Hasta La Creative!

The moms in this commercial don’t expect the usual gifts for Mother’s Day. “Nothing, nothing. I don’t want anything,” one says as the spot begins. “No chocolates, jewelry,” adds another, while a third insists, “I don’t need a spa day. Mommy doesn’t need flowers. Mommy doesn’t need any of it.” These are real moms whose…

Giveaways are dime a dozen across social media. Effective, legal, responsible and on-brand competitions, however–not so much. Cluttering up your newsfeed, thanks to shares and tagging, and popping up as adverts and organically from the pages you like, they range from products you’re actually likely to buy to that old chestnut, the “Win an RV”…

Now that Michael Cohen’s pay-to-play scheme has been revealed, the companies that took Trump’s personal lawyer up on his offer of access to the president of the United States in exchange for large (huge!) payments are racing to do damage control. See “AT&T’s top Washington official is out over the hiring of Trump’s lawyer” (Bloomberg News via Ad Age) and “Novartis CEO: ‘We made a mistake’ with Cohen payments” (Politico) for starters. There are a lot of unanswered questions as the scandal continues to unfold, but in this segment from Thursday night’s “Daily Show,” Trevor Noah takes on the most basic question: How did various corporations get sucked into playing ball with Cohen in the first place? As Noah puts it,

I’m actually shocked that these major corporations got tricked by the classic Nigerian prince scam. Because if Michael Cohen had pitched them in an African accent, they would have seen this coming from a mile away.

Noah then does his best Nigerian prince accent (starting at 4:15 in the clip embedded above) and makes the pitch:

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Taking their cue from a screenwriter, rival software developers are adding tools to analyze material before it reaches casting directors or producers.

The Google Assistant might finally jump ahead of Amazon’s Alexa in the race for user-friendly (if not potentially creepy) artificial intelligence. .@Google’s new AI assistant sounds exactly like human https://t.co/VPhJAreDaE pic.twitter.com/C7YrJfFIiw — Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) May 11, 2018 At its annual developer conference this week in California, Google announced the latest update to Assistant, including…

The dramatic tension in Andrew Rossi’s 2011 documentary “Page One: Inside The New York Times” was supplied by the operatic decline of the newspaper industry and the spectacle of Times journalists (most notably the late, great David Carr) just trying to do their jobs as the media economy crumbled around them. The dramatic tension in Liz Garbus’ “The Fourth Estate,” an upcoming Showtime documentary series, has to do with the paper’s journalists just trying to do their jobs as President Trump attacks journalism itself and openly fantasizes about the end of “the failing New York Times.”

Garbus, the Oscar-nominated director of acclaimed documentaries including “Bobby Fischer Against the World,” “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” “The Farm: Angola, USA,” and “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” followed Times journalists during the first year of Trump’s presidency and then some (the last day of shooting in the Times newsroom was just a few weeks ago, on April 16, when the paper won three Pulitzer Prizes). Judging from the trailer above, Times White House Correspondent Maggie Haberman (who shared in one of the Times Pulitzers as part of the team that’s been reporting on the Trump-Russia connection) is destined to emerge as one of the heroes of “The Fourth Estate.”

NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet made the decision to allow Garbus access to the newsroom. An Associated Press report about the doc notes that Baquet …

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