It’s Pride Month! And every year, around this time, a certain kind of pundit hops on a soapbox to complain about how the term “LGBTQA” just keeps getting longer, and isn’t that just ludicrous? Actually, it isn’t. In fact, it’s not nearly long enough. And a campaign from Wieden + Kennedy New York highlights why….
Samsung went around the world in less than five minutes, as two globe-trotting ads debuted atop this week’s viral video chart.
The company grabbed the top spot with the story of a young girl, aspiring to be an engineer in India — promoting the education of women through Samsung’s technical schools around the world. A new Galaxy S8 ad takes viewers across Peru in the second-place spot.
With the QLED TV global launch, ranking No. 10 this week, Samsung boasts eight different top-10 video campaigns in the past eight weeks. The rankings reflect both “organic” views — those initiated by consumers — and paid views, which surface as pre-roll.
What makes a company one of the best places to work in the ad industry? Last year it was perks such as stipends for educational courses and obedience training for employee dogs. Others offered peer awards programs, weekly fitness outings or company-sponsored volunteer days.
This year Ad Age wants to uncover even more morale-boosting benefits in the 2017 Best Places to Work. Conducted in partnership with Best Companies Group, the program has the same expanded eligibility requirements introduced last year: Any agency, ad tech, media company or marketing division of a brand that’s been in business for more than one year and has more than 15 full-time employees can enter.
Submissions are open now; early pricing ends June 16 and the final deadline is July 14. Signing up is easy — employee surveys and employer questionnaires are sent at a later date. (The full timeline can be found here.)
Ad Age “Media Guy” columnist Simon Dumenco’s media roundup for the morning of Tuesday, June 6:
Today’s theme is friendship — between the U.K. and the U.S. (see No. 4, below), between the White House and the Kremlin (No. 3), between a senator and an embattled HBO star (No. 6), and between the president and “Fox & Friends” (No. 5). It’s all so, you know, heartwarming. Anyway, let’s get started …
1. The New York Times sent out a “Breaking News” alert last night (it arrived in my inbox at 9:15 p.m. ET) titled “A contractor faces espionage charges for giving a classified report about Russia to the news media, the first leak case of the Trump era.” The story by Charlie Savage that it links to tells the remarkable story of a rather simple cat-and-mouse game:
Anheuser-Busch InBev has quietly moved into the digital publishing business with a series of investments in websites that cover beer culture and the rising craft beer industry. But the slow move by the nation’s largest brewer into the editorial business is raising conflict-of-interest questions and causing blowback in the boisterous craft beer community.
The complaints began coming last week when it was disclosed that AB InBev took a minority stake in RateBeer, a site that publishes consumer-driven beer ratings and stories on beer culture. The investment, by the brewer’s incubator and venture capital unit ZX Ventures, took place in October but only drew notice last week after after it was discovered by another craft beer beer news site, Good Beer Hunting.
ZX Ventures also funds a beer culture magazine called October that was introduced in January by Pitchfork, the music site owned by Conde Nast. (Good Beer Hunting owner and founder Michael Kiser serves as executive editor of October, a point that Good Beer Hunting disclosed in its coverage of AB InBev and RateBeer.)
Samsung went around the world in less than five minutes, as two globe-trotting ads debuted atop this week’s viral video chart.
The company grabbed the top spot with the story of a young girl, aspiring to be an engineer in India — promoting the education of women through Samsung’s technical schools around the world. A new Galaxy S8 ad takes viewers across Peru in the second-place spot.
With the QLED TV global launch, ranking No. 10 this week, Samsung boasts eight different top-10 video campaigns in the past eight weeks. The rankings reflect both “organic” views — those initiated by consumers — and paid views, which surface as pre-roll.
Britons watching pro-jihadist Youtube videos last week may have received pre-roll campaign messaging from none other than Theresa May, London’s Sunday Times reported, leading Britain’s three largest political parties to pull all YouTube advertising before tomorrow’s general election.
The Times reported that messaging for the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democratic parties was running alongside extremist content, the latest example of YouTube’s struggle to keep advertisements off objectionable video this year:
Election adverts for Labour and the Lib Dems also ran on a YouTube channel created by a supporter of Islamic State. Tim Farron, the Liberal Democratic leader, was pictured above the supporter’s profile picture, an image of the terror group’s black flag.
