Morning Update: Toyota releases ’emotional’ robot; L’Oreal Brazil reveals make-up for the blind; Vogue’s blogger backlash
Ad Week: Toyota Is Selling a Baby Robot That Reads Your Emotions and Talks to You
If you need a co-pilot for a cross-country drive or just someone to tell your problems to when a friend or psychiatrist is unavailable, Toyota now offers a robot to take care of your needs.
The car maker has revealed Kirobo Mini, a baby-sized, bionic companion that is designed to interpret people’s facial reactions to converse about how they are feeling. Kirobo Mini speaks and moves its head and arms; it will cost $400 when it first becomes available next year via dealerships in Toyota’s home country of Japan.
L’Oréal Brazil has created a makeup course for its Maybelline New York brand to teach visually impaired women how to use its products.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), about two-thirds of the visually impaired are women. For most of them, being independent and looking after themselves is essential for their self-esteem.
Campaign Live: Vogue blogger backlash underlines disconnect between media owners and influencers
If the fashion world was once the most impenetrable of ivory towers; digital influencers have successfully staged a revolution. Yet certain editors at Vogue appear to remain in a state of perpetual denial.
In a post Milan fashion week frenzy, US Vogue editors lined up to criticise “bloggers”for the “distressing” “street-style mess”. Even brands were in the firing line; Nicole Phelps, director of Vogue Runway, wrote: “It’s not just sad for the women who preen for the cameras in borrowed clothes it’s distressing as well to watch so many brands participate.”
Ad Week: How the ‘New Mac’ Candle Went From a Silly Idea to a Labor of Love That Sold Out on Day 1
That first whiff of a freshly opened Apple box is an experience many of us can conjure up in our minds. But could you create a formula to truly capture the scent?
Andrew Green essentially gave himself this mission of bridging the factory and the olfactory when he came up with the idea to create a New Mac scented candle as a self-promotional item for Twelve South, the Apple Accessory firm he co-founded in South Carolina.
Poynter: How a single reporter stopped Trump’s foundation in its tracks
When New York State Attorney General David Schneiderman ordered Donald Trump’s foundation to stop raising money, David Fahrenthold should have sent a bill.
Fahrenthold is a Washington Post reporter who reported that the foundation wasn’t properly registered even as it solicited donations. Between appearances on MSNBC and CNN last night, he detailed the persistence and good luck that led to the discovery, along with his ingenious use of crowdsourcing that’s made him to Trump’s charitable machinations what historian Edward Gibbon was to the Roman Empire.
90 Seconds, a six year-old company that has been called the Airbnb of the video production world, has a network of 5,000 creatives, has produced 10,000 videos in 22 languages, and shot in 87 countries. Six months ago, the company received a sizeable funding injection from Sequoia.
In this Q&A with Mumbrella Asia’s editor Robin Hicks, founder Tim Norton talks about mistakes brands are making in online video, why ads don’t work on the internet, and tackling the perception that cloud video production means low quality.
The Drum: The five questions every marketer must ask their media partners now
Dentsu and Facebook’s separate admissions of irregularities in how they quantify what they say they offer, and what they actually do deliver, are fuelling fears that clients are losing trust in their media partners.
Fears that belie just how exposed many marketers could be right now should they fail to ask the following questions of the rest of the media industry.
