Magnum is all about premium pleasure and art is a real passion point for Magnum lovers. This year the brand worked with the illustrator Thomas Danthony to create a series of outdoor works of art. The illustrations show different moments of pleasure where the iconic shape of the ice cream is beautifully and masterfully integrated.
Magnum is all about premium pleasure and art is a real passion point for Magnum lovers. This year the brand worked with the illustrator Thomas Danthony to create a series of outdoor works of art. The illustrations show different moments of pleasure where the iconic shape of the ice cream is beautifully and masterfully integrated.
Magnum is all about premium pleasure and art is a real passion point for Magnum lovers. This year the brand worked with the illustrator Thomas Danthony to create a series of outdoor works of art. The illustrations show different moments of pleasure where the iconic shape of the ice cream is beautifully and masterfully integrated.
Magnum is all about premium pleasure and art is a real passion point for Magnum lovers. This year the brand worked with the illustrator Thomas Danthony to create a series of outdoor works of art. The illustrations show different moments of pleasure where the iconic shape of the ice cream is beautifully and masterfully integrated.
How’s everyone feeling today?
If you’re moving a little slower than usual, we feel your pain. Last night brought together more than 500 of adland’s rowdiest for a night of awards at the 2018 Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Gala at Cipriani 25. Fun was had by all, especially the guy who had to be retrieved from the bar to accept his award. And me, who will refuse to be called anything other than Meg Ryan after a little slip during the staff introductions.
Luckily for this year’s A-List winner Wieden & Kennedy, we were able to retrieve the trophy from Blarney Stone (where it had been since Anomaly won it — and left it during the afterparty — last year).
If your love and protectiveness of your shoes occasionally tips over into obsession, you probably identified with Nike’s new “Shoe Therapy” campaign. Nike knows how its products connect with consumers and celebrity athletes alike, and it plays with that relationship and brand loyalty in the new spots, which bring back the classic tagline, “It’s Gotta…
If you could build your own WestWorld version of yourself, would you do it? Or, setting aside the moral and philosophical questions, could you do it? Simone Giertz–scrappy inventor, YouTube personality, famed “Queen of Shitty Robots” and Adweek Creative 100 alumna–decided to give it a shot. A new 6:30 clip, sponsored by HBO and created…
Experiential marketing is the current flavor of the month, especially as broadcast spending dips and digital becomes increasingly fraught. But it’s time clients and agencies took a hard look at whether spending millions of dollars on a one-time event is the best use of their investment.
The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it event is all well and good, but it’s hardly scalable. So instead of investing in one-off (call them “perishable”) events, consider taking a cue from another lifestyle trend: The “sustainable” approach to experiential.
“Perishable” to me evokes a one-night party in the Meatpacking District in New York, with a bunch of jaded “influencers” and bloggers checking their phones, while ignoring the very thing that they’re meant to have a hand in promoting: the lavish experience around them which cost a fortune to put on (and which generates a tremendous amount of waste in materials and food).
How’s everyone feeling today?
If you’re moving a little slower than usual, we feel your pain. Last night brought together more than 500 of adland’s rowdiest for a night of awards at the 2018 Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Gala at Cipriani 25. Fun was had by all, especially the guy who had to be retrieved from the bar to accept his award. And me, who will refuse to be called anything other than Meg Ryan after a little slip during the staff introductions.
Luckily for this year’s A-List winner Wieden & Kennedy, we were able to retrieve the trophy from Blarney Stone (where it had been since Anomaly won it — and left it during the afterparty — last year).
Last fall, YouTube launched a “hold for review” feature in its livestreaming service, YouTube Live. When a creator turns this feature on, YouTube will automatically hold “potentially inappropriate messages” sent during livestreams for their review. Our guide will show you how to turn this feature on from within the YouTube mobile application. Note: These screenshots…
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 more than eight million smart TVs. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time yesterday.
A few highlights: In a dramatic Alfa Romeo ad, an announcer implores us: “If you don’t want to be seduced, then please, please look away.” Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the U.S., promotes the fact that by using its mobile app you can get personalized deals “at your fingertips, so you can save from anywhere.” And Baskin-Robbins fans express how the ice cream shop “got me like”and you’ll just have to watch the ad to appreciate what they mean by that, exactly.
For Crime Victims’ Rights Week (April 8 to 14, 2018) this year, MADD is releasing a new public service announcement highlighting the devastating impact that drunk driving has on its victims. It features an injured victim, Philip Ormston, who was hit by a drunk driver suffering a traumatic brain injury that has left him unable to speak, swallow, walk or talk. MADD is grateful to Dallas-based companies The Marketing Arm and ATK PLN for producing and donating the creative and informative PSA.
Giving Gene is a bold fundraising and awareness campaign that explores why people give. The national campaign offers Canadians the opportunity to test their DNA by purchasing a Giving Gene Kit from GivingGene.ca and find out if they’ve inherited the “Giving Gene,” a genetic polymorphism that is associated with giving. Unlike other fundraising campaigns, the Giving Gene appeals to humans’ innate curiosity and offers supporters the gift of self-discovery. Giving Gene Kit proceeds go directly to Easter Seals Canada, helping the organization continue providing life-enhancing services to Canadians living with disabilities.
