Hasta La Creative!

Reeha Alder-Shah, managing partner at Dare London, has joined AnalogFolk in the same role.

If there was a defining moment when advertisers started to get a proper handle on social media marketing, it was when an ex-American football star called Isaiah Mustafa was drafted in to save Old Spice from oblivion.

Richard Thomson explains how readers’ reactions on social media impact i’s front page.

Milton Elias looks back on his career to date and shares his lessons from the ladder.

Despite the bad news we see daily in the press, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet believes that humanity, as a whole, is entering an age of abundance and from there, an age of intelligence.

Tesco has reported a 1% rise in group like-for-like sales, a growth for the sixth consecutive quarter.

Animation by Ad Age. Composite images iStock.

If you go the route of fine ros, luxe hotel rooms and chopper rides, Cannes can cost a minor fortune. A major fortune, even.

But for young, job-hopping creatives looking to cozy up to executives at big-name agencies, the festival can be priceless (though with new Hotel Access passes for unregistered delegates, that may one day be more difficult).

Continue reading at AdAge.com

As the ad world adjusts to a new era of project-based work, as many as two-thirds of marketers that normally work with agencies report that they would like to bring that work in house, according to research by Gartner. This puts agencies at a crossroads, and brand marketers, whether or not they realize it yet, in a very challenging position.

Brands aren’t moving in this direction just because they want to save money (although they certainly do), but because they want to streamline complex processes and work with invested professionals who are closer to the data and know their brand inside and out — something that’s been lost since the death of the AOR.

The in-house strategy makes a lot of sense, but it comes with a host of challenges, starting with the loss of a well-rounded bench of agency specialists who have the unique skills to get a message out across the many platforms and mediums. Companies are realizing that finding the right talent isn’t easy, and that managing the huge number of functions that a robust marketing arm requires — from data analytics to content production — is a very tall order.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

It’s easy to mock the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. The name alone does a lot of the work for you. While there are many things to deeply love about our business, its deep need for self-congratulations is not among them. And there’s no place where this need is expressed more strongly than at Cannes.

The most spot-on complaints from the detractors include:

You travel thousands of miles to meet with companies who would happily come to your home office tomorrow if you just asked nicely.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

(TrendHunter.com) Chopping up watermelon or various other fresh fruits usually means having to chop endlessly in order to prepare it for consumption, but the Perfect Slicer aims to change this. Capable of chopping…