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The creators of the acclaimed ‘Meet Graham’ safety campaign have applauded the spin-off parody ‘Meet Grant’, which depicts a creature with unusually thick skin, smaller than average genitals and a completely removal spine, aka ‘the only person designed to survive a career in advertising’.
Clemenger BBDO swept the board at Cannes Lions and beyond in 2017 with the intriguing and intricate ‘Meet Graham’ campaign. This week, fellow Australian shop

Callaway Golf has turned the camera on three very distinct courses in its latest ‘Golf Lives’ series, aiming to prove that golf isn’t just reserved for country clubs and elites.
The second iteration of the documentary series celebrating untold stories of the sport highlights a spirit of inclusivity. Developed by Callaway, agency the Kimba Group and produced by Vice Media, ‘Golf Lives’ gets to the heart of its subjects’ passion for the game and t

Farmers Insurance has enlisted the help of the undead — a mummy, a vampire and a zombie to help get customers getting their life insurance policies in order.
The spots, which fall seamlessly into the overarching 'We Know From Experience' push starring actor JK Simmons, have each ghoulish narrator casually saunter, hike, or practice yoga moves around the living.
In Cardio of the Dead, a zombie jogger limps down a path, checking her pulse to no avail: “Still nothing.” 
Van H

The UK’s Parliament recently decided to question an actual robot about artificial intelligence. This might sound like a good idea on paper, but considering there aren’t any sentient robots, it’s a lot like asking a toaster oven to testify on the State’s nutrition program. Actually, it’s worse: A toaster oven can’t be manipulated into making misleading statements. The robot, a Pepper model from Softbanks Robotics, was trotted out before Parliament by handlers

It’s been a decade since the Supersonics last shot hoops at Key Arena in Seattle for the NBA, having left to become the Oklahoma City Thunder. The abrupt relocation of the 41-year franchise left fans stunned and heartbroken, but many of those fans are determined to bring the Sonics back, as a new social campaign is rallying the troops.
‘Bring ‘Em Back’ is a grassroots, cross-media campaign conceived by World Famous, an independent content studio based in Seattle. With an

Nearly 80% of cable subscribers have also been using streaming video platforms, said a study conducted by video advertising SaaS platform Telaria, and Adobe Advertising Cloud.
The two released the study, called ‘Inside the Minds of Cord-Cutters and Cable-Keepers’ in hopes to illustrate the experiences and behaviors of an array of TV consumers.
For those ‘cable-keepers,’ nearly a quarter of their time has been spent on streaming platform. However, 42% have continued to rel

Nearly 80% of cable subscribers have also been using streaming video platforms, said a study conducted by video advertising SaaS platform Telaria, and Adobe Advertising Cloud.
The two released the study, called ‘Inside the Minds of Cord-Cutters and Cable-Keepers’ in hopes to illustrate the experiences and behaviors of an array of TV consumers.
For those ‘cable-keepers,’ nearly a quarter of their time has been spent on streaming platform. However, 42% have continued to rel

Discord, the gaming chat app, today opened its fledgling game store and library to beta, meaning anyone can purchase games, launch games they already own, or play games granted to them by the premium subscription option. The store itself is modest, especially compared with the likes of Steam, Origin, or Uplay. It’s got some indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Subnautica, Celeste, or Frostpunk. If you’re in the mood for some older favorites, it’s also got the likes of Metro

GitHub today announced Suggested Changes: a new feature that promises to make it easier to implement and action changes in pull requests. Here’s how it works. Suppose you’re collaborating on a repository with an active pull request. A reviewer can look at that pull request, and if they see room for improvement, suggest a change to the code by leaving a comment. The author can then accept the suggestion with a single click. 🎉 GitHub is adding Suggested Changes – A way f

Stephen Fry, Olivia Colman and Danny Dyer front Stand Up To Cancer's latest campaign, one that uses virtual reality films to raise awareness about the science of cancer and its treatment. 
A joint venture between Cancer Research UK and Channel 4, Stand Up To Cancer hopes to bring the UK together to speed-up progress in life-saving cancer research. 
Although cancer is the leading cause of death across the world, every day, lives are saved by the work of scientists around the world who a