Ad Age “Media Guy” columnist Simon Dumenco’s media roundup for the morning of June 7:
Yesterday’s accidental theme, dear reader, was friendship. Today’s equally accidental theme is rejection — of certain Twitterers by President Trump (see No. 1, below), of Trump by James Comey and vice versa (No. 2), and especially of Kesha by Jerry Seinfeld (Nos. 3 and 4). Anyway, let’s get started …
1. Or maybe he could just block everyone? “The Knight First Amendment Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group based at Columbia University, threatened to take legal action against President Trump if he does not unblock critics on Twitter,” per Benjamin Mullin of the Poynter Institute. “The demand, made in a letter to President Trump, was sent on behalf of Holly O’Reilly and Joseph M. Papp, two Twitter users who were blocked by the president’s account after criticizing him on the social media network.” Knight argues that Trump’s Twitter is something called a “designated public forum” and that the president has no legal right to just banish his critics in such a forum.
Apple wants into your home, but not in a weird way.
The Home Pod, Apple’s Siri-voiced speaker, was unveiled this week, with a premium price tag — $350 — and Apple is playing up the privacy of the device. The marketing around Home Pod, which won’t kick off in earnest until the fall, will focus heavily on the privacy aspect of Apple’s device compared to the Amazon Echo and Google Home, according to people familiar with Apple’s strategy.
“They’re really focused on privacy,” said one person with knowledge of Apple’s marketing plans. “There is no bloatware, no tracking, and they’re not selling your information. That’s completely different from Google Home and Amazon Echo.”
The banner ad may be a crime against advertising, but creative agency Air Brussels appears to have found an extremely effective way of using the internet’s oldest ad format.
Amnesty International tasked the agency with getting people to sign petitions against humanitarian crimes committed across the globe. A difficult task in any medium, they said, but they found tremendous success by putting a creative spin on YouTube banners.
The banner ads were shown at the bottom of a video and looked like subtitles — not ads. Each banner then had a call to action to visit the Amnesty’s page concerning the specific issue.
These billboards are watching you
Number You Need to Know
20 — The number of stores German discount chain Lidl is opening this summer in North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, as it makes its U.S. debut. Lidl, which has about 10,000 stores in Europe, has plans for another 80 East Coast locations by the summer of 2018.
Kathy Griffin said on Tuesday that she “went too far” on her latest photo shoot with controversial photographer Tyler Shields, creating an image where she is holding a bloodied mask of President Trump. Visually it reminds you of Jihadi John’s beheading of Alan Henning, and other gruesome ISIS propaganda.
In a video from the shoot, Kathy seems to be well aware of the controversy the image would cause, joking “we’re going to have to go to Mexico… Like today.” with Shields on the set, while viewing the images.
But as soon as the images were published, the backlash was fierce with everyone from former porn stars to Chelsea Clinton weighing in on the photo.
If @kathygriffin wanted to shock people, she should actually be funny.— Jenna Jameson (@jennajameson) May 30, 2017
This is vile and wrong. It is never funny to joke about killing a president. https://t.co/zIiuKoMyFw— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) May 30, 2017
Kathy took to social media to apologise for the image, stating “I made a mistake, and I was wrong,” adding that she’s asked the photographer to remove the images from his social accounts.
I am sorry. I went too far. I was wrong. pic.twitter.com/LBKvqf9xFB— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) May 30, 2017
Adland can confirm that the PR fallout from this is now affecting Kathy’s jobs, brands don’t dare have her as a spokesperson when she’s in the news for this sort of joke. Griffin was scheduled to perform at Route 66 Casino near Albuquerque on July 22, but that show has been cancelled. CNN, where the comedian traditionally hosts the new years eve show called the photo “disgusting and offensive.” They have stated “We are pleased to see she has apologised. We are evaluating New Year’s Eve and have made no decisions at this point.”
Even squatty potty, whose mascot is a pooping unicorn and concept is that we’re all “full of shit”, has distanced themselves from Kathy pulling all ads starring her immediately. CEO of squatty potty Bobby Edwards has issued the following statement:
“We were shocked and disappointed to learn about the image Ms. Griffin shared today, it was deeply inappropriate and runs contrary to the core values our company stands for. In response, Squatty Potty has suspended its ad campaign featuring Ms. Griffin. We have acted swiftly and decisively to demonstrate our commitment to a culture of decency, civility, and tolerance.”
