Hasta La Creative!

The pop-punk trio’s new album sold 172,000 copies, while Maxwell’s first album in seven years debuted at No. 3.

Internet giants Alibaba Group and Baidu could face a hit to earnings from new regulations in China that will tax search advertising.

China’s State Administration for Industry & Commerce last week issued new rules on the classification of internet ads. From September, paid searches will be treated as Internet advertising for the first time and that revenue could be subject to an additional 3% tax.

Such a move could force Baidu, operator of China’s most popular search engine, to cut its earnings for fiscal 2017 net income to $2.4 billion, according to analysts at Daiwa Capital Markets led by John Choi. That’s about 4% below the average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. About 50% of Alibaba’s revenue in the first quarter would be affected, suggesting a 2.4% hit to earnings, he wrote.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

360i, Weber Shandwick and Momentum collaborated on a campaign serving as a follow-up to February’s “Oreo Wonder Vault” effort for Oreo, which saw a mysterious Oreo door near 18th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues in New York lead to a Wonka-esque OOH activation. The follow-up changes coasts, with a Los Angeles installation promoting the brand’s new Choco Chip Cookies.

The 30-second launch video, running on digital and social, stokes childhood nostalgia in viewers by reminding them of a time when imaginative playtime ended with a snack of chocolate chip cookies … and no one even had to recharge their mobile devices!

Depicting a man moving to a new house with his son while recalling his childhood, the spot ends with the pair sharing a few Choco Chip Cookie Oreos along with the line, “But no matter where we end up or how far we go, we can still feel at home with this new treat from Oreo.”

The actual OOH component of the campaign follows through on the theme. Visitors to the “Wonder Vault” in L.A. will find a rooms full of oversized objects, meant to make them feel like a kid again, including a giant table with oversized charis where they can sit, legs dangling, and, of course, an enormous cookie jar full of Oreos.

This is not a green screen.

“The new cookie is a combination of two childhood classics: Oreo and chocolate chip. Together they become a beacon of home, evoking simple childhood memories of wonder and ease,” the brand told AdFreak.

In addition to the OOH activation and launch video, the campaign also includes a week-long, Twitter-based sweepstakes offering participants the chance to win a pair of Oreo cookie jars and two packs of Choco Chip Oreos to fill them. 

Lawyers filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Facebook, alleging it allowed the Palestinian militant Hamas group to use it as a medium to carry out attacks that killed four Americans and wounded one in Israel, the West Bank and Jerusalem.

“Facebook has knowingly provided material support and resources to Hamas in the form of Facebook’s online social network platform and communication services,” making it liable for the violence against the five Americans, according to the lawsuit sent to Bloomberg by the office of the Israeli lawyer on the case, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.

“Simply put, Hamas uses Facebook as a tool for engaging in terrorism,” it said.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The leadership change comes during a somewhat tumultuous time for the company, which is dealing with several prominent departures.

Y&R New York added to its creative and digital departments with three new hires: executive creative director Ryan Blum, director of interactive and activation Catherine Patterson and digital experience director Eric Ackley. 

“These hires will help us to be led more by creative and digital, to move into areas like user experience and experiential,” said Y&R New York CCO Leslie Sims.

Blum will be leading the Y&R’s Navy partnership while helping launch the Memphis office that finally opened after nearly a year of legal back-and-forth involving the client’s previous agency, Campbell Ewald.

He joins the agency from Publicis Seattle, where he has served as creative director since January of 2015, focusing on the T-Mobile. Prior to that he spent two years with TraceyLocke as a group creative director working on brands including Samsung, Texas Lottery and 7-Eleven. He spent an earlier stint with TraceyLocke as a copywriter, beginning in March of 2002 and leaving in February of 2008 to join The Martin Agency. During his original run with TL, he worked on the Kwik-E-Mart 7-Eleven cross-promotional campaign with The Simpsons Movie.

(Another creative who worked on that campaign, Kyle Jones, recently joined Kansas City-based agency Barkley.)
Patterson comes to Y&R after serving as a founding partner for “creative and strategic SWAT team” TakeTheKing since September of 2015. Before that she spent a year as senior vice president, executive producer/creative technology and emerging media group at McCann New York, following six years with he agency as SVP of its experience group. She worked with Sims while at McCann, led the Nature Valley Trail View project, designed the digital and social media launches for the Phoenix Mars Lander program and launched a margarita into space for Jose Cuervo last year’s National Margarita Day.

