Advertising Agency: Creative ADM, Perth, Western Australia
Creative Director: Ben Catley
Production: Prashant Umakanthan
Published: November 2013
via Business Feeds
Advertising Agency: Creative ADM, Perth, Western Australia
Creative Director: Ben Catley
Production: Prashant Umakanthan
Published: November 2013
One of the biggest criticisms about Facebook is that it's basically a database of every random person you've ever met, and that too many of the things on the site are meaningless drivel posted by people you have no interest in actually being friends with in real life.
The social network is combatting those criticisms with a new ad campaign, titled "Where will your friends take you?" It shows how Facebook can be used to bring people together offline to make life better.
According to Mashable, the ads were made by Wieden+Kennedy, the same agency behind 2012's infamous "Chairs" debacle. However, the new ads take a much less philosophical approach and instead provide specific, believable examples of how people use Facebook to organize fun activities and seek valuable emotional support.
Here's one, in which a group of friends uses Facebook Messenger to gather people for a spontaneous snow day activity that consists of putting skis on couches (again with the seating furniture!) and riding down a hill:
In another, more serious ad, a crying woman uses Messenger to ask her best friend to come console her after a breakup:
And another one shows how even online-only interactions can make people happier. Here, encouraging wallposts motivate a man to continue training for a marathon:
You can see the other four ads in the campaign on the YouTube page Facebook created for it.
Join the conversation about this story »
Citigroup is lowering its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results after discovering fraud at a Mexican subsidiary.
The troubled Tokyo Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy after a significant amount of virtual currency went missing.
@angelporrino That's our girl.
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) November 22, 2013
@DrakeBell Can't wait.
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) June 23, 2013
Want to cuddle and eat Taco Bell?
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) February 12, 2014
@aguywithnolife Is butter a carb?
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) June 14, 2013
@MeanGirlsQuotes God, Karen you're so stupid.
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) July 12, 2012
@OldSpice Is your deodorant made with really old spices?
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) July 9, 2012
@MensHumor We're probably going to make a lot of money today anyway. #Ballin
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) April 20, 2012
@dogboner We don’t tolerate harassment of ANY kind. Please contact us ASAP at media@tacobell.com
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) December 10, 2010
Keep your friends close and your @TacoBell closer.
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) November 21, 2013
@HiJessicaLu Never settle.
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) February 25, 2014
new shirt from the bae @TacoBell http://ift.tt/1evx8bj
— Elijah Daniel (@aguywithnolife) February 4, 2014
It's official, @TacoBell is my valentine. http://ift.tt/1evx7nJ
— Lee Newton (@leenewtonsays) February 14, 2014
@Illuminati_Stop We made this for you. http://ift.tt/1obcOgh
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) February 18, 2013
@SamPottorff That could be arranged.
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) November 22, 2013
@lamenesss Roar.
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) October 8, 2013
#LetsBeSerious Taco Bell is my favorite restaurant.
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) April 28, 2013
Dating is cool, but have you heard of @TacoBell?
— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) October 7, 2013
Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen says poor weather could be to blame as fourth quarter growth revised to 2.4%, down from 3.1%
Regulators trying to close string of suspected boiler rooms and FCA says victims of share fraud lose average of £20,000
In The Wolf of Wall Street, sharp-suited Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo diCaprio, makes calls from a scruffy strip mall in Long Island. "Good morning, Jordan Belfort with Investors' Center in New York City. The reason I'm calling is that an extremely exciting investment opportunity crossed my desk today. Typically our firm recommends no more than five stocks per year: this is one of them. Aerotyne International is a cutting-edge tech firm out of the Midwest, awaiting imminent patent approval on a new generation of radar equipment…"
In reality, Aerotyne is a worthless, dilapidated garage in Dubuque, Iowa. But Belfort hooks the investor with "research" that indicates the 6c-a-share stock could rise to a dollar, "or go much, much higher – your profit on a mere $3,000 investment would be upwards of 50,000… That's right, you could pay off your mortgage." The investor – the "schmucks" in the film – falls for the spiel, parting with $4,000.
The dialogue in the "Investors' Center" may be fictional, but as police raided 14 addresses across Spain, seizing, among other items, an Aston Martin and a Ferrari, the reality is not far off. The term boiler room was first coined in the US to describe how political parties hired rooms at election times to speed-dial prospective voters, but later became a byword for the cheap offices where brokers would sit in close proximity, serially calling "sucker lists" of potential share buyers, selling worthless stock from a pre-prepared script.
