Hasta La Creative!

Lots of people go to TripAdvisor for reviews on travel destinations — and then go somewhere else to book the trip. So as the summer travel season heats up, TripAdvisor, which competes in the growing online travel agency sector with Trivago as well as with Airbnb, is turning to more TV as well as a little furry friend to remind people it has one-stop shopping.

“People know us for our reviews and our contentwe have huge traffic for that,” said Neela Pal, VP-brand marketing at 17-year-old TripAdvisor. “They don’t know that you can look at any hotel and get all the prices from over 200 sites and book through us.”

In the new spots, which will run nationally in a mix of 30-and-15-second commercials and in longer lengths in Europe, a tiny owlan evolution from TripAdvisor’s logourges consumers to use TripAdvisor to find the lowest price. In one spot, the owl is getting measured for a custom-fit spa robe. The ads are part of TripAdvisor’s “Latest Reviews, Lowest Prices,” tagline.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

As a third day of deliberations dawns, it is clear that the jurors in the Bill Cosby sexual assault trial have been painstaking in their review of the evidence.

Grey London’s former creative chief explains why we should be looking for the ugly during Cannes Lions next week.

Sky Bet has appointed Who Wot Why to its retained creative account as it seeks to create a better through-the-line experience.

Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick is taking a leave of absence following a scathing report on the company’s workplace culture.

The Media Week Awards are the biggest and most highly prized awards in UK commercial media because they are judged by the toughest critics – the industry’s leaders.

“I’m just suggesting, humbly, that better products are easier to sell,” says Jerome Nadel, senior VP and chief marketing officer at Rambus, a public software licensing company in Silicon Valley.

This begs the question, are better products really too much to ask for? For decades, the answer for many CMOs has been, unfortunately, yes. Like it or not, it has traditionally fallen on a marketing department to market a product or service — as is — to the best of its abilities, which can handicap even the most brilliant campaigns. The good news? The role of marketing is changing, slowly but surely.

Jerome Nadel is one of today’s innovative CMOs adopting design-led thinking, which is essentially the unification of product development and marketing. By closely integrating the two, each formerly disparate function informs and ultimately improves the other. So, instead of using customer stories at the bottom of the funnel to nurture conversions, or “downstream” as Nadel refers to it, these softer elements of the customer journey are introduced upstream to improve the product, according to what customers actually need and want. By thinking about marketing during product design, the product becomes better and thus easier to market. “You need to be thinking about these user stories and be connected,” Nadel says, “because that’s going to be the foundation of the narrative you’re going to use to promote later.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

One relief organization found that people were more likely to donate to victims of the 2011 Japanese tsunami than to those fleeing the war in Syria.

The virtual reality space lacked relevant content for youth culture, so Google teamed up with Boiler Room to create a mobile VR experience immersing people in one of the world’s most famous music scenes.

Agency statement says work for Phillipines Tourism is original and not a ripoff of a 2014 South African ad.