Joking about sitting presidents is a comedian’s bread and butter, but sometimes it really goes too far. It’s one thing to do standup routines like Dana Carvey where he basically does impressions of all the presidents with jokes, it’s another to just rant like Bill Hicks on a bad night at them. Stephen Colbert recently spewed a long rant of vitriol about President Trump ending it by calling him “Vladimir Putin’s cock holster.” Years ago, the rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask caused the entire Missouri fair to get sensitivity training, and the president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association to resign, because clowning around in a President mask was somehow racist. In 2011 Gilbert Gottfried was fired as the Aflac duck voice for cracking a joke in poor taste on Twitter. By the way, did you know that now first lady Melania Trump was in an Aflac ad?
In a polarised world adding political jokes or points to your act can serve to alienate more than half of your fans, as Kathy just learned. Amy Schumer got booed off-stage for making Trump jokes, and Anheuser-Busch killed the Amy Schumer & Seth Rogen “Party” campaign as sales declined. Sometimes people just want to be entertained, or learn about a new product without cause marketing, political posturing or random lesbians snogging in the lifestyle shots. When your job is to be funny, and a spokesperson, you need to balance carefully on the line of “still relevant/famous” and suitably non-offensive. Beheadings aren’t funny.
One could high-brow it and argue that the severed head image is a reference to Judith with the Head of Holofernes, or maybe it’s a photographic response to the Der Spiegel cartoon cover. Perhaps it is as simple as just being inspired by ISIS recent images of beheadings that have crept into our collective unconscious for years now. But no matter how you look at Tyler Shields’ body of work, you’ll and up noticing after a while that the images all feel quite familiar. Even straight up copied, but staged.
Tyler Shields created “The Suspense series” long after Ryan McGinley established his falling people look, which he’s used in everything from fashion shoots to billboard art installations.
Henry Leutwyler has even called Tyler Shields out on Instagram, for his “pointe” photo of a ballerinas feet that looks like a direct copy of Henry’s photograph of same. He has gotten no response.
@thetylershields @thedirtysideofglamour Are you really not even a little bit embarrassed ? @nowness ?? @foleygallery @lgamanagement @pragerericprager @queenruba @nycballet @hasselblad_official #ballet BALLET A Portrait of The New York City Ballet Published by @gerhardsteidl in 2012. A post shared by Henry Leutwyler (@henryleutwyler) on Dec 23, 2015 at 11:02am PST
We are certainly not the first ones to notice, Vice has written a long article Is Celebrity Photographer Tyler Shields Inspired, Or Copying Other Artists?
The Vice article speaks to other artists and Paddy Johnson, art critic and founder of Art F City, about Tyler Shields work. Paddy is not impressed.
Johnson told me that, in her opinion, Shields’s copying of other’s work was not the biggest problem with his photographs. “The issue with the work of Tyler Shields isn’t so much that he’s copying so many artists’ work—though his shouldn’t be an artistic model to aspire to—but that his appropriations replace the unique vision of the original with the cheap ploys of shock or nostalgia,” she said in an email.
“Take the Sally Mann rip-off [pictured above]: you never forget the original for the child’s defiant gaze while holding a cigarette,” Johnson wrote. “She’s not an adult, but she’s at the stage where you can begin to see who she will become emerge. And in that photo, it seems almost a little too early. With Shields’, there’s no authenticity to the photograph. It’s staged from beginning to end, so what you get is a child striking a pose with two women in the background gazing sexily at the camera. Are they what she is to become or are they just ornaments for the photo? Either way, Shields takes what began as an incredibly haunting photograph and turns it into an art postcard.”
There’s – naturally – a Tumblr dedicated to Tyler Shields plagiaristic style. Tyler Shields exposed, where the most recent entry quotes Tyler’s own Twitter account as he says “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” with the visual retort “Yes, we have and so did you.”
Tyler’s blood and gore obsession has had Lindsey Lohan posing with knives and blood spatter and women giving BJ’s to guns, so it was really only a matter of time before he was inspired by ISIS beheadings in order to “push the envelope.” The surprising thing is that despite such obvious plagiarism and now an image that got Kathy Griffin fired so fast her career may have screeched to a halt and early retirement – Tyler Shields’ phone keeps ringing. Perhaps his “Shields” name is an actual shield.