When I was a kid, I briefly held the aspiration of making my own cartoons. I dabbled in the animation portion of Flash and made a few cheesy .flvs, but soon realized I wasn’t up to the task of dealing with keyframes and drawing pretty vectors. Maybe if I’d started in 2018, things would’ve gone differently. Increasingly powerful technology and the advent of AI make it easier to get your feet wet in animation than ever. Case in point: Adobe is releasing an impressive tool called

As a freelancer working with people around the world, I tend to use these tools not because I particularly like any one of them, but because I don’t have a choice. I grudgingly accept the long wait times and obscenely huge processing fees for the same reason I keep riding that crappy train to work: because there simply isn’t a better option. While digital money transfer companies highlight benefits like fast transfer-to-bank times, good exchange rates, and low fees, there’s no

Wired’s big 25th anniversary event (congrats!) culminated Monday in a summit featuring a veritable who’s-who of big tech bosses. And, like everything else in the US this year, it turned out to be heavily-focused on politics. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was there to peddle patriotism. He graciously volunteered his company for future lucrative military contracts, apparently to save the US from less dutiful businesses. According to him, “If big tech companies are going to turn their ba

This week has seen another wave of appointments and departures at brands, media owners and agencies. The Drum has rounded up the key moves from the EMEA, APAC and North America regions below.
 
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Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles
Eris Felber has been appointed the new head of communications for the Volkswagen commercial vehicles brand. He will report directly to the chairman of the board of management, Dr Thomas Sedran. 
Carat Manchester
Carat Manchester has promoted Pete Me

Freshworks, a startup customer engagement software company, took on its biggest rival at Salesforce's massive annual conference in San Francisco, Dreamforce, and it used a blimp and other out-of-home (OOH) messages as weapons.
Freshworks took to the skies with a #Failsforce blimp that circled Salesforce Tower (the tallest building in San Francisco) all week long. It used other guerrilla tactics like taking to the streets with a marching band, and a complete 360 campaign called ‘H

After two weeks of heated legal action, bidding, internal strife and uncertainty at Unilad, The Drum can now confirm the social publisher has been sold to its biggest rival LadBible.
Unilad entered administration earlier this month with debts of around £10m, half of which was owed to ousted founder Alex Partridge who then sold his debt to LadBible – which made it the primary creditor over Unilad.
Administrator Leonard Curtis and executives from LadBible addressed staff at 1

Today’s consumers are more health conscious than ever before and seeking out healthier product alternatives as result. With greater awareness about the health risks of heavy drinking, inevitably consumer attitudes and buying decisions towards alcohol are changing.
In the UK, a fifth of consumers are choosing not to drink alcohol and over 41% are looking to moderate their overall alcohol intake, by lessening the volume consumed while raising the quality or by turning to NoLo (No and Low alc

In the second of this two-part series, Frank Ye of London based, Chinese-focused agency Qumin, continues his exploration of Western branding in Chinese culture and how it is essential for Western business to find the right name.
We’ve talked extensively on the importance of coming up with a suitable Chinese name for your brand if you want to enter China and impress the increasingly sophisticated Chinese customers.
Many brand managers wonder how big a difference a Chinese version of the bra

Huawei could have just delivered the P20 Pro this year and left it at that. It was one of the most feature-packed smartphones I’ve ever tested, and its unique triple-camera array featured the largest sensor we’ve seen in a modern smartphone. It was enough to earn the P20 Pro the highest DxOMark score yet – something no phone has been able to beat seven months later. The Mate 20 Pro takes everything that was great about its predecessor and dials it up to 11. We got the cha

The Drum has introduced an online registration process that will ask users to submit their name, email address and professional needs from the website in order to access some of the content published going forward.
In introducing the registration and sign in process, The Drum intends to gain a first-hand understanding of the needs of its readership, in order to supply relevant insights and services online, for no monetary cost.
The one-time registration process will be asked of all users wh

