Hasta La Creative!

-CP+B, Bradley Cooper and want you to join them and “Stand Up to Cancer with American Airlines This June” (video above). 

-MullenLowe expanded its U.S. creative team with three new hires: Scott Hayes will serve as executive creative director out of the agency’s Winston-Salem, North Carolina office;  Chris Ribeiro and Drew Stalker join MullenLowe L.A. in roles as senior vice president, group creative director.

-Crowdfunding platform Indiegogo acquired Agency of Trillions with the goal of expanding its enterprise crowdfunding division.

-Miami Ad School Students Kohl Forsberg and Jay Fleming wrote up a fake pitch deck for that Pepsi Kendall Jenner ad.

-Doner launched a “#FeedYourSmile” Twitter campaign for the 40th anniversary of Potbelly Sandwich Shop in which the brand responds to 100 unhappy tweets with 100 improvised songs.

-Google Chrome will automatically block “annoying” ads. So…all ads?

-Full service creative studio The-Artery named Liron Ashkenazi-Eldar as lead design director.

Imagine if the New York Knicks were booted from the NBA after a year of bad play. It would, at the very least, cause havoc for sponsors shelling out big bucks to back the team. This scenario has been exactly what’s happening in the burgeoning esports business, where poorly performing teams are dropped each year, potentially limiting the growth of a sport that has enjoyed a surge of fan interest in recent years.

One of the industry’s biggest players on Thursday announced changes aimed at fixing the problem in a bid to lure more brand dollars and make the sport more accessible to casual fans.

Riot Games Inc., owner of the wildly popular League of Legends game and leagues, unveiled a new franchise model for its North American League Championship Series that includes creating a permanent lineup of teams starting in 2018.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

We are generally skeptical of anything claiming to be the world’s first or biggest or best. It’s a big fucking planet, you know?

Anyway, Havas and client Greenfield Natural Meat claim to have created the world’s largest “sustainable billboard” in the middle of some fields in Manitoba.

You know, Canada. Also known as “one of the countries that hasn’t pulled out of the Paris Agreement.” Here’s the video.

That’s not technically a billboard, but it does cover 70 acres. Kind of made us think of the Nazca Lines in Peru that only aliens and Illuminati can see.

A lot of effort went into this project, which Havas Canada VP and creative director Cory Eisentraut calls “a labor of love.” And it’s pretty cool that the client was into it.

It’s all about highlighting the fact that, as one can see clearly in the messaging, Greenfield doesn’t use antibiotics and raises its animals in open pens.

From client VP and GM Domenic Borrelli: “The overuse of antibiotics in the food chain is a serious public health issue and animal care issue, and Greenfield has a better way. We exist to make the world a better place by producing meat a more natural way, and that means saying no to antibiotics.”

So at least someone cares about the big, floating rock on which we all live.

Sure, McDonald’s drive-thru’s are pretty convenient. You can swing by McDonald’s and pick up your food without even getting out of the car. But wouldn’t it be that much more convenient if you didn’t have to drive to McDonald’s in the first place? In a goofy stunt recently, McDonald’s Brazil and ad agency DPZ&T built…

Danny McBride would like more, in general. Specifically, he’d like more people to come up to him on the street and say they loved him in Your Highness. He can never hear that enough because, well, he never hears it at all. McBride, the brash actor-comedian-pitchman, stars in a new ad for Microsoft Xbox’s Game…

“Wonder Woman,” the comic-book epic poised to dominate the box office this weekend, also shatters one of the remaining glass ceilings for women — directing big-budget, Hollywood superhero movies.

If director Patty Jenkins succeeds in turning the story of the Amazonian princess into a blockbuster, she could pave the way for more acceptance of women at the helm of the movie industry’s most financially important pictures. The feature is already a hit with critics, scoring among the best Marvel and DC Comics movies on review aggregator RottenTomatoes, and is headed toward a $111 million opening weekend in North American theaters, according to BoxOfficePro. That would make it one of the year’s biggest movies.

The film and TV industries are under pressure to usher in more diversity behind the camera, with federal regulators making an inquiry last year into discrimination by studios. Just 4% of all directors across 1,000 top movies from 2007 to 2016 were female, and of those only three were black women, according to Stacy Smith, an associate professor at the University of Southern California. Jenkins has spent most of her career in television and has a single previous feature to her credit — the 2003 drama “Monster,” which earned an acting Oscar for Charlize Theron.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Google’s Chrome browser will soon come with preinstalled technology that will block the most annoying ads currently marring the web experience, the company confirmed on Thursday.

Publishers will be able to understand how they will be affected through a tool Google is dubbing “The Ad Experience Report.” It will basically score a publisher’s site and inform them which of their ads are “annoying experiences.”

At the same time, Chrome will give publishers the option to force a choice on people running their own ad blocking software: whitelist the site so its non-annoying ads can display or pay a small fee to access the content ad-free.

Continue reading at AdAge.com