In Europe, Spain's "Costa del Crime" has become the home of boiler room operations, usually manned by British citizens, with sophisticated websites (often cloned from authorised firms) to persuade investors the proposition is real. Like Stratton Oakmont in The Wolf of Wall Street, blue-chip names are used to convince buyers of their legitimacy. A company calling itself First Capital Wealth, which had its assets frozen by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in November, is just the latest in a string of suspected boiler rooms that regulators have attempted to close in recent years. It purported to be operating from a skyscraper in the City of London, selling "innovative real estate options focusing on emerging markets".
High-pressure sales staff in boiler rooms typically alight on whatever investment fad is popular at the time – from carbon credits to rare earths to land that is about to gain planning permission (but never does).
Victims of share fraud lose an average of £20,000 to these scams, with as much as £200m being lost in the UK each year, says the FCA. Even seasoned investors have been caught out, with the biggest individual loss recorded by the police being £6m. It says the scam firms often have few assets and victims are not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
Among the most disturbing tactics used by boiler rooms is what's dubbed recovery room fraud. The callers phone victims of share scams, posing as the police or a regulatory body, and promise to recover their money – for a fee, of course.
Lowe's first work for Volkswagen's Seat, from its new Lola office in Barcelona, Madrid, takes acceleration to absurdist lengths.
A two-minute teaser ad that landed on YouTube this week features a guy seated in a high-back seat in front of a black acceleration pedal, albeit one detached from a car. It's connected to an engine, though, and as he depresses the pedal, a cluster of 280 toy monkeys also plugged in to the engine bizarrely start clanging the tiny cymbals in their hands. But as the guy presses down harder—creating a loud engine roar—the monkeys, sadly, burst into flames and explode into the air. "Only a Cupra can handle the engine of a Cupra," explains screen copy.
The ad then cuts to a thumbnail image of the Seat Leon Cupra and the fun tagline, “Enjoyneering.” It's just a teaser ad—the first of three—for a big campaign that rolls out next month. Let's hope the next one is kinder to kids' toys.
CREDITS
Client: Seat
Client Contact: Gabriele Palma / Jochen Dries
Creative Agency: Lola, Barcelona
Executive Creative Director: Chacho Puebla
Creative Directors: Néstor García, Nacho Oñate
Creative Team: Cristina Fité, Esther Matas, Miki Ocampo, Saray González
Agency Producer: Cristina Español
Global Business Director: Clark Steel
Account Supervisor: Alejandro Belloti
Production House: Blur
Director: Maxi Sterle
Producer: Pablo Acón
Postproduction House: Metropolitana
Sound Studio: Cannonball
Edits: Monkey, Washing Machine and Mechanical Bull
"The idea of 'Sport Doesn't Care' is that sports is the great leveler," says Carlo Cavallone, ecd at 72andSunny in Amsterdam, of his agency's hard-hitting 90-second spot for Paralympics sponsor Samsung.
"Abled and other-abled athletes are exactly the same when it comes to competing," he tells AdFreak. "Paralympic athletes don't go to the games because they want to make a statement about their disability; they go because they want to win a medal. This is often missed in the communication about this event."
The spot pulls no punches, showing athletes faced with fatigue, pain, stress, the elements and burnout as they struggle through the rigors of practice and preparation that they hope will carry them to glory at the 2014 Paralympic Winter Games, starting March 7 in Sochi, Russia.
"We wanted to make this point to invite more viewers to follow the event, present it as a true, intense, awesome sporting competition," says Cavallone. The agency worked with Smuggler director Henry-Alex Rubin (who lensed 72andSunny's previous Paralympics work and co-directed the documentary film "Murderball") to achieve an edgy mood that Cavallone calls "real, raw and pitiless. The last thing we wanted to be was tear-jerking. There's nothing to cry about here."
The tone is similar to Procter & Gamble's "Tough Love" spot from Wieden + Kennedy, which unflinchingly focuses on youngsters participating in sports with the loving support of their moms. The Samsung ad is more low key and gritty, showing the adult athletes balancing grueling training regimens with child-rearing and other workaday responsibilities.
"It is incredible that in 2014 we still see campaigns where other-abled athletes are presented as objects of pity, on one end—or supermen, on the other," says Cavallone. "Isn't that incredibly patronizing? We think so. They are just athletes and they really don't care about their disability."
