Hasta La Creative!

CareerCast is a company whose services we  have not used and may never use, given that we work in media and nobody in this industry ever really does the traditional job listing thing unless they have to because of laws.

We are going to post on their dumb marketing listicle thing anyway, because today is weird and this post will maybe give our readers a chance to share their thoughts on account executives and human resources managers, or the number one and two most important positions in any creative ad agency.

The CareerCast post itself is kind of amusing if only for gems like this: “The idea of schmoozing clients over bourbons and steaks seems exciting, but [Marilyn] Paige – who worked in the advertising industry’s mecca of New York – said this romanticized idea of the industry has past.”

So what does “overrated” even mean in this case? It’s a job you may think you want, but perhaps you should maybe reconsider due to “the stress, competition, industry volatility and high job turnover associated with these jobs.”

Basically, Paige thinks that working in accounts is harder and less rewarding now than it was in the past: “The internet has made things easier, but it has not made them simpler. It’s easier to reach 3,000 people with an email list, with a social media campaign. The research, strategy and technical know-how has changed quite a bit. You have to keep up on the tactical know-how, and it never stops changing.”

This sounds very familiar to us, but we’re still not quite sure why account manager would be so severely overrated, given the numbers associated:

OK, so you have to put up with crap from clients to earn that fairly generous salary. How is this new?!

Now get ready to take this whole exercise even less seriously:

So why is HR manager on this list of “underrated” jobs along with dietitian and, of course, programmer? Probably because they are both overpaid and necessary. And based on a few select posts we’ve written over the past 9 months or so, we’d say the relatively small but influential world of agency HR could possibly use a quick review or a swift kick in the ass.

We also liked the top stock image, complete with this killer copy: “Half length portrait of young confident man manager standing with crossed arms in hall of his corporation, prosperous male leadership dressed in elegant luxury clothes relaxing after business meeting”

Prosperous male leadership indeed. We will call him Account Bro.

The Line messaging app was blocked in China a little over two years ago, a target of the government’s Great Firewall, just like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Here’s what’s unsual about Line: Its brand has only gotten hotter in China since then.

The bunny, bear, frog and duck characters that started out as messaging stickers on Line’s app have turned into a lucrative merchandising and licensing opportunity in Asia, including in China. They’re cute like Hello Kitty, but fresher and edgier.

In China, McDonald’s put Line characters on toys for an Olympics promotion. Pizza Hut had a Line promotion too. Line’s characters have adorned T-shirts at China’s Uniqlo stores and on notebooks from Moleskine. Line has five shops selling its own merchandise in China, plus two pop-ups, and plans for more.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

After almost two decades of relentless decline caused by piracy and falling prices, the music business is enjoying a fragile recovery thanks to the growth of paid streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music.

Retail spending on recorded music grew 8.1% to $3.4 billion in the first half of 2016, according to a draft midyear report from the Recording Industry Association of America that was obtained by Bloomberg News. That means the U.S. industry is on pace to expand for the second straight year — the first back-to-back growth since 1998-1999.

The credit goes to streaming — internet services that give listeners commercial-free access to millions of songs for a monthly fee — or for free if they’re willing to hear ads. U.S. streaming revenue grew 57% to $1.6 billion in the first half of 2016 and accounted for almost half of industry sales, more than countering shrinking purchases of albums and singles. Subscriptions totaled $1.01 billion, according to the RIAA data.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Amnesty International will issue a challenge to the advertising industry at The Drum’s Plan it Day and Do it Day events, calling on advertisers to change perceptions surrounding refugees. 

“Everyone knows the challenge in the broad sense,” Amnesty International communications director Osama Saeed Bhutta told the publication. “We have 20 million refugees worldwide and in the last year there have been some attempts by the United Nations (UN) and President Obama to get people to help sort it out because they realize our generation is going to be judged by future decades on how we dealt with this.”

The goal of the challenge will be to shift public opinion at a time when anti-refugee sentiment seems to be growing in certain circles. Such sentiment is often attributed as a contributing factor in the U.K.’s Brexit decision this summer, for example, while xenophobic anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment also seem to at the heart of Donald Trump‘s campaign. Just yesterday, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., generated controversy with a tweet comparing the “Syrian refugee problem” with a bowl of Skittles with three that “would kill you.”

