Hasta La Creative!

Fashion retailer Hennes & Mauritz AB wants to get a better sense of what makes its customers tick. To help it, the Swedish company just hired a man best known for revealing a data privacy scandal that rocked Facebook Inc. and raised serious questions around how some corners of technology are shaping human existence.

At H&M, 29-year-old Christopher Wylie will help the company use big data and artificial intelligence to make sure it actually designs things shoppers want. If successful, the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower might be able to help fix some of H&M’s most pressing issues, including getting its inventory under control and ultimately making the company more profitable.

“If you better understand what people like to wear, and how they like to wear it, and how they want to feel when they’re wearing it, you’ll naturally start to create insights as to modernizing and updating your collection,” Wylie said in an interview at H&M’s Stockholm headquarters on Thursday.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The “Dead Boy,” first made famous in Nationwide’s widely derided Super Bowl ad 2015, lives again in a new riff from Stephen Colbert that spoofs all the commercial tropes of the Big Game.

On Wednesday, the host of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert debuted what he called “The Most Emotionally Manipulative Super Bowl Ad Ever.”

“The Super Bowl commercials are not afraid to pull on the nation’s heartstrings to move their products,” said Colbert, noting spots of reunited families, impressive athletes and unlikely animal friendships. “And how could anyone forget the actual Super Bowl ad, the Super Bowl of sad Super Bowl adsthe one where the kid was actually dead the whole time?”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Facebook and Twitter have been sharing notes on fake accounts tied to Iran that have been trying to manipulate political thought around the world, leading to another wave of takedowns by the social-media sites.

Facebook said it removed 783 pages, groups and accounts linked to Iran that were attempting to manipulate political discussions about current events, like the Israel-Palestine conflict and the wars in Syria and Yemen. The company said Thursday that the accounts and page administrators typically represented themselves as locals in at least 26 countries, including Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan and the U.S., but posted messages that repeated the content of Iranian state media.

The removals built on activity the companies found last year, with some outside help from security firm FireEye. The industry collaboration has been central to the success of these operations, Facebook said.

Continue reading at AdAge.com