That point is driven home by the spot's conclusion as a voiceover says, "You know what my real problem is? I hate losing," and the end theme flashes on screen: "What's your problem? Sport doesn't care."
Bottom line: "They've got a lot of problems, the problems every athlete has," Cavallone says, "but their disability doesn't count as one."
With some internships, you're lucky if you get some free food and the occasional swag. Other internships, apparently, pay you more than $6,000 a month.
Glassdoor, a job site that features reviews from anonymous employees, just put out its annual list of the highest-paying companies for internships. There are six companies on the list that pay more than $6,000 a month (which would work out to $72,000 a year) and one company that pays more than $7,000 (or $84,000 a year).
To put that in perspective, the median household income in 2012 was $51,017.
Odds are those interns eat better than you.
Love March Madness?
We sure do at Mashable, which is why we’re putting our own spin on things this March: Instead of pitting college basketball teams against one another, we've created a bracket to crown America’s Most Social Small Business, presented by Capital One Spark.
Earlier in February, we challenged small businesses all over the country to tell us why they deserve the title. After receiving a flood of submissions from businesses across a variety of industries, we vetted the entrants by dissecting their social presences, consumer engagement, short responses and company size and revenue numbers (not every small business stays small forever) Read more...
Advertising Agency: NBS, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Creative Directors: André Lima, Eduardo Almeida
Art Directors: André Havt, Luiz Otávio Guimarães
Copywriter: Philippe Lacerda
Production: Miguel Pacheco
Motion Graphics: Cláudio Portugal
Account Team: Tatiana Soter, Danielle Portella, Marina Gouvêa, Larissa Ximenes
Published: February 2014
Advertising Agency: BBH, India
Creative Director: Russell Barrett, Manish Darji
Copywriter: Malhaar Rao
Illustrator: Manish Darji
Chief executive officer: Subhash Kamath
Chief creative officer: Russell Barrett
Directors: Manish Darji, Sushma Joseph
Managing director: Arvind Krishnan
Head of strategy: Sanjay Sharma
Visual design concept: Manish Darji
Business director: Sunil Tulsiani
Account manager: Rajeev Roy
Account team: Anas Dalvi
Planner: Yudhishthir Agrawal
Executive producers: Sushma Joseph, Rishit Mehta
Agency producer: Stuti Guha
Director of photography: Saish Kambli
Editor: Sushma Joseph
Music Director: Aaron Drakes
Two of the biggest players in the Ring of Fire say the province has to start making decisions to move the mining development forward.
Corporation will no longer pay to have channels on satellite broadcaster's platform, saving £4.5m a year
The BBC and BSkyB have resolved their long-running row over retransmission fees with the corporation no longer having to pay to put its channels on the pay-TV platform, saving £4.5m a year in licence fee money.
They have also agreed a new long-term carriage deal for BBC services and the iPlayer on-demand service on Sky's satellite platform.
The BBC had threatened to start charging Sky for its content if it did not drop the annual fee, which also applied to the three other public service broadcasters, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.
ITV will also benefit, saving around £2m a year after reaching an agreement with Sky last month to drop the fee as part of carriage negotiations for its pay-TV drama channel ITV Encore.
In a joint statement, the two broadcasters said: "Sky and the BBC have reached an agreement which reduces the BBC's payments for platform services to zero.
"Alongside this, both parties have reached an agreement that secures the long-term availability of BBC channels and the BBC iPlayer on the Sky platform. We will also continue to discuss opportunities that offer viewers/Sky customers new and innovative ways to discover and consume BBC content."
The BBC had previously paid £4.5m a year in retransmission fees with the three other public service broadcasters, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, footing a combined bill of around £10m.
The issue was made a priority by the BBC's director of strategy and digital, James Purnell, and BBC director general Tony Hall.
The BBC raised the stakes last year, threatening to charge Sky for its content, following a call by culture minister Ed Vaizey for the satellite broadcaster to scrap the charges earlier in 2013.
The BBC has previously argued that its content underpinned Sky's profits and the charge should be dropped. Sky had argued that the BBC was benefiting directly from its billions of pounds of investment and technical services supporting its 49 radio and TV channels on the platform.
The BBC's retransmission bill was £10m a year until it was reduced three years ago.
