Behind e.l.f.'s surprising Super Bowl TV buy
Posted in: UncategorizedSocial media and digital darling explains its Big Game strategy, which features Jennifer Coolidge
Social media and digital darling explains its Big Game strategy, which features Jennifer Coolidge
E.l.f never thought it would promote its primer as the perfect skin-smoothing product for dolphin wannabes, but when the adored star of The White Lotus tells Access Hollywood that she dreams of growing fins, you adjust your marketing strategy. @betches The most iconic response per usual #jennifercoolidge #goldenglobes ? original sound – betches In the…
The NBCU streamer partnered with M&M’s and Google for its Big Game creative.
The move by Nelson Peltz came a day after the company’s C.E.O., Bob Iger, announced a restructuring that will cut $5.5 billion in costs and eliminate roughly 7,000 jobs.
Squarespace is celebrating 20 years in business by honoring Anthony Casalena’s original elevator pitch. In 2004, the founder and CEO presented an era of dynamic digital development with a comfortingly simple product–“a website that builds websites.” “Everyone just had that light bulb moment,” said VP of creative Ben Hughes. “We said, ‘What an incredible bit…
The commercial shows a dad who forgot his baby’s favorite binky tearing through mountain roads in a Telluride crossover.
Messenger allows users to search for messages that have been previously shared in conversations, rather than requiring them to browse their entire chat logs to find the message(s) they’re looking for. Our guide will show you how to search for messages in a Messenger chat in the Messenger mobile application. Note: These screenshots were captured…
Prerecorded and shot footage from top filmmakers is opening up a world of opportunity for creative agencies, and greatly reducing in-house production costs.
Heba Y. Amin, Operation Sunken Sea: Relocating the Mediterranean, Inaugural Speech (video still), 2018
In the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel was working on Atlantropa (aka Panropa), a massive engineering and colonisation proposal that called for dams to be built across the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and between Sicily and Tunisia. The scheme would lower the Mediterranean Sea level. This drop would provide the government, company or alliance financing the colossal project two advantages. First, the difference between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic sea levels could be harnessed to generate hydroelectric power. An independent overseeing authority would then be able to cut the energy supply to any country posing a threat to peace. The other consequence of the sea level drop was it would partially drain the Mediterranean, providing land to settle and grow food as well as overland access to Africa. The engineer also planned to dam the Congo river to irrigate the Sahara and give shipping access to the African interior.
Atlantropa, Exhibition poster, 1932, via El Pais
Sörgel believed that uniting Europe and Africa as one continent would make that region of the world more powerful and peaceful. It would provide work and stimulate the post-WW1 economy. His techno-utopia is typical of a mindset that emerged in the early twentieth century and has never really left us: the technofix, this belief that technology can solve the world’s problems.
The engineer never took into consideration how other countries would react. How state borders would shift and how geographical changes might provoke new local conflicts over territory or resources. He didn’t think about the wildlife and human population that would be displaced. He completely ignored local cultures that would be erased and fishing communities that would lose their livelihood. The planned dams and bridges would landlock regions and cultures that had relied on the sea for centuries.
A look at current scientific knowledge also suggests that the implementation of the project would have had unpredictable and disastrous environmental consequences on a global scale. Once dry, the lands would have been too salty for most crops. The Mediterranean itself would have become gigantic hypersaline lakes. Even the cycles of rain would have been disrupted throughout the basin.
Claiming ownership over the Mediterranean Sea is not just utopian, it also demonstrates a deep-seated sense of entitlement…
Herman Sörgel in the office of the New York Times, n.d. ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum
Heba Y. Amin, The Master’s Tools I (restaging of Herman Soergel’s portrait), 2018
Artist Heba Y. Amin reappropriates this arrogance in a series of works that take a critical look at colonialist attitudes and turn the Atlantropa’s infrastructural plan on its head. In the video Operation Sunken Sea: Relocating the Mediterranean, Inaugural Speech, the artist portrays herself as the ruler of a fictional nation, re-enacting the speeches, gestures, logic and languages of male authoritarian figures from recent history who have planned or implemented megalomaniac proposals. This time, however, the mastermind in charge of launching the aggressive geoengineering operation is a woman from an Arabic country. With humour and sarcasm, Amin subverts the duality between the Southern and the Northern side of the Mediterranean. Draining and rerouting the Mediterranean sea, her character asserts, would benefit the African continent. It would bring an end to terrorism and the migration crisis, provide employment and energy alternatives, counter the rise of fascism in Europe, challenge the continent’s imperialist stance and finally bring justice to the looted people of Africa.
Heba Y. Amin, Operation Sunken Sea: Relocating the Mediterranean. Inaugural speech, Malta, May 25, 2018 (Excerpt)
Heba Y. Amin, Operation Sunken Sea: Visual Research, Flower Bouquets (video still), 2020
Her grandiloquent speech is resolute and aggressive. Her text is composed entirely of fragments from actual speeches of eight dictators, including Benito Mussolini, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and Xi Jinping. By plagiarising this presumptuous and patriarchal energy, the artist changes the way these colonialist projects and attitudes are remembered today.
In an interview with ArtForum, the artist explained that Atlantropa was part of a long lineage of similar projects that emerged throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, including a mega-plan to flood the Sahara, presented by different colonial powers. The massive infrastructure project first surfaced in Jules Verne’s 1905 novel Invasion of the Sea which featured European characters who studied the feasibility of flooding a low-lying region of the Sahara desert to create an inland sea and open up the interior of Northern Africa to trade.
Heba Y. Amin, Visions of the Sea I, 2018
Heba Y. Amin, Operation Sunken Sea: Relocating the Mediterranean, Inaugural Speech (video still), 2018
The whole universe Amin created for the project has an old-fashioned, authoritarian and bureaucratic allure. It also uses intriguing graphic symbols. The main emblem of the work series, for example, is a map of the Mediterranean that the artist found in a 10th-century Islamic manuscript, where the Strait of Gibraltar forms the centre of orientation. The map, designed by Persian geographer Al-Istakhri, envisioned the sea as a positive space. A complete reversal of how many European governments envision the Mediterranean today. A stylised version of the map appears in sculptures and flags that flank her desk and speaking column.
I saw the work in several exhibitions. Most recently at the Artissima art fair in Turin. I thought it was high time I mentioned it on the blog.
Other works by Heba Y. Amin: Heba Y. Amin. The toxic legacy that European ideas of progress left on the Egyptian landscape.
Super Bowl 57 is almost here, with the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs set to battle it out at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. on Feb. 12 for one of the most-prized trophies in sport. But with more than 100 million tuning in for the self-proclaimed “Greatest Show on Earth”–and the…
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Last summer, the U.K.-based Marketing Society presented Jaclyn Pannell with its Future Leader award. If you’d told a younger Jaclyn Pannell that a job in logistics could lead to a role as a global marketing chief, she wouldn’t believe you. She’s spent her career at international logistics company DHL, starting as a graduate management trainee…