Hasta La Creative!

Viacom has agreed to buy the U.K.’s Channel 5 for 450 million pounds ($761 million), giving the owner of MTV and Comedy Central a broader presence in Europe and a chance to create shows for the local market.

Sumner Redstone’s company will pay cash to buy the broadcaster from Northern & Shell, the publishing company owned by Richard Desmond. The purchase will immediately boost earnings, according to a statement from New York-based Viacom, which also today reported second-quarter profit that beat analysts’ estimates.

Viacom is buying a station — known for provocative reality-TV shows like “Britain’s Crime Capitals” and “Celebrity Big Brother” — that also airs popular U.S. fare including “CSI New York” and “The Mentalist.” Channel 5, with about 42 million viewers in any given month, gives Viacom an opportunity to capitalize on its U.S. programming in Britain and introduce U.K.-created content to global audiences.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Dodo magazine might only be on its second issue, but it's got big plans for the future. In fact, one idea directly involves the future.

The magazine is putting together a "time capsule" double issue—half of the edition is available now, and the second half will be sent out in 2024 to everyone who subscribes to Dodo this year. Also, if you follow the website prompt and write a letter to your future self, you'll also receive that with your 2024 half issue. If Dodo sends each issue in a vintage Trapper Keeper, it will have officially reached Peak Middle School.

This isn't their first goofy marketing stunt, either. Dodo printed just one copy of its "Issue Zero," which it buried in a treasure chest that interested parties needed a map to find.

The time capsule thing relies on the bold presumption that a print magazine can make it 10 years in the digital era. But I want Dodo to succeed, if only because I'm wondering what else they've got planned.

Via PSFK.

Operating under the assumption that more people would recycle if it was fun, Coca-Cola and Grey Dhaka placed six “Happiness Arcade” machines around Dhaka, Bangladesh. The machines were operated by inserting an empty Coca-Cola bottle and played a branded version of arcade relic Pong. As some might remember (and Adweek readers noticed), DDB Stockholm made the same hypothesis regarding fun and recycling back in 2009 (dubbing it their “Fun Theory”) with their similar “Bottle Bank Arcade” campaign for Volkswagen.

“Bottle Bank Arcade” differed in that it turned recycling itself into a game: lights above bottle deposits lit up and, the faster you inserted the bottle, the more points you got. It seems like it was both more fun and a better way to promote recycling than Coca-Cola’s more branded effort, in which it appears the only type of bottle that makes the game work is a Coca-Cola bottle.

At the very least, these seem like two executions of the same idea. We’ve included DDB’s “Bottle Bank Arcade” after the jump for comparison.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As the media company reported a 4 percent rise in quarterly earnings, it also announced it would buy the British television group Channel 5 Broadcasting.

Já está no ar, com duas atualizações semanais, o Drinks Tube, novo canal de Jamie Oliver no YouTube. O projeto é resultado de uma parceria do chef com a Bacardi, e tem por objetivo desmistificar o preparo de drinks e coquetéis – mais ou menos o que Oliver tem feito nos últimos anos com seus programas culinários.

Além dos vídeos, a parceria inclui também o site e aplicativo Mixed Cocktails, que além de receitas ainda traz a história, curiosidades e um passo a passo de como preparar diversos drinks.

O conteúdo é bacana e bem feito, vale conferir.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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Once you're done binging on Orange Is the New Black and Scandal, browsing Netflix can start to feel like rummaging through the discount DVD bin at Target. But now there's an easier way to cut through the clutter.

If you feel like you've already seen all the good stuff (and all of the slightly above mediocre stuff), you might want to try Netflix Roulette.

Developer Andrew Sampson created the API-driven website to help you find new movies and shows based on your own criteria. You can filter by genre, rating, director, actor or keyword, then just hit "spin." The app displays a show or a movie for you to watch, and if you don't like it, you can spin again.

Sampson's reportedly been contacted by a recruiter at Netflix, and he's been featured by news outlets including The Huffington Post and Time, so maybe this side project will turn into something quite a bit bigger. Don't listen to Wesley Snipes. Always bet on red!

Quants continue their sweep into marketing in search of interesting problems and viable business models in which to address them.

Case in point: the two atomic physicists who founded Menlo Park, Calif.-based Quantifind. They once worked on contract for the CIA — using algorithms to detect the aliases used by terrorist groups and shell companies that were really money laundering fronts — before they applied their technology to interpreting social data for big brands.

“It was a lot of fun,” said Quantifind CEO Ari Tuchman, referring to the CIA pilots. “It wasn’t clear there was a business there.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

With all the recent coverage about non-human activity and outright ad fraud in digital marketing, the term “botnet” has become widely used as a synonym for all things related to fake traffic.

The perception seems to be that there are individual creators of these monolithic botnets that single-handedly steal ad dollars from unwitting brands and agencies, usually showing up solely on “bad” publisher websites. But the botnet ecosystem is actually comprised of many categories of companies and individuals that facilitate ad fraud, and in most cases these groups are buying and selling anonymously from each other. Here’s a breakdown:

Continue reading at AdAge.com