Ackley joins Y&R from sister agency Geometery Global, where he served as experience director for a little over two years. That followed more than five years with Havas, first as associate director, creative technology and then director of creative technology. Over the course of his career, he’s worked with brands including Dos Equis, Ritz, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, Volvo, American Express, Nikon and Charles Schwab.

Outdoor, Print
IPTRAN

It looks better when is just art.

Advertising Agency:Artplan, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
Chief Criative Officer:Roberto Vilhena
Creative Director:Alessandra Sadock, Gustavo Tirre, Ricardo Weistman
Art Director:Bruno Foscaldo
Copywriter:Pedro Rosadas
Photographer:Márcio Freitas

Twitter said Monday that it will live stream coverage of the Republican and Democratic National conventions through a partnerships with CBS News.

They will be the first non-sporting events to be live-streamed on Twitter in partnership with a media company.

“Twitter is the fastest way to find out what’s happening in politics and to have a discussion about it,” Anthony Noto, Twitter’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. “By bringing the live discussion of the Republican and Democratic national conventions together with CBSN’s live video stream of the proceedings, we believe we’re giving people around the world the best way to experience democracy in action.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Here’s a quick one we missed due to all the other things going on in and around this kind-of-amazing industry over the past week or so.

You may have heard that Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of the official “Holding Company of the Year” for 2016, told AdAge in an interview recorded at this year’s Cannes festival that he’s not sure whether WPP will even bother participating in 2017. He (rightly) observed that organizers have made the event “too big and too hectic” in an attempt to bring in more revenue and said, “At some levels I believe it has lost a bit of its focus.”

He made some specific comments about creativity in advertising that also got our attention.

Regarding the increasing presence of ad tech and social media companies, their ostentatious yachts and their unavoidable, poorly designed billboards, he told the World Advertising Research Center (WARC):

“The simple fact of the matter is whether you or I like or not, or whether the creative community likes it or not, our business has become more technologically related.”

It’s almost like he’s tired of hearing creatives complain about this subject. He then removed any doubt about his feelings:

“The snottiness of believing that creativity just resides in the creative department of traditional agencies, that media people can’t be creative, or data people can’t be or people who do healthcare or promotion or CRM can’t be creative – it’s a nonsense and it’s insulting to the people who are in those areas.”

See, he has a pretty good point there. But he chose to make it in such a way as to essentially tell “traditional” creatives to get the fuck over it.

Today “Ad Contrarian” Bob Hoffman had some thoughts on Sir Martin and creativity, and they were about as kind as one would expect.

Hoffman writes, “Martin Sorrell is to advertising what McDonald’s is to food. He demonstrates no appreciation for the art, quality or grace of it. His only interest is in making it lay more golden egg mcmuffins. … He pretends that because we call a certain department the ‘creative department’ that we are disdainful or unappreciative of contributions from others. This is utter bulllshit.”

Well, we don’t know that it’s utter bullshit. But sure.

“He pretends that in the ad business the people in the creative department think they have a monopoly on creative thinking,” Hoffman writes, adding, “Pure trash. Every endeavor can be improved by creative thinking. Creativity is a way of thinking, not a department.”

Of course Bob is a little touchy about this subject, as are many of our readers. It’s understandable that people will be pissed when a man who’s never done what they do basically says that their work was never all that important in the first place.

Joris Strijbos, Axon, 2016. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Joris Strijbos‘s kinetic light sculptures are elegant, ingenious and almost minimalist. Under the deceivingly simple appearance of the works, lay systems that delve into the laws of cybernetics, play with the architecture of the space, mimic biological systems and surprise their creator with their intrinsic unpredictability.

The artist is currently showing two of his latest works in a solo show at the NOME gallery in Berlin. The first of them, Homeostase, is made of group of luminous elements that communicate with each other and devise a generative choreography based on principles found in cellular automaton and swarm intelligence. The second installation, called Axon, consists of a trio of rotating arms that explore the idea of machine synesthesia and generate their own audiovisual composition.

The two installations are composed of a series of identical elements, connected in a network and exchanging information between one another through electric signals. The collective behavior of the actuators and sensors create unpredictable patterns, as though a system of living organisms with their own variable program. A moving scene emerges, where the borders between a ‘natural’ order of things and the mechanical constructions of humans are tested.

