Hasta La Creative!

In an eerie echo of what played out on “CBS This Morning” last week, Savannah Guthrie, with Hoda Kotb by her side, opened NBC’s “Today” this morning by reporting on the network’s firing of the show’s co-host Matt Lauer.

Guthrie read a statement from NBC News Chairman Andy Lack and then looked into the camera and said, “We just learned this moments agojust this morning. As I’m sure you can imagine, we are devastated, and we are still processing all of this. And I will tell you right now we do not know more than what I just shared with you. But we will be covering this story as reporters, as journalists. I’m sure we will be learning more details in the hours and days to come, and we promise we will share that with you.”

Turning to Kotb, Guthrie continued, “And Hoda, I mean, you know, for the moment all we can say is that we are heartbroken. I’m heartbroken for Matthe is my dear, dear friend and my partner and he has been loved by many, many people here. And I’m heartbroken for the brave colleague who came forward to tell her story, and any other women who have their own stories to tell. And we are grappling with a dilemma that so many people have faced these past few weeks: How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly? And I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know that this reckoning that so many organizations have been going through is important, it’s long overdue and it must resolve in workplaces where all women, all people, feel safe and respected. As painful as it is, this moment in our culture, and this change, had to happen.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Ad Age has learned that some Instagram viewers were subjected to a flood of porn this past weekend, including what appeared to be live sex shows. The company says it was a spam attack that broke through its defenses.

On Sunday night, according to an Instagram viewer, the live section of the app, where users, brands and publishers stream videos from their phones, featured at least seven accounts sharing sexual content. The explicit videos included at least one showing a couple engaged in oral sex.

“We choose not to advertise in live environments … that’s not TV for just that reason,” says an exec from a top media agency holding company, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

How Santa must suffer, trying to eat all those cookies on Christmas Eve! With help from agency Romance, French grocery store Intermarch? has released its holiday ad. Titled “I’ve Dreamt So Much,” it follows a boy whose family takes him to sit on Santa’s lap ahead of the holidays, at which time something troubling occurs…

In 1999, researchers Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris uncovered some astounding insights in how people perceive the world around them.

Their “Invisible Gorilla” experiment asked people to focus on a video of other people passing basketballs to one another and count the number of hand-offs. Halfway through the video, someone dressed in a gorilla suit walks in and out of the scene thumping its chest around. When asked if anything unusual or if someone in a gorilla suit appeared in the video, about half of the test subjects said they missed the whole thing.

How could that possibly be?

Continue reading at AdAge.com

In 2017, the London Evening Standard newspaper wanted to bring its “foodie focus” to life by creating Britain’s biggest food festival to date, with a charitable emphasis on food waste that could live on after the event. The result, London Food Month, was the winner of the Best Debut Event category at the 2017 Event Awards.

Airlines from easyJet to Air Canada are ditching holiday clichés and giving prospective travellers a taste of their services with fine-dining menus, fun cafés, virtual cabins and sports-themed lounges.

Baileys, the Diageo-owned Irish liqueur, is encouraging people to indulge over the festive period at its pop-up bar.

Alexa Fund, Amazon’s VC programme, has received an additional $100m (£74.3m) to fund voice innovation.

Advertising growth at MailOnline offset print decline at parent company DMGT in the last 12 months and the website will be profitable in the new financial year.