into our Detroit headquarters over the next month. SEE INSIGHTS and Assembly will continue to operate from the Atlanta office. We thank those affected by this consolidation for their service and are doing our best to help them find new positions.

No word on what, exactly, led to this change–but the last sentence means that not every member of the Doner Atlanta team will make the transition to Detroit. The total number of employees affected remains unclear as well, though for context you may recall that MDC made some staffing cuts in early 2013 after the Atlanta office became a Doner operation. A few weeks before that move, MDC officially merged Doner and Media Kitchen Atlanta in order to better serve the agency’s media clients.

A tipster tells us that the last day of operations for Doner Atlanta will be July 6 and that executives have already contacted clients to announce their resignation from all active accounts managed by the Atlanta office.

Updates when they come in.

Unless you’re hiking the Appalachian Trail, or staring at your walls all day, or living under a rock, or running ad-blocking software for your eyeballs, you’re bombarded with brand logos all day long.

Here’s a fun and downright trippy project by the folks at Zing, who have taken some of those famous logos and GIF’ed their histories. The results are pretty neat, and you might just want to just sit and stare at them morph from old to new, over and over.

Then maybe go on a hike, but not after seeing them on white. Enjoy. 

Kobe Bryant and Lionel Messi aren’t just winners on the court and on the field — they’re the champs of YouTube: Their “Selfie Shootout” ad for Turkish Airlines, created out of Crispin Porter & Bogusky Los Angeles and directed by Joseph Kahn via HSI, took the No. 1 spot in YouTube’s ad competition, part of the platform’s 10th anniversary festivities.

Last month, YouTube announced that advertising had “come of age” on the site: Four of its 10 most-viewed videos in 2014 were ads. So held a contest among 20 of its most popular ads, asking consumers to vote for their favorite. Contenders included the likes of VW’s Little Darth from “The Force,” Old Spice’s Man Your Man Could Smell Like, Evian’s Roller Babies and more — but apparently, they weren’t enough to top Turkish Airlines, whose spot featured Mr. Bryant and Mr. Messi globe-hopping as they tried to one-up each other with their extreme selfies. Check out the four runners-up below.

To cap off the celebration, YouTube also examined the 20 ads in the contest to come up with a list of trends that defined them in the hopes of enlightening viewers on what makes ads stand out on the site. One of YouTube’s conclusions: “Take the time you need to tell your story.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The FTC has elaborated on its rules on endorsements, making plain that it’s not enough to just link to disclosures about paid endorsements online, to make your disclosures far from the paid action or to otherwise leave things at all unclear. Watch attorney Brian Heidelberger’s brisk walk through the rules.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

American tech workers in Orlando found their jobs and desks transferred to immigrants brought in under H-1B visas by an Indian firm.

CP+B found a clever way to work with Facebook’s autoplay video ads playing on mute, releasing a pair of ads for Hotels.com which make use of the lack of sound.

In one of the ads, the brand’s spokesman Captain Obvious bangs away at a piano. Text relays the message “Ads autoplay silently on Facebook…which is good for you…because I don’t know how to play the piano” before letting users know they can get 10 percent off their first stay when they download the Hotels.com app. Another spot sees Captain Obvious paired with a sign language interpreter, despite the fact that the ad also has subtitles. He admits that the interpreter is technically unnecessary, but vouches for her awesomeness. The approach works a lot better with the first spot, where the silence is not only part of the gag, it actually makes it more watchable (since you don’t have to hear Captain Obvious’s painful attempts at piano music).

The ad technology known as programmmatic is really a series of tactics including fully automated buying on a large scale, real-time auctions for ad inventory and data-driven targeting. Often just one of those elements is enough for someone to call a campaign “programmatic.” But like the future according to William Gibson, programmatic advertising isn’t evenly distributed. With the help of Magna Global, Pathmatics and IgnitionOne, we’ve assembled the snapshot you need to understand programmatic in a few quick glances, as well as a reference you can return to: Get a downloadable PDF version here.

Sources: RTB spending, total programmatic spending and RTB by device according to the Magna Global Programmatic Model, changes in metrics according to Ignition One and impressions by product category according to Pathmatics.

Continue reading at AdAge.com