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The resource-rich country is riding high economically but a battle is brewing for water between people, mining and agriculture
The sight of foreign faces in Ulan Bator used to turn heads. Now they are two-a-penny as the once remote Mongolian capital fast becomes a hotspot for international investors. The main draw is the country's rich mineral deposits, which, if successfully exploited, could see the national economy more than double over the next two decades.
Impinging on that rosy picture, however, is the tricky question of water availability. The central Asian country suffers from extremes in seasonal runoff, local water stress and chronic deficits.
"In the coming two decades, water demand is expected to triple even as water suppliers are shrinking", states 2030 WRG, which predicts a 244,000 m3 per day water deficit by the end of the next decade. The link between water stress and mineral exploitation is where much of the concern currently lies. A substantial proportion of Mongolia's copper and gold reserves happen to be found in its driest spot: South Gobi. Rainfall in the desert area ranges between zero and a measly 50mm per year.
A range of potential infrastructure options is on the table. One of the most ambitious would see the country pump in water via a 600km pipeline from the Orphon River in the country's north. At $550m (£328.7m), the project's price tag puts its viability in doubt. Desalination represents another outside option. However, question marks hang over whether landlocked Mongolia has the deep pockets or indeed the hydrological conditions to make it happen.
For the moment, the onus is on mining companies making their operations as water efficient as possible. The World Bank-backed International Financial Corporation, for example, recently initiated a water management programme with most of the major mining operators in South Gobi. Among its early outputs is a pilot training package for companies on best practices.
"There's a lot to be shared and gained by visiting each another's projects and setting among ourselves the height of each other's bar", said Mark Newby, environment manager for Rio Tinto's huge Oyu Tolgoi copper-and-gold mine in South Gobi.
Oyu Tolgoi, which came on stream in 2013, is touted as a benchmark for the industry. The $6.2bn (£3.7bn) project draws all its water from a 560km2 subterranean aquifer, located about 400m below the desert surface. Over two-thirds (70%) of its water use is reclaimed, recycled and then reused. High efficiency tailings thickeners and reclaim processes account for the largest proportion of water savings at the mine, which operates a zero-water discharge policy.
From the "get-go", the company realised water efficiency would be make or break for the project, said Newby: "It's a fossil resource and if it's to be used up unreasonably quickly, then that just ends the mine life earlier". The mine is expected to use up one fifth of the aquifer's 6.8bn cubic metres during its projected 27-year lifespan, according to Rio Tinto's own calculations.
Campaign groups have claimed that Oyu Tolgoi could jeopardise local water availability. Rio Tinto maintains that an impermeable layer above its main aquifer separates the brackish water that it extracts from the cleaner, shallower water on which local communities depend. The company has also installed sensors in over 30 wells in the area and has trained local herders in their use, promising them real-time data on water levels.
Local concerns surrounding Rio Tinto's mine reveal an additional concern around mineral extraction's impact on agricultural. Mongolia's Southern and Central Zones occupy terrain traditionally used by nomadic herdsmen. Diverting already scarce water resources to mining could imperil their livelihoods, analysts warn. Similarly, water scarcity threatens the production of irrigated food crops, the problem is especially in the Central Zone, which provides Ulan Bator with much of its food supplies.
Shifting agricultural production to the country's east and west regions, where water resources are more plentiful, represents one potential solution. Again, a more obvious and more immediate answer is to promote water efficiency. Among 2030 WRG's early recommendations is an increase in the use of drip and sprinkler irrigation, coupled with improvements in fertiliser balance and pest control.
The most pressing water-related headache facing Mongolia relates to Ulan Bator itself. With around 1.3 million people, the capital city is home to over two-fifths of the total population. The city's infrastructure is already under huge strain, with access to clean water and sanitation facilities among the chief problems. Rural-urban migration is set to exacerbate these further in the coming years.
"In a high growth scenario, Ulan Bator could potentially run out of water between 2015 and 2021, which is not that far off", warned Alex Mung, head of the World Economic Forum's Water Initiative and an adviser to 2030 WRG.
Mung sees a key role for private water companies in terms of knowledge sharing and the co-financing of vital water infrastructure. He points to the example of South Africa, where municipal governments are offering private operators financial incentives to reduce leakages. The companies are remunerated according to their ability to stem water losses.
The traditional availability of water means many national firms have yet to grasp the urgency of the problem, said Mung. That will require a concerted awareness-raising effort. Learning to collaborate within the business sector and with government is another imperative, he argued: "The more we can do together, the better it will be for everyone and overall for Mongolia."
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