Joris Strijbos, Homeostase, 2016. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Opening | Oscillations by Joris Strijbos. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Strijbos is also part of Macular collective, a group of artists interested in art, science, technology, and perception (do have a look at their website when you have a moment, there’s tons of talent in there.) I caught up with the artist right before its solo show opened in Berlin:

Hi Joris! Some of your work is inspired by early cybernetics. Why do you think it is important and relevant today to pay closer attention to early cybernetics? What can the cybernetics approach teach us about machines, living systems, intelligence, etc?

For me early cybernetics is mostly an inspiration. I like the idea that complexity can emerge from simple rule-sets and feedback loops. The fluctuating outcome of these kind of systems make me think of social interaction processes within groups of living organisms.

The works you are showing at NOME start from a set of parameters that you established and then they take a life of their own. Has this element of unpredictability ever surprised you? Do the installations sometimes behave in ways you wouldn’t have expected for example?

They definitely behave in ways that I could not have predicted, especially in the beginning of programming the installations. I start with some very simple feedback loops and see what kind of behaviour the installation performs. From there on the programming becomes more of an interaction between me and the machine. I try to provoke a certain interesting and emergent behaviour in which there is a balance between unpredictable complexity and the opportunity for the spectator to “read” the rules of the system.

Joris Strijbos, Homeostase, 2016. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Joris Strijbos, Homeostase, 2016. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Do you think that it is important for the visitors of the exhibition to understand the functioning of the works in order to enjoy them?

I don’t think it is necessary to have a deeper understanding of the background of these works. They are primarily build as multi sensorial installations that can be experienced in it’s abstract form. They are kinetic light works that perform a choreography which can be seen as some sort of visual music. This can be experienced without knowledge of the idea to work with artificial living systems. What I like is that by observing the works someone can detect the rules behind the actions that take place in the installation.

Joris Strijbos, Homeostase

Joris Strijbos, Homeostase

Joris Strijbos, Homeostase, 2016. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

I was looking at the spectacular images of Hemeostase on your website and it seems that each time you exhibited the work, it inhabited the space very differently. How are you planning to install Homeostase at NOME? How will it adapt to the gallery?

Indeed the work was first realised as a modular system that could adapt to every space. It was mainly installed as a horizontal field, either above or in front of the viewer. For NOME I made a new version of the work that gives the spectator more of a topview. The units are placed in a vertical grid which gives a good view of the interactions between the different rotating arms in the system.

Joris Strijbos, Axon, 2016. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Joris Strijbos, Axon, 2016. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Joris Strijbos, Axon, 2016. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Axon seems to be a new work. Could you take a moment to tell us how it works and what you wanted to achieve/show with it?

Axon came forth out of the idea of machine synaestetics. I was reading in John Johnston‘s book, The Allure of Machinic Life where he writes about new forms of nascent life that emerge trough technical interactions within human-constructed environments. At the same time I was doing some research on neural networks and synesthesia. This made me think of how synesthesia could work inside a machine. And so the base for the work comes from the idea to cross sensors and actuators in a robotic community. Technically the work consists of three identical rotating arms, which have a speaker, a sensor and a light attached to it. In the work motion, sound and light are connected in a very direct way and form components for a generative audiovisual composition.

Opening | Oscillations by Joris Strijbos. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Opening | Oscillations by Joris Strijbos. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Both Axon and Homeostase “comprise a robotic community of identical elements, connected in a network and exchanging information between one another through electric signals.” Does the presence of visitor influence in anyway the installations? Or is it some kind of an internal dialogue between the elements?

In both the works there is communication trough light. This means that the units in the works can detect the amount of lumen around them. In theory a visitor could influence the system, but my aim is more on an interaction between the different units in the system instead of one with the audience.

Any upcoming projects, exhibition or research you could share with us?

At the moment I am busy with the Macular collective to set up a lab concentrating on a combination of land art and new media art. It is mainly focused on using green energy sources for kinetic light and sound installations. Furthermore I am working with artist Nicky Assmann on a project focusing on the moiré effect. We are making kinetic sculptures that play with the visual perception of complex grids. There are some exhibitions planned with new works from the project towards the end of the summer.

Thanks Joris!

Opening | Oscillations by Joris Strijbos. Photo by Bresadola+Freese/drama-berlin.de for NOME Gallery

Oscillations by Joris Strijbos opens at NOME Project gallery in Berlin until 30 July 2016.

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