Hasta La Creative!

YouTube has hired Lyor Cohen as its global head of music, entrusting the former Def Jam and Warner Music executive with improving the video site’s contentious relationship with the recording industry.

Mr. Cohen, who started his career under the tutelage of Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons, helped shape the music business and pop culture though his work with artists such as Run-DMC, Public Enemy and Ed Sheeran. Most recently, he founded 300 Entertainment, a boutique record label that scored a hit last year with rapper Fetty Wap.

After decades of watching new technologies transform the music business and the lives of his artists, Mr. Cohen will help YouTube and its parent Alphabet Inc. refurbish its image with artists. Some of the most powerful musicians have criticized YouTube for not doing enough to protect their copyrights, while labels have fought with the company over their share of revenue from advertising on music clips and videos.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Procter & Gamble and Syracuse University have signed onto the cause of Saturday Morning, a coalition for peace and change around racial inequality formed earlier this year by African-American creative leaders Keith Cartwright, Geoff Edwards, Jayanta Jenkins and Jimmy Smith, the group said Thursday at an event during Advertising Week.

Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard and Damon Jones, P&G’s director for global company communications, reached out to the nonprofit a few days ago and said, “Consider us in,” according to Mr. Smith, chairman, CEO and chief creative officer of Amusement Park.

“Among the ways our brands can make the world a better place is through our voice in advertising,” Mr. Pritchard said in a statement provided by a spokeswoman. “We have an opportunity and a responsibility to create advertising that both builds our brands and positively represents the people we serve –particularly African Americans. We look forward to working with the Saturday Morning team to learn more and continue to promote positive conversations, hope, and the power of diversity and inclusion.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

CBS Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves laid low all summer, watching as the family that controls his company fought with the leadership of their other media giant, Viacom.

Mr. Moonves can shun the spotlight no more. The Redstones prevailed, ousting management at faltering Viacom last month, and are now pushing the companies to recombine. Shari Redstone, who has assumed her father Sumner’s leadership of the family business, told Viacom and CBS she would like Mr. Moonves to run the show, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

A recombination could produce cost savings and help the companies contend with a changing media industry, National Amusements, the Redstone family holding company, said in a statement Thursday formally asking the companies to consider a merger. As the controlling shareholder of both CBS and Viacom, National Amusements won’t weigh a takeover by a third party or any deal that would require it to give up power, it said.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Keith Cartwright, exec creative director at Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners and a co-founder of Saturday Morning, a coalition dedicated to peace and change around racial inequality, spoke to Ad Age the day before the group announced that Procter & Gamble Co. had signed onto its Peace Brief.

Here, Mr. Cartwright addresses why advertisers should have no trepidation about joining a cause that can sometimes be considered politically charged.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The only photography venue in the UK exclusively devoted to documentary, Side Gallery, is about to re-open with an exhibition dedicated to children. Children! Now this is definitely not my favourite subject but a look at the press images made me realize that not everything related to kids needs to be offensively tiresome, uninspiring and jejune:

Phillip and Jamie are creatures from Outer Space in their spaceship, photograph by Denise Dixon, Portraits and Dreams, Wendy Ewald

Karen Robinson, Seaham, Co.Durham, Spring 2004. From All Dressed Up

Also how could it be soporific when the show is handled by Amber, a collective born in the late 1960s with a mission to document working class culture in photos and videos? The new exhibition, called CHILDHOODS, will present work from Amber’s collection, spanning four decades of documentary photography. From 1977 to 2016. From children living in a small coalfield community in the Appalachians, USA to the ones living in today’s marginalized communities.

Sadly, i can’t go to Newcastle and visit the show but i laid my hands on as many press images as i could and have dutifully copy/pasted them below. With, occasionally, a few notes about the photos:

James Mollison, Tzvika, 9, Beitar Illit, West Bank. From Where Children Sleep

“Tzvika, nine, lives in an apartment block in Beitar Illit, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. It is a gated community of 36,000 Haredi (Orthodox) Jews. Televisions and newspapers are banned from the settlement. The average family has nine children, but Tzvika has only one sister and two brothers, with whom he shares his room. He is taken by car to school, a two-minute drive. Sport is banned from the curriculum. Tzvika goes to the library every day and enjoys reading the holy scriptures. He also likes to play religious games on his computer. He wants to become a rabbi, and his favourite food is schnitzel and chips.”