If you happen to be in Paris next weekend, you might want to go shopping. For a good cause. BETC has once again partnered with anti-AIDS NGO called AIDES for a Fashion Charity Sale.
The sale will run from the 9th to the 11th of June in Les Magasins généraux which also happens to be the new office building of the BETC. This is located in a Parisian suburb called Pantin.
“We don’t have any plans of releasing a covfefe flavoured soda,” they tweeted, “If you want the taste of incompetence there are other colas more readily available.” The tweet was meant to poke fun at competitors but people were not amused, someone tweeted back “This is not a good marketing strategy.” and RC Cola mocked them with the mocking chicken Spongebob meme. Yes, the one that MIC.com says “is all that makes sense anymore in our broken country.”
Ten minutes later their branded verified Twitter account was suspended. Ouch.
Correction 20:30: Another ouch, I wasn’t paying attention to details here, and as Paul Arden always reminded us “the Devil is in the details. ” This was apparently not the official RC Cola account, but a parody mirroring the official accounts name and look, but making off-brand tweets. Got me. Just goes to show you that most people will fall for parody accounts at a first glance, and that little blue checkmark is pretty useless.
At this time we are working to actively pursue the deactivation of the fake account known as @OfficialRCCola with help from @Twitter.— Dr Pepper Snapple (@DrPepperSnapple) May 31, 2017
They don’t have a clue about the ten scholarships we awarded this year. They wont have read the SCABs written by our scholarship students, or be aware that Olly Wood, who won a scholarship to the school a few years ago, has just won five pencils at D&AD.
Yes, some of our students come from privileged backgrounds. Diversity wouldn’t be diversity without them. And our course is nearly £15,000, which is a barrier for many people. But it is the most successful course of its kind. If we were a for-profit enterprise, we could double our fees and still be cheaper than Miami Ad School.
One of my proudest achievements is that our school, through our scholarship program, gave Joel Buckley the opportunity to make a better life for his family. There is no way Joel would have been able to study without his scholarship. Diversity includes helping people re-skill.
I could tell you sixty-one stories about sixty-one incredible students who have had their lives changed by our scholarship program.
Our scholarships are part funded by agencies, and part funded by me teaching or talking in various places around the world. When you visit our school, you can see the names of our agency sponsors as stars on the steps leading up to our studio. The ECDs of our sponsor agencies help us choose who to award scholarships to.
Collectively, our sponsors funded six out of ten scholarships that were awarded last year. We were also blessed with a £12k gift from Marketing Academy, with instructions to share it amongst two scholarship students who weren’t able to afford to study without a bursary.
Sponsorship of a scholarship starts at just £500 per month and comes with a number of benefits that ensure a fruitful working partnership between school and agency. (To find out more email: honor@schoolcommunicationarts.com). Most agencies spend more than that on fruit for their reception.
The industry will soon begin preparing for Cannes and its opulence, for the annual self-congratulatory nonsense that we all pretend to hate. You could sponsor a scholarship and provide a bursary with the average agency’s drinks budget over the week. We both know that this is an understatement.
When I get angry, I look for solutions. So I created this crowd-funding page for anyone going to Cannes. Simply buy one less bottle of champagne whilst you are down there, and buy it on our page instead.
When you get back, we will send you a bottle of quality British champagne, together with the story of one of the sixty-one students whose lives have been changed thanks to a scholarship at SCA.
If we sell one thousand bottles we can fund four scholarships.
That’s worth raising a glass to.
And that was worth getting angry for.
PS – Please share this message with as many people as possible. Let’s create plenty of scholarships through plenty of drinking.
Bringing species back from the brink of extinction is the goal of San Diego Zoo Global. As a leader in conservation, the work of San Diego Zoo Global includes on-site wildlife conservation efforts (representing both plants and animals) at the San Diego Zoo, San Diego Zoo Safari Park, and San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, as well as international field programs on six continents. The work of these entities is made accessible to children through the San Diego Zoo Kids network, reaching out through the Internet and in children’s hospitals nationwide. The work of San Diego Zoo Global is made possible by the San Diego Zoo Global Wildlife Conservancy and is supported in part by the Foundation of San Diego Zoo Global.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