Gaming Masculinity. Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, by Megan Condis, an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Publisher University of Iowa Press writes: In 2016, a female videogame programmer and a female journalist were harassed viciously by anonymous male online users in what became known as GamerGate. Male gamers threatened to rape and kill both women, and the news soon made international headlines, exposing the level of abuse that many women and minorities face when participating in the predominantly male online culture.
Gaming Masculinity explains how the term “gamer” has been constructed in the popular imagination by a core group of male online users in an attempt to shore up an embattled form of geeky masculinity. This latest form of toxicity comes at a moment of upheaval in gaming culture, as women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals demand broader access and representation online. Paying close attention to the online practices of trolling and making memes, author Megan Condis demonstrates that, despite the supposedly disembodied nature of life online, performances of masculinity are still afforded privileged status in gamer culture. Even worse, she finds that these competing discourses are not just relegated to the gaming world but are creating rifts within the culture at large, as witnessed by the direct links between the GamerGate movement and the recent rise of the alt-right during the last presidential election.
Condis asks what this moment can teach us about the performative, collaborative, and sometimes combative ways that American culture enacts race, gender, and sexuality. She concludes by encouraging designers and those who work in the tech industry to think about how their work might have, purposefully or not, been developed in ways that are marked by gender.
As Condis reminds us in her book, the early adopter of internet technology had envisioned the web as an equal opportunity environment. According to them, we’d soon leave our bodies, our prejudices behind and embodiment as a marker of identity would entirely fade away.
Anita Sarkeesian was vilified when she launched a kickstarter project to shoot a series of videos criticising the portrayal of women in video game. The trolling campaign launched against her culminated in the game Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian
Alas, these utopian dreams have not yet come to pass and discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation and race is still rife in the digital landscape. This is particularly true in the virtual world of gaming. Too many gamers still believe that you can’t be a real gamer if you’re not a straight white man. Today however, more and more women are making their way into the gaming culture. The female “invasion” of the gaming space (as well as the presence of anyone deviating from the caucasian heterosexual standard) threatens their privileges and identity. Gamers retort by professing their disdain for anything considered feminine or gay. This makes for a highly toxic environment where overt sexual objectification of women is regarded as a ‘normal part of the culture’, where homophobic epithets are thrown at one another and where rape is used as a metaphor for dominance in the game.
The book Gaming Masculinity examines how gender politics are filtered through and produced by the logic of video games, in both expected and unexpected ways. It explores how gamers are trolling and segregating anyone who doesn’t conform to their idea of what a gamer should be but it also reveals how female and queer gamers are fighting back to obtain a space and a legitimacy in gaming, how they create countermemes that decry sexism in geek culture, how they hack into their favourite online role-playing games to include gay and lesbian relationships and how they turn on its head the assumption that video games can only be profitable if they appeal exclusively to straight white guys.
The discussion around gender and sexual preferences in gaming is an important one not just because gaming is a growing industry but also because the logic of gaming is seeping into other arenas: politics, online dating, education, interaction, activism, etc. In the last chapter of her book, Condis draws parallels between the toxic masculinity of gamer culture and the politics of the alt-right. She explains how #GamerGate taught the Trump, the Milo Yiannopoulos, the populists and the far-right advocates of this world how to troll, hack the political game and muddy the waters when mainstream media accused them of racism and sexism.
The book is also a call to developers to design more inclusive contents and safer environments for women, queer, people of colour, disabled people or other unacknowledged groups.
To show his young daughter that girls can be the hero too, Mike Hoye hacked into The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and changed its main character from male to female
Duy Nguyen hacked Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town to enable same-sex relationships
I’m not a gamer and, like most of you, i know male gamers who are neither sexist nor homophobic. Yet, i found this book fascinating because of the way it transcends gaming and virtual world and shows us the impact that online behaviour can have on ‘real’ life (and vice-versa, of course.)
Gaming Masculinity is a very dense book. It is packed with case studies, observations and reflections but it also suggests paths to undertake if we want improve gaming culture. It’s also very entertaining. I highly recommend you get your hands on a copy!
Related book review: Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
Image on the homepage via Kotaku.
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 more than eight million smart TVs. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time yesterday.
A few highlights: In a dramatic Alfa Romeo ad, an announcer implores us to “If you don’t want to be seduced, then please, please look away.” Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the U.S., promotes the fact that by using its mobile app you can get personalized deals “at your fingertips, so you can save from anywhere.” And Baskin-Robbins fans express how the ice cream shop “got me like”and you’ll just have to watch the ad to appreciate what they mean by that, exactly.
Are you ready to find out how blockchain, the emerging digital currency, is set to rock the world of social media influencers? Before we go any further, consider this: Influencers can shift a brand’s image from obscurity into the limelight. With the right tactics, they have the power to grow your brand and double or…
When Alexander Wang drops a new collection for Adidas Originals, you know something completely wild and unexpected is going to happen. In the past, the designer has done everything from flipping the Adidas logo upside down to selling a collection out of garbage bags during New York Fashion Week as an ode to the resale…
In the Economist a couple weeks ago, Marc Pritchard of P&G described the current advertising business operation as “archaic.” He clarified his remarks at the 4A’s Accelerate conference to note that both the client and the agency are culpable in that description, but the fact remains that much of the press around our category portend…
Sport England has called a review of its creative account.
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