James Mollison, Ahkôhxet, Brazil. From Where Children Sleep

“Ahkôhxet is a member of the Kraho tribe, who live in the basin of the river Amazon. There are only 1,900 members of the tribe. The Kraho people believe that the sun and moon were creators of the universe, and the red paint on Ahkôhxet’s chest is from one of his tribe’s rituals. The tribe grow and hunt their own foods, and any other material they need is bought using money earned from film crews and photographers who visit their camp.”

Dean Chapman, Shifting Ground, 2001

Dean Chapman, Shifting Ground, 2001

When photographer Lesley McIntyre’s daughter Molly was born in 1984, she was suffering from a muscular abnormality. The doctors thought it was highly unlikely she would survive more than a few weeks or months. But Molly lived until her fourteenth birthday and McIntyre documented her moments of happiness and challenges in the series The Time of Her Life.

Lesley McIntyre, Molly administering her own medication, St.Mary’s Hospital, London, 1998. From The Time of Her Life

Lesley McIntyre, Demonstration against cuts in education, Piccadilly, London, 1995. From The Time of Her Life

Karen Robinson, Text messaging in Lorianne’s bedroom. Thornley, Co.Durham, Summer 2004. From All Dressed Up

Tish Murtha, ‘Mala’ Anderson, Elswick. From the exhibition Juvenile Jazz Bands, commissioned by Side Gallery and first exhibited in 1979

Tish Murtha, The Chieftains training, Cruddas Park. From the exhibition Juvenile Jazz Bands, commissioned by Side Gallery and first exhibited in 1979

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Tanya and her grandfather, 1982. From Step by Step

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Connell-Brown Dancing School, North Shields, 1986. From Step by Step

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Dance display at Terminus club, 1982. From ‘Step by Step’

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Carmen Decker and mum, Diana, 1982. From ‘Step by Step’

Wendy Ewald‘s Portraits and Dreams was a participative project from the 1970s developed with the children she was teaching in a small coalfield community in the Appalachians, USA.

I Dreamt I Killed My Best Friend, Ricky Dixon. From Portraits & Dreams, Wendy Ewald

Liz Hingley’s Home Made in Smethwick are portraits of families living in Smethwick, one of England’s most ethnically diverse towns. The photos are accompanied by personal recipes.

Liz Hingley, 2016. From Home Made in Smethwick

Kai Wiedenhöfer is showing portraits of refugee children from his new work, Forty Out of One Million / Syrian Collateral.

Kai Wiedenho?fer, Duwa a and Shahd Sarshan. From Forty Out of One Million. Syrian Collateral, 2015

Julien Germain, Kuramo Junior College, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria. Basic 7 / Junior Secondary Level 1, Mathematics. June 22nd, 2009. From the series Classroom Portraits

CHILDHOODS opens on 1 October and closes on 27 November 2016 at Side Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Previously: For Ever Amber, ennobling working class and marginalized communities.

Source

Back in May, Droga5 introduced its “Made the Johnsonville Way” campaign for the sausage brand with ads purportedly based on ideas from Johnsonville employees. The approach showcased the brand’s down-to-earth midwestern roots, and there’s plenty of that on display in the agency’s latest effort, “The Sausage Support Center.”

“The Sausage Support Center,” according to the 30-second spot, is manned by Johnsonville employees, who can help you figure out what to make for dinner. A call center housed in a folksy room with wood-paneled walls features employees answering calls to provide customers with help coming up with ideas for sausage-centric recipes.

“Next time you don’t know what to make for dinner, give us a call,” says one such employee.

Further online spots explore individual call center representatives and their go-to Johnsonville dinners. Like Bob, who pitches his “grown up macaroni and cheese” and Sheri, whose favorite is spicy baked beans. The spots are a bit cheesy but present the brand and its employees as likable and down-to-earth in a way similar to past efforts.

“We’ve all been there—standing in a grocery store or kitchen, wishing someone would just tell us what to make for dinner,” Droga5 associate creative director Kevin Weir told Adweek. “So we thought, ‘Who better to be that person than some certified sausage experts in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin?’ Now, they’re just a phone call away.”

Oh, and that number: (844) 9-SAUSAGE.

MDC Partners agency Vitro hired Sy Kraft as executive director of insights and strategy, a newly created position.

He joins the agency following a year and a half as a senior level integrated strategy and business stewardship consultant with S.I.N.K. Consulting in Brooklyn. Before that he spent two years with Publicis’ PKT and MSLGROUP as senior vice president, integrated/digital/social strategy, working with clients such as P&G and L’Oreal-Garnier.

