Hasta La Creative!

(TrendHunter.com) Bethany Halbreich, currently an Innovation and Creativity Consultant at PepsiCo in New York, discussed how she ensures that fresh and effective ideas keep flowing with Trend Hunter.

How does your…

The Association of National Advertisers’ #SeeHer campaign gets a new face — rather, many new faces, in “A Woman Did That,” a campaign co-created with MTV in honor of Women’s History Month.

Created in-house at MTV, the campaign will feature a series of one-minute videos highlighting accomplished women including Rihanna, Olympic gold medalist Laurie Hernandez, fashion designer Lucy Jones, actress and activist Gina Rodriguez, author Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, and Iiventor and Student Keiana Cave. It will also include trivia segments highlighting fascinating bits of women’s history and the struggles.

The campaign will have a concentrated kickoff on MTV this weekend, with a slate of films running from Saturday through Sunday evening. The spots will then continue to air on the channel for the rest of the month. The campaign will also extend to the network’s digital and social platforms, including Snapchat Discover.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

For what seemed like forever, the promise of mobile advertising was all about reaching the proverbial “right consumer at the right time with the right message.” The descriptions from zealous mobile ad execs usually involved ads or notifications that hit someone’s phone with an offer when it was near a storefront or spotted in a grocery aisle. In other words, it was all about using the data immediately.

That was mobile location data 1.0, suggested industry execs at the Local Search Association conference in San Diego this week. Some believe location data 2.0 has begun.

What that means, they say, is that advertisers are sophisticated enough to look at location data more holistically through a wider lens. While many mobile marketers still focus on getting messages to people at key moments, the use of data showing where people have been over time is just as, if not more, important than where they are right this instant.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Mekanism launched a new campaign for Muscle Milk aimed at active millenials under 35, entitled “Strong Feels Good.”

Built around a broadcast and digital spot running in 60, 30 and 15-second iterations, the campaign celebrates the feeling of accomplishment and subsequent celebration after a tough workout. The spot opens on a woman reaching the end of a tough backpacking ascent up a mountain. Looking out at the view, she begins to dance in celebration. The scene then shifts to groups of people similarly dancing goofily, the feeling apparently contagious.

The effort acts as an extension of the “Stronger Everyday” campaign Mekanism launched for the brand last April with a spot starring Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry. Curry returns for an appearance at the conclusion of the spot, showing off his own dance moves. The approach feels more than a bit stretched out in the full, 60-second version (above) and actually benefits from the cut to a shorter runtime.

“Strong Feels Good” will make its’ broadcast debut (in the 60-second format) today during coverage of the Golden State Warriors game against the Chicago Bulls and will continue to run on digital and social media channels through June.

Credits:
Agency: Mekanism
Client: Muscle Milk
Founder & Executive Creative Director: Tommy Means
EVP, Director of Creative: Tom Lyons
Associate Creative Director: Joe Beutel
Art Director: Sean Grimes
EVP, Managing Director: Michael Zlatoper
Director of Brand Management: Anna Boyarsky
Brand Director: Luke Welch
Brand Manager: Sarah Holden
Head of Planning, West: Jeremy Daly
Head of Production: Kati Haberstock
Director of Production Operations: Frank Lewis
Senior Producer: Jess Murray
Producer: Megan Ubovich

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Production Company: Hungry Man
Director: Dave Laden
DP: Jamie Ramsay
EP: Caleb Dewart
Line Producer: Ahnee Boyce

Editorial: No6
Editor: Lucas Spaulding
Asst Editor: Brian Meagher
Producer: Yole Barra

Finish/Color/Graphics: The Mill
Creative Director: Jay Bandlish
Head of 2D: Randy McEntee
Color: Greg Reese
EP: Krystina Wilson

Music: Travis & Maude
Creative Director: David Wittman

Marc Pritchard’s calls to hold digital advertising accountable are long overdue, brave and heard. It is a great start, but only a partial solution. Without a broader view, this path could lead to a less efficient and more dangerous ecosystem.

I agree with the chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble. Enforcement of Media Rating Council’s viewability standard, campaign verification by MRC-accredited third parties, and transparency in agency contracts is a must. Having a self-regulatory organization — Trustworthy Accountability Group in this case — is critical if their authority is to be respected. The rules, developed by TAG, the MRC and the IAB are all beneficial. Yet, they have often been ignored because these organizations hold no enforcement authority. Both publishers and advertisers have skirted the standards to complete a campaign or hit a target. This needs to stop.