Media surrounding the refugee crisis hasn’t been limited to documenting such xenophobic fearmongering, however. Bhutta points to the inclusion of Team Refugee at the Rio 2016 Olympics, which included ten refugees from around the world brought together by the International Olympic Committee and UNHCR as an initiative that could help “shift the debate towards a more positive and humanitarian direction.”

“It showed the rest of the world that refugees are people with hopes and aspirations and determination as well. That’s no better represented than by [Syrian swimmer] Yusra Mardini, who saved so many lives by swimming and pushing a boat over to Greece and then ended up at the Olympics,” he added. “That’s a movie story right there.”

“For us, this challenge is about changing public opinion – something marketers do every day,” Bhutta said. “We could have framed it in many different ways – it could have been about aid or targeting governments – but we’ve focused on public opinion because these industries (advertising, marketing, digital) are going to be essential in changing the way this is dealt with and coming up with creative solutions.”

Amnesty International’s Do It Day challenge will run simultaneously in the U.S. and the U.K. but Bhutta notes that the problem requires a global outlook. “We’re a global movement and we have real global muscle so what we’re looking for is ideas that can be implemented everywhere,” he said. 

“There’s an immediate two-year horizon we’re working towards and have an ambitious target of having two million refugees resettled by then, but that by no means solves things. We’re open minded and looking for possibilities. Short term ideas are great, but what we really want are ideas with longevity that can bring debate to the fore in different ways.”

If you didn’t make it to Dmexco in Cologne, Germany, don’t worry: There will be another digital conference next week, and the week after.

There shouldn’t be a fear of missing out — FOMO — but a fear of conference overload. Call it “FOCO.”

Now, that’s not to say Dmexco (pronounced “D-Mex-Co”) doesn’t come with tech star power or primetime programming. It just faces competition for attention in the digital and marketing industries already booked year-round in conferences, summits, getaways, retreats, weeks and awards.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

MUH-TAY-ZIK|HOF-FER, the formerly independent agency that was acquired by VCCP in May, has opened a new operation in New York City and hired Nick Johnson, founder of The Incite Group, to run it.

This news is not a revelation: In a May Adweek piece, ECD and co-founder John Matejczyk stated that he planned to open a Manhattan location with the backing of London-based VCCP. The story also noted that the two agencies “plan to eventually enter the South American and Asian markets,” though it did not specify how, exactly, that might come about.

We’ve been in touch with MUH-TAY-ZIK’s PR team about this development since August, but they have so far declined to comment directly. Multiple sources, however, confirmed that Johnson will oversee the office and serve as president, and it seems that his title will apply across the entire organization since the agency does not currently list anyone in that position.

Various sources tell us that the New York operation remains small at this time, with a staff in the single digits. The creative department has yet to expand to Manhattan, which is primarily focused on new business. Details regarding the MUH-TAY-ZIK|HOF-FER New York location are currently unavailable, and it’s not clear whether the lease has been finalized. But we do know that the team itself has been working in an alternate space.

If the New York office ever resembles the agency’s San Francisco headquarters, there will be lots of white.

Johnson worked at various marketing companies in the U.K. before founding The Incite Group, which describes itself as “A global intelligence company” that handles both paid and earned media (social, email marketing, advertising, PR) and produces “Conferences, reports and analysis on how to engage your customers and drive sales,” in 2013. It’s not clear at this time whether he will play any role at Incite moving forward.

Some small changes occurred in the San Francisco office of MUH-TAY-ZIK|HOF-FER prior to the New York move, with former AdAge journalist Maureen Morrison joining the shop in a content-focused role and a very small number of employees let go due to changes in the agency’s relationships with clients Netflix and SoFi, which moved toward more project-based work.

Updates as we get them. At the very least, expect MUH-TAY-ZIK|HOF-FER to begin more aggressively pitching new business in Manhattan in the months to come.

Artificial Intelligence. What Everyone Needs to Know, by computer scientist, researcher and futurist Jerry Kaplan

On amazon USA and UK.

Publisher Oxford University Press writes: The emergence of systems capable of independent reasoning and action raises serious questions about just whose interests they are permitted to serve, and what limits our society should place on their creation and use. Deep ethical questions that have bedeviled philosophers for ages will suddenly arrive on the steps of our courthouses. Can a machine be held accountable for its actions? Should intelligent systems enjoy independent rights and responsibilities, or are they simple property? Who should be held responsible when a self-driving car kills a pedestrian? Can your personal robot hold your place in line, or be compelled to testify against you? If it turns out to be possible to upload your mind into a machine, is that still you?