Kraft’s previous agency jobs include a stint as senior group strategy consultant with Grey New York, where he worked with brands including the NFL, Pantene, Downy, TJ Maxx and Goya, and a senior strategy director role at Leo Burnett. He also brings client-side experience to the Vitro gig: for three years he was CMO for Real Club Resorts, or “Mexico’s largest domestic beach hotel group in Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Tulum.”

Kraft has also worked as an adjunct professor and advisor at NYU’s School of Professional Studies. 

The appointment comes after Vitro won AOR duties on Adidas Golf at the beginning of the summer; that news followed the departures of executive creative directors Kt Thayer and Oliver Duncan a month prior. Earlier this year, ASICS shifted its global creative business to 180 Amsterdam and 180LA from the agency and Vitro opened a new office in Austin, hiring GSD&M’s Jake Camozzi and Victor Camozzi to run its creative department.

Austin-based innovation agency T3 hired Christian Barnard as chief operating officer and Nelan Schwartz as chief technology officer. Ben Gaddis, formerly chief innovation officer, will now serve as president, while founder Gay Gaddis will focus on her duties as CEO. 

“Our management group could lead agencies anywhere in the world,” said Ben Gaddis in a statement. “It speaks volumes about our clients and our unique culture that this talent wants to do great things at T3.”

Barnard joins T3 from Razorfish, where he served as group vice president leading the agency’s Austin office since the beginning of 2015. That followed two and a half years as vice president of SapientNitro. Before that he spent four and a half years as CEO of Deft Strategy, which he co-founded in June of 2010 after three years as global vice president of frog design.

Schwartz joins T3 from frog design, where he has spent the past sixteen years. Most recently he served as executive technology officer, heading up frog’s technology offering in Europe from its Munich office since April of 2012. He originally joined frog as a developer in 2000, working his way up to technology director in 2007, principal technologist the following year and associate technology director in 2011.

Ben Gaddis originally joined T3 as director, mobile and emerging media strategy in April of 2009, following two years as vice president, business development for Omnicom-owned ipsh. He was then promoted to vice president, growth and innovation at the beginning of 2011 and chief innovation officer around two and a half years later. 

“This move is a natural evolution in T3’s growth, in retaining our 27 years of independence and in expanding our collaborative Think Tank model to develop innovative, useful experiences for our clients,” Gay Gaddis said.

-GSD&M launched a lip-sync battle themed spot for Southwest Airlines called “Any Way” (video above).

-JWT partnered with Getty Images to launch a pop-up women’s magazine at Advertising Week in New York called Glass. 

-The U.K. Advertising Standards Authority is investigating Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky for allegedly misleading promotional material surrounding the game.

-Digital agency Bluecadet opened a New York office, hired Lillian Preston as managing director, Brett Renfer as creative director and Ben Bojko as creative/technology director.

Santa Monica agency Supermoon, which counts Jessica Alba‘s The Honest Company, Ancestry, Custom Ink, and Campbell’s Fresh/Bolthouse Farms among its clients, hired Deutsch L.A. veteran Kyle Acquistapace as president and managing partner. He joins founding partners CEO Amir Haque, executive creative director David DeRoma, director of strategy Jill Burgeson, and group account director Nicole Rowett at the agency. The latter three are also veterans of the Deutsch organization.

Acquistapace spent sixteen years with Deutsch L.A., including serving as partner, director of media and data strategy from June of 2006 through last September. He originally joined the agency seven years earlier and served as executive vice president, group media director during that period, working with clients including Mitsubishi and Expedia. Acquistapace has also served as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California for the past nine years.

“Kyle’s take on leadership is hands-on and human, a perfect match for Supermoon,” Haque said in a statement. “He’s a champion of a disciplined form of advertising: creative and strategic, and always in the service of building a brand’s business.”

“I wanted to help create something great again, surrounded by passionate people who trust each other,” Acquistapace added. “I believe there’s an evolved form of agency out there waiting to be built, an agency based on creativity and reason and fairness. And I’ve found the right group of people to bring it to life.”

Supermoon specializes in serving companies as they move through the “second stage” of their life cycles. No longer startups, these companies are looking to expand their consumer bases in the interest of long-term success.

“Second-stage companies reach a point where they can’t grow anymore,” Haque says, adding, “We help people people break through that wall.”