Some say marketing is an art. Sure, being creative with your slogans, copywriting and other marketing collateral is important but the ‘art’ component should not extend to areas where it does not belong. Creatively brainstorming your product pricing strategy or your PPC spending is never a good idea - science needs to applied.
As data grows bigger, however, new approaches need to be adopted when gathering and transforming that data into meaningful actions. That’s where machine l

The cryptocurrency sector has grown anxious over a market reliance on controversial “stablecoin” Tether (USDT), after its value dropped well below its supposedly pegged price of $1. In fact, the market is so concerned with the risks associated with USDT that a “Tether premium” has formed on the cryptocurrency exchanges still using it. Stablecoins like USDT are supposed to be equally valued and completely interchangable with the US dollar. But as the value of USDT has bec

It seems there’s news of a new cryptocurrency scam every week. Usually, as victims come forward the scam is revealed and the perpetrators get caught. However, one scam investigation in India has hit a dead end. Subhashchand Jewria encouraged people to invest in their virtual currency, ATC Coin. Claiming after an 18 month “lock-in” period the cryptocurrency could be used for online shopping, but nothing ever materialized. A year after Jewria’s arrest, the investigation is

Following the 2015 Paris Agreement to hold the global increase in climate to below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was asked to produce a report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5℃. The report focuses on what must be done if we want to avoid warming above 1.5℃, and the difference between 1.5℃ and 2℃ warming. The general message is that the ecological and social impacts of 1.5℃ are significan

This Day In Days is a new section where we share the best deals of the day alongside a historical fact, and try to connect the two. The aim? To enrich ourselves financially, and you spiritually. In this day in 1384, Jadwiga was crowned King of Poland – although she was a woman. You can view this a middle finger to the patriarchy. Or you can see it as a form of patriarchy. Why? Well, the middle finger is that Jadwiga was called “king” to reflect she was a queen regnant, a

Bob Pittman, the media mogul currently heading up iHeartMedia, believes his success at companies from MTV to Six Flags can be traced back to one philosophy – treating each brand as if it were a mortal, human entity that needs to be protected.
Pittman formed this theory early on in his career in media, beginning with the launch of MTV in his mid-twenties. He was part of the first team to introduce the music industry to TV, a feat never successfully accomplished before.
Yet now, he questions

Sainsbury’s has unveiled an eerily cute stop-motion campaign to promote its range of Halloween products, directed by Mike Waring the animation lead behind Wes Anderson’s Oscar-tipped Isle of Dogs.
The film, created with agency of record Wieden+Kennedy London, follows a petrified lip-syncing pumpkin.
The madness of the spot is only heightened by the score –​ a version of the theme tune to 90s kids show ‘Round the Twist’,

Google Pixel 3’s camera has a lot of impressive tricks up its sleeve. One of them is Super Res Zoom, which improves digital zoom for clear pictures, and allows for decent results when working with a single-lens setup like the one on the Pixel 3. The company’s AI team explained in a blog post today that the camera zooms in before taking a picture, rather than shooting a picture first and then cropping it. That helps it improve the image quality later with special algorithms: The Supe

One day we might all be able to send Bitcoin from literally anywhere in the world, with no electricity and no internet connection. Off-grid cryptocurrency transactions seem to be becoming an achievable possibility as yet another developer has managed to send Bitcoin without a data connection, using low-cost consumer grade hardware. An ingenious developer from New Zealand managed to send the transaction over 12 km away using four goTennas and a $30 Android smartphone. Over the weekend I sent a b

MIT will create a new college with courses combining AI, machine learning, and data science with other academic disciplines. With $1 billion in funding, this will be the largest financial investment in AI by any US academic institution. The new college will have 50 new faculty positions and numerous fellowships for graduate students. The school will open next September, starting initially in other buildings until around 2022, when the new college is slated to get its own space. Rafael Reif, the

It’s been years since the Palm brand graced a new electronic device. It’s now on a ‘companion phone,’ which is essentially a small, more portable smartphone that shares your existing number and is available only with a Verizon carrier contract. Sadly, it’s not the return to greatness I was hoping for. In case you missed the launch coverage over the past several hours, here’s a quick recap. The 5cm x 9.7 cm Android-based ‘handset’ features a 3.3.-i