Sometimes i realize that i need a new perspective on technology. My main sources of information about science or technology are art exhibitions, social media channels run by activists and books by social scientists or philosophers. I decided to expand my horizons and check out what an engineer has to say about technology. In particular artificial intelligence.

I thought a book like Artificial Intelligence. What Everyone Needs to Know wouldn’t overwhelm me with nerdiness. The volume is part of an Oxford University Press series that aims to offer compact and balanced monographs on complex issues in a Q&A format.

In his intro to the book, computer scientist and futurist Kaplan promises to give nontech readers an overview of the key issues and arguments about the main social, ethical, legal and economic issues raised by Artificial Intelligence.

The experience didn’t start too well for me… The first part is remarkably techy for a book that promises not to scare off the amateur. It’s not difficult to follow at all but i was there for the ethics, the critics and the possible pitfalls of AI! I soldiered on nonetheless, read about the intellectual history of AI, the history of machine learning, the various types of AI (actually that part was very interesting, it gives grounding and clarity to the whole field), etc.

JPL’s RoboSimian exits its vehicle following a brief drive through a slalom course at the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals. Photo: J. Krohn/ JPL-Caltech

Things picked up for me at chapter 4, the one that studies the philosophy of AI and how it poses a series of challenges to philosophy or religious doctrines which often orbit around human uniqueness and our place in universe. Whereas the first few chapters explained terms such as computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, the pages in chapter 4 invite readers to reconsider and refine their understanding of intelligence, free will, consciousness and what it means to be ‘alive.’ Automated methods are slowly nibbling at the list of abilities previously considered the sole province of humans. Think of chess, for example. Pre-Deep Blue, being a master of chess was regarded as the epitome of being intelligent and human. Then in 1996, Garry Kasparov was defeated by a computer and we had to find new benchmarks to define human intelligence.

The following chapters kept on getting more and more relevant to my interests as they explored the impact that AI will have -or already has- on law, on human labor, on social equity (although the disruptive effects of AI are not inevitable, it is quite likely that income inequality will get worse) and it ends by looking at the possible future impacts of artificial intelligence.

The questions Kaplan explores are fascinating. I sometimes wished he would have added more details and depth to several of the issues he presents but i guess the particular format of the book made it difficult for him to be too lengthy. Here are some of the questions he answers (and sometimes admits we don’t have quite yet the framework to answer them with certainty):

Should people bear full responsibility for their intelligent agents (if your autonomous car hits someone)? Should an AI system be permitted to own property? Could an AI system commit a crime (answer is yes) and can it be held accountable for it? Can a computer ‘feel’? Which professions are under threat of being automated in the near future? Will i be able to upload myself into a computer? How can we minimise future risks posed by the machines? What will be the impact of AI on social equity? What are the benefits and the risks of making computers that act like people? Who’s going to benefit from this tech revolution? Are there alternatives to our current labor-based economy?

Artificial Intelligence. What Everyone Needs to Know is not a book i would normally pick up but i’m glad i did. There is much hype and fear around robots and artificial intelligence and it’s difficult to get a clear view of what lays ahead of us. Much of the public perception of AI is shaped by Hollywood, sensationalist headlines, and videos of robots interacting flawlessly with a trained demonstrator. The reality, as Kaplan demonstrates in this book, is a bit more complicated:

IEEE Spectrum, A compilation of robots falling down on Day 1 of the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, 2015

Source

Martha Stewart has some intriguing collaborations going on right now. In the U.S. she’s working on a VH1 cooking show with Snoop Dogg. Meanwhile, she just flew to China to build her brand at a quirky live-streamed event hosted by e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Ms. Stewart is at work with Alibaba on “opportunities for future collaboration,” according to a release that gave no details on what lifestyle products she will actually sell in China. But she gave a keynote speech at a Shanghai show promoting kitchenware that was hosted by Alibaba platform Tmall. Afterward she posed, at length and somewhat awkwardly, for photos with Tmall’s humanoid cat mascot.

Ms. Stewart mused about China’s “growing young middle class with unprecedented purchasing power” — the people she will target with her brand, which is owned by Sequential Brands. And she talked about how much China has changed since she first visited in 1982 (“very few automobiles,” “no big skyscrapers.”)

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Skittles has responded with uncharacteristic yet appropriate seriousness after being dragged into the presidential race by Donald Trump Jr., son of the Republican nominee, who posted a controversial tweet on Monday with an analogy about Skittles and refugees.

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