Hasta La Creative!

“Staging this scene allowed us to capture people’s attention and send an important message about safe driving,” said Alan Gellman, chief marketing officer at Esurance, in a statement. A spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based company did not say if the brand has seen any Pokmon-related claims this year.

Esurance spent $148 million on measured media in the U.S. last year, according to Ad Age’s Datacenter. The company worked with Leo Burnett and MSLGroup on the new campaign.

Though Pokmon Go has been a boon for the retail industry, reviving traffic in malls and spurring sales of branded merchandise from licensors like Hasbro, Build-A-Bear and Scholastic, the phenomenon has triggered several safety warnings as players forget to stay aware of their real, not virtual, surroundings when on the move.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

A new proprietary quantitative and qualitative benchmark study conducted by smith & beta called “The State of Advertising Talent,” which analyzed responses from over 2,000 advertising agency employees across North America, EMEA, APAC and LATAM, concluded that agencies “must invest more in talent development to compete in the fast moving digital economy.”

“For far too long, agencies have relied on the acquisition of expert talent to deliver digital solutions to clients, but this approach has simply not scaled,” explained smith & beta founder Allison Kent-Smith, in a statement. “Most employees are far behind in skillsets that are generating the largest revenue opportunity. For some skillsets, more than 60% of employees rate themselves novice or ‘have no idea’ about that particular practice area.”

Among the findings are that, while 62 percent of employees report clients are asking for more advanced digital work, but over 43 percent of respondents feel inadequately prepared to provide such work. A full 55 percent of respondents described themselves as novice or below in mobile-strategy capabilities, while only 15 percent thought they were experts or semi-experts. Half of respondents described themselves as novice or below in data/KPIs measurement, while around a third of respondents described themselves that way in regards to cross-platform storytelling. 65 percent, meanwhile, described themselves as novice or below when it comes to prototyping. When it came to more general questions, half of respondents said they weren’t “fast and iterative with their ways of working” and only 7 percent felt they were exceeding client expectations.

“There are agencies that are focused on ensuring their digital capabilities and skillsets match client demand,” said Kent-Smith, citing Ogilvy & Mather as an example. “They invest in annual educational programming for staff that promotes experimentation, making, and understanding digital trends and technologies,” she added. “Cultivating a learning culture is critical to sustained innovation in the industry.”

“Digital must be at the heart of any idea we create,” added Ogilvy & Mather New York president Adam Tucker. “With new technology driving rapidly changing consumer behavior, continuous digital transformation is imperative. Two years ago we committed to putting every Ogilvy New York agency employee through a 12-week digital education series partnering with smith & beta. As a result, our people are far more digitally fluent and our ideas digitally centric. Now we’re moving this training to a client team level and seeing even greater impact.”

(TrendHunter.com) This spacious loft space is proof of the design potential that older, traditional buildings can have.

Called the ‘Fitzoy Loft,’ the space was previously a warehouse that was only 250…

“Staging this scene allowed us to capture people’s attention and send an important message about safe driving,” said Alan Gellman, chief marketing officer at Esurance, in a statement. A spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based company did not say if the brand has seen any Pokmon-related claims this year.

Esurance spent $148 million on measured media in the U.S. last year, according to Ad Age’s Datacenter. The company worked with Leo Burnett and MSLGroup on the new campaign.

Though Pokmon Go has been a boon for the retail industry, reviving traffic in malls and spurring sales of branded merchandise from licensors like Hasbro, Build-A-Bear and Scholastic, the phenomenon has triggered several safety warnings as players forget to stay aware of their real, not virtual, surroundings when on the move.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

YouTube has revised its approach to nixing ad revenue to any controversial video creators as it hopes to keep brands from appearing against objectionable material.

The problem with the YouTube community is over what it considers “objectionable.”

On Wednesday, YouTube video creator Philip DeFranco, with 4.5 million subscribers, said he was put on the no-ad list after he mocked “political correctness.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

For all you Pokemon Go players out there, there’s a bunch of new Pokemon wandering the busy streets. But they’re not ones you’ll want to catch. 

Esurance and agency Leo Burnett imagined some new Pokemon characters for its “Don’t Catch and Drive” campaign, reminding motorists not to play the distracting smartphone game between the wheel.

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Samsung’s introduction video for its new Galaxy Note 7 returned to the top of the Viral Video Chart with 30.3 million views in the week through Sunday, according to Visible Measures’ weekly ranking of video campaigns, encompassing both paid and organic activity. The video campaign touts the smartphone line’s newest features: an iris scanner and a water resistant stylus.

Samsung dominated the chart in August. The company’s Olympics-themed campaign featuring South Sudanese runner Margret Rumat Rumat Hassan (and its cord-free earbuds) dropped from No. 1 to No. 5, with 6.3 million views.

Other widely-seen videos include Wieden & Kennedy’s “Unlimited” for Nike (No. 2) and Harmon Brothers’ “Redneck Drives a Duct Tape Car Off a Cliff!” for FiberFix (No. 3). Are we really surprised about the latter’s appearance on the chart? The title alone screams click here.

Continue reading at AdAge.com