Hasta La Creative!

Website: www.mydaughterwill.org

GSD&M, a usually quite creative ad agency in the heart of “weird” Austin, created this ad pro-bono together with five-time Academy Award-nominated director Richard Linklater. The ad was shot in GSD&M’s own bathrooms in parts, and the idea is to add a little humor to a serious subject. GSD&M’s CEO Duff Stewart told Advertising age: “Discriminatory legislation is not what this country is about. We need to speak up when we can.” Oh, I agree. But what the agency is speaking up against here is SB6 which they have dubbed “the bathroom bill”. Advertising tends to have a bad reputation due to omissions and spin, and here the spin is that it’s all about sitting vs standing in public bathrooms, when the bill encompasses shower rooms, locker rooms and all changing rooms in schools. The bill is very clear that “Biological sex” means the physical condition of being male or female, which is stated on a person’s birth certificate,” thus putting weight on reality of biology over what anyone might identify as, in terms as clear as bill can be. But you wouldn’t learn this from this lazily put together choddy, which suggests that every business will flee tax-haven Texas because some people sit down when they pee. No seriously, the standing vs sitting thing, they actually went there.

Of course there’s a website and a hashtag: #StopSB6, hoping to prompt people to write to their congressman to stop this bill. Why has this bill even appeared? Well, if you never heard of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, it’s a federal law that states: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” That means you can’t lock girls out of school, or scholarship programs, which actually used to be a problem. In fact, discrimination against women and girls is still such a hot topic that advertising agencies usually fawn all over themselves over projects that encourage girls to enter STEM or be the 3%, or #womennotobjects etcetera. We’ve come a long way since 1972, baby as the Virginia Slim ads used to say, but discrimination due to a persons sex still happens. While females historically have faced greater sex restrictions and barriers in education, Title IX benefits men as well, since the goal is to achieve educational equality for all. All of this changed when this guidance letter issued under President Barack Obama was sent out to public schools. The damning part is:
As a condition of receiving Federal funds, a school agrees that it will not exclude, separate, deny benefits to, or otherwise treat differently on the basis of sex any person in its educational programs or activities unless expressly authorized to do so under Title IX or its implementing regulations. The Departments treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations.

And with that, the law that was intended to prevent discrimination, enables discrimination. If women and girls is a class that is not defined by biological reality, but instead a chosen identity, what does it actually mean to be female? Who is female and how can we tell? Female as a term becomes irrelevant, as does being biologicallya woman or a girl. This choddy – complete with horrible piano as they tend to be – never comes close to explaining any of this, but they expect uninformed citizens to write their congressman after seeing a guy in a cowboy hat hammering on about not being like North Carolina in a bathroom. The website makes it clear that “It is and always will be illegal to harm or harass someone in a restroom,” but mentions nothing of situations where young girls and anatomically young boys are nude together in the same changing rooms. Probably because if they did, not a single parent in Texas would write to their congressmen about this.

Related: years ago the national organisation for marriage also made a choddy for their pet cause, which didn’t give you the full story either.

After all this time, Big Tech monopoly Google and its competitor Bing will start “self policing,” and making it harder people to find illegal streaming and download sties that pirate content. This comes as fantastic news because it not only takes one step in the right direction for musicians and filmmakers, but it also might help ease the epidemic of sex trafficking.
According to M Magazine:
“A voluntary code of practice will kick-start collaboration between the parties to demote links to websites that are dedicated to infringing content for UK consumers.
The code will accelerate the demotion of illegal sites following notices from rightsholders, and establishes ongoing technical consultation, increased co-operation and information sharing to develop and improve on the process.
The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has led the discussions, with the assistance of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The BPI, Motion Picture Association and the Alliance for Intellectual Property have been in conversation with Google and Bing.”
Not a moment too soon. According to government statistics, in the U.K., nearly 80 million music tracks were accessed illegally in 2016–in a three month period alone. But if you dig a little deeper, it may not be the triumphant partnership between Silicon Valley and Content Creators after all.
A statement on the BPI’s website reads in part:

Following a Government-chaired series of roundtables, a voluntary code of practice (‘code’) will kick-start collaboration between the parties to demote links to websites that are dedicated to infringing content for consumers in the UK. The code will accelerate the demotion of illegal sites following notices from rights holders, and establishes ongoing technical consultation, increased co-operation and information sharing to develop and improve on the process. It will also enable new practices to be adopted where needed.

The parties want to work together toward ensuring consumers have easy access to legal content and are not being inadvertently led to the infringing websites which proliferate online and risk to expose them to malware. A core aim is to ensure that users who are looking for legitimate content are much less likely to get presented with links to infringing content. There will also be collaboration to improve autocomplete suggestions which can lead users to infringing search results.

Yeah, whatever. In case you can’t read between the lines, there are two important things to note. First: This only applies to the U.K. You’d think if piracy is such an issue they’d be voluntarily self-policing on a global level. Not just in one country. And a country which incidentally has stepped up its efforts to curtail this behavior without the help of either search engine by sending emails to offenders letting them know they’re being jerks. Unsurprisingly, a lot of content creators see this as being a little too late as the behavior has been ingrained since the days of Napster. And spoiler alert: even if they “hide,” the websites, it’s a certainty a lot of people have them bookmarked already.
Secondly, don’t forget that this agreement is voluntary and not really enforceable by any sort of law. And Google and Bing have until later this year in June to report any findings to rights holders, meaning they are kicking the can down the road while the problem they continue to monetize happily persists.
In addition to pretending to figure out how to delist or demote websites, Google and Bing will also work to fix their autocomplete so those words “free download” don’t appear when someone types “Beyonce.”
Interesting timing, in the wake of Theresa May becoming Prime Minister. May has already been labeled as the “villain of the year,” by Big Tech. So this isn’t some PR move at all. No way. To quote Johnny Rotten, “They mean it, man.”
Honestly. Does anyone really still believe it is really so hard for Google to police its own search engine? It’s also not an arduous task to delist sites, or take away the means of making ad revenue either. They have the ability to punish sites that use pop-up ads, for God’s sake. They delist sites all the time. And we should know. Google delisted Adland for three months for zero reason. And they had no problem removing our ability to monetize Adland, by banning us from Adsense. And we’re a legitimate site but still don’t have that monetizing opportunity. if anyone really believes Google will do the right thing here, we’ve got a bridge to sell you.

They look different on the outside but are all the same on the inside. That’s true of people all over the world – and now of cola, too. Or at least ALI COLA, the first cola that comes in six different skin colors. In 2017, politics is lurching to the right – in Germany, Europe and the USA. So the German agency loved relaunched the pro-tolerance cola brand ALI COLA and invented their own cola. Instead of coming just in the usual black, ALI COLA is available in six different skin colors. But though they look different, all six colors taste exactly the same. They’re all the same; they just look different on the outside. Like people. ALI COLA responds to prejudice and with humor. The slogan: Cheers to tolerance. The brand also supports Kiron, an NGO that has found a way to cut red tape and help refugees earn university qualifications thanks to online courses and partner universities.