Morning Update: Facebook bans sight loss ad; Twitter to go beyond 140; Heineken 007 tie-up
The Guardian: Facebook bans ‘degrading’ charity ad about sight loss
Facebook has banned a hard-hitting ad campaign by the Royal National Institute of Blind People, arguing that users of the social networking site should only see “neutral or positive” messages.
The RNIB launched the ad on its YouTube channel and has been seeking to run a campaign featuring the video across Facebook.
The campaign, which aims to promote the need for sight loss advisers in every UK hospital, uses the common charity advertising tactic of making viewers think about how they would feel if their health was under threat.
Ad Week: Here’s the most enchanted, surreal least ad-like bank ad of the year
Umpqua Bank tries something decidedly different for the financial services category with “The Seed and the Moon,” a visually stunning animated short by CAA Marketing and Nexus director Kibwe Tavares.
The three-minute film is a parable about growth and humanity. It opens when a lone tree in a forbidding, Blade Runner-esque metropolis is torn apart by an earth-moving machine.
One of its seeds manages to take root in the cracks of an alley. Nurtured by moonbeams, the little green guy grows and grows, ultimately shooting toward the clouds and utterly transforming the harsh urban sprawl into a sun-splashed, verdant wonderland.
Recode: Twitter plans to go beyond its 140 character limit
Twitter is building a new product that will allow users to share tweets that are longer than the company’s 140-character limit, according to multiple people familiar with the company’s plans.
It’s unclear what the product will look like, but sources say it would enable Twitter users to publish long-form content to the service.
Users can already tweet out blocks of text with products like OneShot, but those are simply images, not actual text published on Twitter. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.
Mumbrella Asia: Heineken launches Singapore campaign around Bond film, plots world’s first selfie from space
Heineken has launched a marketing push around the latest Bond film in Singapore.
As well as a TVC, created by Iris Worldwide, the beer brand has introduced a series of limited edition packs that give exclusive content from the new film via scanning the Heineken logo with a mobile phone.
Heineken Spectre 20s packs are on sale in Singapore at supermarkets for S$58.40 each.
Ad Age: Youtube’s most native ad yet outs shoppable cards into organic videos
YouTube has created its most “native” ad yet. For years the Google-owned video service has run ads before videos or interrupted videos with ads, but now it’s incorporating ads into the actual videos to function more like Google’s search ads than YouTube’s typical pre-roll spots.
Earlier this year YouTube unveiled TrueView Cards, an interactive spin on its skippable pre-roll ad format that let brands include information about a product featured in an ad as well as links to a brand’s site.
Now YouTube is adapting the format for videos in which a product appears, even if those videos weren’t paid for by an advertiser.
Wired: What content bubble? Business Insider scores huge sale
At Business Insider, the only bubbles on anyone’s mind today are the champagne kind.
The eight-year-old media startup was acquired today by German publishing giant Axel Springer. The deal values Business Insider at $442 million, almost $200 million more than whatThe Washington Post sold for in 2013 and well above the $315 million AOL paid to acquire The Huffington Post in 2011.
In the current frothy market for content, BI’s deal feels like one of the bubbliest yet.
Digiday: What happens when you have a ‘black people’ Advertising Week panel without black people
Tip: When you host a panel called “Here are all the black people,” maybe make sure you actually have some.
A Tuesday panel at Advertising Week New York went pretty viral — albeit not in the way the panelists might have wanted — when the lack of diversity on stage was called into question.
The One Club hosted the “Here Are All the Black People” event Tuesday that is an all-day career fair for multicultural students and recent graduates who might be interested in the ad industry.
