Hasta La Creative!

A web giant promises to tighten its safeguards to avoid pairing ads with offensive content, but advertisers are not convinced.

(TrendHunter.com) While the smartphone is essentially a mini computer, brands are responding to the popularity of the cellular devices with the production of devices like the ‘KS-PRO’ Ultra Mobile…

Your phone is driving you through this journey,

driving you mad, extracting value, whining like a baby, purring like a lover, bombarding you with deadening, maddening, embarrassing, outrageous claims that concern time, space, attention, credit card numbers. It copy-pastes your life into countless, unintelligible pictures that have no meaning, no audience, no purpose, but do have impact, punch, and speed. It accumulates love letters, insults, invoices, drafts, endless communication. It is being tracked and scanned, turning your into transparent digits, into motion as a blur. A digital eye as your heart in hand. It is witness and informer. If it gives away your position, it means you’ll retroactively have had one. If you film the sniper that shoots at you, the phone will have faced their aim. They will have been framed and fixed, a faceless pixel composition. Your phone is your brain in corporate design, your heart is a product, the Apple of your eye.

Dense clusters, radio waves, letters and snapshots, intimate and official communications, TV broadcasts and text messages drift away from earth in rings, a tectonic architecture of the desires and fears of our times. In a few hundred thousand years, extraterrestrial forms of intelligence may incredulously sift through our wireless communications. But, imagine the perplexity of those creatures when they actually look at the material. A huge percentage of the pictures inadvertently sent off into deep space is spam.

Spam is our message to the future.

Instead of a modernist space capsule showing a woman and man on the outside—a family of “man”—our contemporary dispatch to the universe is image spam, enhanced advertisement mannequins.

From the perspective of image spam, people are improvable, or, as Hegel put it, perfectible. They are imagined to be potentially “flawless,” which in this context means horny, super skinny, armed with recession-proof college degrees and always on time for their service jobs, courtesy of their replica watches. This is the contemporary family of men and women: a bunch of people on knockoff antidepressants, fitted with enhanced body parts. They are the dream team of hyper-capitalism.

— Hito Steyeri

The post Apple of Your Eye appeared first on Adbusters | Journal of the mental environment.

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(TrendHunter.com) Anyone who works in an office that finds themselves feeling anxious or stressed at their desk could make use of the ‘Flingons’ magnetic stress toys as a way to alleviate some of their…

Sid Lee Collective, an agency-sponsored incubator fueling employees’ passion projects, is opening an art exhibit on Saturday entitled “Refuge.”

The exhibit includes various expressions of the importance of aiding refugees from war-torn countries, from photography documenting children in a camp for Syrian refugees to a model representing refugee camp cubicles and banners with messages such as “Home For Now” and “Imagine Equality.” Some of the art is being sold, with proceeds from their sale, along with related merchandise, going to the American Civil Liberties Union and the Refugee and Immigrant Fund.

“It’s a platform for us to push passion products, and we thought we’d look at something with a bit more purpose, that’s more meaningful,” Sid Lee New York executive creative director Dan Brooks explained to Adweek. “We came upon the idea of harnessing the power of the collective and bringing creatives under one banner to make a statement about civil liberties and the refugee crisis.”

Clearly, the installation was also motivated by recent political events, such as the president’s executive order targeting refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

“More and more, you’re seeing people who weren’t normally activists taking a stand, with the equality marches in New York and the news coverage around the travel ban…It’s an opportunity and maybe even a responsibility now for people who are involved in communication and creativity to use a bit of their influence to inspire people and be purpose-driven,” he added.

Images (top to bottom): Adrian Yu, Jo Metson, Sid Lee

The New York offices of Deutsch have hired Heather English and Marques Gartrell (who are copywriter and art director, respectively) as the newest members of its creative team.

They will both hold the title of VP, creative director and officially begin their new roles on April 10.

“I’m excited to welcome Heather and Marques to Deutsch,” said CCO Dan Kelleher. “The amount of care and craft they bring to everything they do, in addition to being super nice people, makes them a great addition to our team.”

The pair had been freelancing at Deutsch, and moving forward they will work across its client roster while also contributing to new business efforts.

“We’re pumped to rejoin forces with Dan and all the talented people at Deutsch,” said the duo, who know Kelleher via their time at Grey and their work on DirecTV’s “Cable Effects” campaign, which he ran as executive creative director. “Joining this team gives us a unique opportunity to work somewhere that’s both creatively and culturally exciting.”

Both English (portfolio) and Gartrell (portfolio) had most recently worked as freelancers, with the former working on campaigns at Joan and Figliulo & Partners and the latter contributing to Joan’s work on Netflix, General Mills and Booking.com.

English was formerly a CD at 360i, where she worked on the Oscar Meyer Sizzl dating app for bacon lovers along with many other campaigns for such clients as Oreo and Hanes. Gartrell spent nearly two years with BBDO, working across Priceline, AT&T and other accounts.

Restrictions on ISP data sharing and use lauded by privacy advocates and bemoaned by ad industry trade groups just got even closer to kaput. The Senate today passed a bill sponsored by Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona to invalidate the Federal Communications Commission rule which, had it gone into effect as originally planned for earlier this month, would have blocked internet service providers from activities like using and sharing data on location and web-browsing habits unless consumers explicitly opted in.

There is a companion bill sponsored by GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee that if passed, which is likely in the majority-Republican body, would seal the fate of the controversial rules.

Today’s vote earned praise from a supporter of other digital privacy initiatives, former Federal Trade Commission chairman Jon Leibowitz, who while serving as FTC chair stunned the ad industry when he called for a do-not-track mechanism for online ad privacy in 2010.

Continue reading at AdAge.com