Hasta La Creative!

Alibaba Group’s quarterly revenue rose 56% from the comparable year-earlier period, powered by Chinese consumers’ thirst for buying cheaper and higher-quality goods online.

Revenue at China’s biggest e-commerce company hit $7.4 billion in the three months ended June, the company said.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has bolstered its dominance in e-commerce by improving the advertising algorithms it uses to generate revenue from brands trying to reach the 466 million active consumers on its online platforms. That is buying time for billionaire Chairman Jack Ma to venture into traditional retail, a sector he wants to revamp via experiments like HeMa Supermarket, a fresh foods store that also provides online grocery delivery.

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Global brands have tried to tighten control on media spending and reexamine their relationships with agency suppliers in the year since a bombshell report on media transparency from the Association of National Advertisers, according to a new survey from the World Federation of Advertisers.

The research released this week from the Brussels-based marketing association representing members like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and national advertiser associations said brands are making changes to their media governance practices in the areas of media transparency, viewability, brand safety and ad fraud.

The WFA attributes the more hands-on approach to the ANA’s report last summer, which claimed rebates and non-transparent practices were pervasive in the U.S. media-buying ecosystem and put the relationships marketers have with their media agencies under a microscope.

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When white supremacists plan rallies like the one a few days ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, they often organize their events on Facebook, pay for supplies with PayPal, book their lodging with Airbnb and ride with Uber. Tech companies, for their part, have been taking pains to distance themselves from these customers.

But sometimes it takes more than automated systems or complaints from other users to identify and block those who promote hate speech or violence, so companies are finding novel ways to spot and shut down content they deem inappropriate or dangerous. People don’t tend to share their views on their Airbnb accounts, for example. But after matching user names to posts on social-media profiles, the company canceled dozens of reservations made by self-identified Nazis who were using its app to find rooms in Charlottesville, where they were heading to protest the removal of a Confederate statue.

At Facebook, which relies on community feedback to flag hateful content for removal, the social network’s private groups meant for like-minded people can be havens for extremists, falling through gaps in the content-moderation system. The company is working quickly to improve its machine-learning capabilities to be able to automatically identify posts that should be reviewed by human moderators.

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Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from 10 million smart TVs. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time yesterday.

A few highlights: An Apple Music ad promotes a rising artist, Canadian R&B/soul singer-songwriter Daniel Caesar, as someone to discover on the streaming service. Gucci serves up a few beautiful people — and a lot of flowers — to hype Bloom, its new fragrance. And supermarket chain Aldi calls attention to how much less its house-brand frozen pizza costs compared to a similar pizza from DiGiorno.

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(TrendHunter.com) The Compact Coin offers users a stylish alternative to traditional, bulky wallet designs that often result in dropped coins, or card-related confusion due to the lack of organized components. The…

(TrendHunter.com) Drones are a common sight in the sky that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so the Bladeless Drone concept identifies how the design could be changed to be more stylish and, above all, less…

Although the damage appeared limited to a few taunting posts, it came after a string of deeper, but apparently unrelated, breaches.

Brittaney Kiefer asked five directors to revisit the first ads they made. Frederic Planchon, Sara Dunlop, Sam Brown, Jim Gilchrist and Noah Harris talk learning the ropes, shooting without permits, and making your own opportunities.