Well, it finally happened. Instagram hit 1 billion monthly active users this June - that’s over 13% of the world population.
And that’s not all - Instagram Stories just hit 400 million daily active users, plus the platform is projected to make nearly 7 billion dollars in mobile ad revenue alone by the end of the year.
All this to say, Instagram is experiencing a period of massive growth right now and launching new features left and right. The question on every marketer’s mind i

It may still be without a permanent chief marketing officer but Airbnb has promoted Geoff Seeley to the role of global marketing director and enlisted ex-Apple and Ford marketer Musa Tariq as head of marketing and experiences. 
Over the past 12 months, Seeley has been the one constant in Airbnb's senior marketing team.
He was hired by former chief marketing officer Jonathan Mildenhall to the "critical" role of media director before the latter left last year. As per

Global data company Fifty-five London - part of You & Mr Jones - has appointed Rob Bowles as head of consulting.
Prior to joining the agency Bowles was part of the customer & digital team at Baringa Partners LLP and has held senior management roles at ZS Associates and Deloitte Digital.
Reporting to UK MD Richard Wheaton, Bowles has been charged with leading a team of digital data consultants to deliver analytics solutions that will enable 55’s clients to implement their digital st

National Geographic has partnered with Wattpad to help spread the word for its ‘Planet or Plastic?’ environmental joint venture with 21st Century Fox.
The title is using the content app to help raise awareness of the topical global pollution problem by running a creative storytelling challenge, asking readers to put down in words how the plastic pile-up is polluting the world’s oceans.
Writers will be tasked with putting the reality of the crisis forward in their own words, har

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen died yesterday at the age of 65. He was suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – a type of cancer. Allen’s company Vulcan Inc. made the announcement through a statement. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world, ranked no. 44 on the Forbes list of billionaires in 2018 when he passed away. It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of @PaulGAllen, our founder and noted technologist, philanthropist, community builder, cons

Microsoft has paid tribute to its ‘indispensable’ co-founder Paul Allen after the technology trail-blazer passed away aged 65 following a battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Allen is reported to have passed away on Monday afternoon just weeks after learning that his cancer, thought to have been treated in 2009, had returned.
Best known as Microsoft co-founder, alongside Bill Gates in 1975, Allen was also a keen follower of American football and basketball (he owned the NFL's Seattle Se

The creation of Publicis Emil by Publicis Groupe at Daimler AG, the manufacturer of Mercedes-Benz, has been touted by some as the new agency model for legacy businesses undergoing digital transformation to find a compromise between in-housing and maintaining relationships with agencies.
By comparison, to highlight the differences in models, fellow French car brand Renault has followed another model, merging both its media and creative agencies (Omnicom’s OMD and Publicis respecti

The creation of Publicis Emil by Publicis Groupe at Daimler AG, the manufacturer of Mercedes-Benz, is being touted as the new agency model for legacy businesses undergoing digital transformation to find a compromise between in-housing and maintaining relationships with agencies.
Fellow car business Renault has followed a similar model, merging both its media and creative agencies (Omnicom’s OMD and Publicis respectively) to bring the bulk of its ad business in-house, which it hop

One of the 2018 Nobel Prizes in physics went to Donna Strickland, a major accomplishment for any scientist. Yet much of the news coverage has focused on the fact that she’s only the third female physicist to receive the award, after Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer 60 years later. Though biochemical engineer Frances Arnold also won this year, for chemistry, the rarity of female Nobel laureates raises questions about women’s exclusion from education and careers in science

Bosch has become the latest official partner of Formula E, following hot on the tail pipe of Heineken which announced its own partnership with the sport just yesterday (15 October).
The German engineering and electronics giant will become the official auto parts, white goods and power tools partner of the fast growing electric street racing series as it seeks to burnish its own credentials in the field of electromobility.
Alejandro Agag, founder and chief executive of Formula E, said: “Bos