What is most critical to an advertiser is ROI. This is the promise of digital advertising in the first place. The clear ability to measure the efficacy of spend is what makes digital special — in theory. However, if a brand spends $1 billion on viewable ads, and consumers never engage, are they doing much better than spending it on nonviewable inventory or fraud?

Continue reading at AdAge.com

(TrendHunter.com) Drones show immense promise when it comes to offering assistance for those who are in life-threatening situations like being stranded in open water, which the Parrot Recon Drone identifies.

The…

RYBN, Dataghost 2, 2016. Installation view at STUK in Leuven for the Artefact festival. Photo © Kristof Vrancken

As early as the 1st century, Jews believed that the Torah and other key religious texts contained encoded truths and hidden meanings. They used a system called Gematria to uncover them. According to this numerological system, each Hebrew letter also corresponds to a number (for example: 1 is Aleph, 2 is Bet, 3 is Gimel, 4 is Daleth, etc.) Kabbalists extended the method to other texts and, by converting letters to numbers, they looked for a hidden meaning in each word. Other hermeneutic techniques used by the Kabbalah are Temurah, which rearrange words and sentences to deduce deeper spiritual meanings, and Notarikon which creates words from letters taken from the beginning, middle, or end of words.

RYBN, Dataghost 2, 2016. Installation view at STUK in Leuven for the Artefact festival. Photo © Kristof Vrancken

RYBN, Dataghost 2, 2016. Installation view at STUK in Leuven for the Artefact festival. Photo © Kristof Vrancken

The French collective RYBN.org has applied this numerological system of transformations, associations and substitutions to computing. Their Dataghost 2 installation is a kabbalistic computational machine that seeks to reveal the hidden messages buried within the data traffic.

A daemon, installed on a server, catches all incoming and outgoing digital communications, and dumps their content using network interception tools. All the encapsulated data are then submitted to several decyphering algorithms, reproducing the hermeneutic techniques of Kabbalah. The raw data are decomposed and recomposed according to the substitution principles that govern the Kabbalah, in order to unveil the mystic of network communications.

By following the kabbalistic alpha-numerical system, the fragments of codes generate in the process millions of shell commands, most of them incoherent or nonfunctional. However, from time to time, the commands will ‘make sense’ to the computer. The machine will interpret them as tasks that needs to be executed. At this precise moment, the machine achieves the invocation ritual of a digital Golem.

However, there is no way to predict where the ritual might lead the machine: the executed commands might saturate the memory capacity of the machine, provoke a definitive stop within the software layer, or overpass several critical limits that results in an overheating of certain electronic components, or lead to the destruction of parts of its physical layers. Over the course of its life, the system constantly publishes its self-destructive activity in the form of a print out of all the different commands.

I discovered the work two days ago at the Artefact festival at STUK in Leuven (a mere 15 minute away from Brussels so take the train now if you’re in Belgium because the show is as enchanting as its theme suggests) and Dataghost 2 was dead. The demise came quite early. The email exchange in which the artists and STUK tried to understand what had happened was printed out and added to the exhibition space. The emails reveal that the system probably erased a critical file which brought the whole process to its term.

The installation is currently running in dead mode. Both the printing machine and the screen remain frozen. ?

RYBN, Dataghost 2, 2016. Installation view at STUK in Leuven for the Artefact festival. Photo © Kristof Vrancken

RYBN, Dataghost 2, 2016. Installation view at STUK in Leuven for the Artefact festival. Photo © Kristof Vrancken

I found the work brilliant. On the one hand, it is super complex and perplexing, just like most esoteric practices. On the other hand, it demonstrates with great efficiency and simplicity that algorithms (and by extension any technology system) are only as rational (or irrational) as the humans who program them.

Dataghost 2 is exhibited at the artefact festival in Leuven, Belgium. The exhibition, curated by Karen Verschooren from STUK & Ils Huygens from Z33 continues until 9 March 2017

If you find yourself in Paris, the RYBN collective will be discussing Dataghost 2 tomorrow 3 March at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris Cergy.

Related stories: The Occult, Witchcraft & Magic. An Illustrated History.

Source

(TrendHunter.com) An automobile manufacturer based in Barcelona, Spain by the name of AD Tramontana is now offering 3D-printed parts for its custom sports cars in partnership with Eceleni.

The Tramontana sports car…