Morning Update: Burger King’s burning Xmas sweater; Vice Media meets the President; Pandora preps Premium service
Creativity Online: Burger King Brings a Flame-Grilled Twist to the Ugly Christmas Sweater
Burger King is all about its patties being flame-grilled – an idea that, with some agency ingenuity, has found its way onto an ugly Christmas sweater.
Burger King France and Paris-based agency Buzzman teamed with a French hipster apparel portal, Rad.co, and emblazoned a tacky holiday sweater with a fireplace motif. You’re supposed to fire up your smartphone with a video of flames, and when you slip it into a pocket on your belly, it looks like there’s a holiday fire roaring away in a fireplace.
Poynter: Vice Media smartly documents Obama’s 8-year brawl with the GOP
“This sh*t really isn’t on the level, is it?” Vice quotes President Obama declaring to an unidentified top aide (actually David Axelrod) just eight days into his tenure, on his way to a key early meeting with resistant Republicans on Capitol Hill.
The line is recalled by Politico’s Michael Grunwald and helps frame ‘A House Divided’, a superior Vice documentary that airs on HBO Friday and sets an early, high standard for the inevitable long-form TV dissections of the Obama era. It’s more a combination of C-SPAN/Frontline than what you’d figure from idiosyncratic and opinionated Vice.
Ad Week: Pandora’s New Premium Service Lets Users Pick What They Listen To
Pandora is getting ready to launch Pandora Premium, an on-demand music offering that could let the music streaming service more closely compete with major players like Spotify and Apple Music.
Pandora Premium will cost users US $9.99 per month for the ability to go beyond the internet radio style of streaming and instead play individual songs and playlists. The service also integrates features from Rdio, which Pandora acquired last year for $75 million when Rdio filed for bankruptcy.
Digiday: WTF are wrapper tags?
Header bidding got a little sexier last week after Amazon announced it was flirting with wrapper tags.
While it was clear that Amazon’s announcement could have implications for publishers, it was less clear exactly how wrappers worked in the first place. They’ve been alleged to increase revenue and reduce page latency, but explanations haven’t always been comprehensible for ordinary humans.
Campaign Live: Agencies must negotiate better to help improve margins
There has never been a time when agencies have faced such adversity, says the chairman of the Marketing Agencies Association
Campaign’s article, by Esther Carder at Kingston Smith, highlighted some difficult trends for marketing agencies. Profit margins have fallen to a new low of just 6%. And in a market where overall fee income has increased by 6.8% to £460 million, we see the twin forces of greater competition and downward pressures on fee income are exerting their power in a big way?
Heineken will take over Singapore’s giant ferris wheel, the Singapore Flyer, in a campaign that will see the creation of five specially designed capsules, each offering a different customer experience.
The beer brand has teamed up with five local creative minds to create the experiences as part of its global Cities campaign, which kicks off next week and is now in its third year in Singapore.
topics
A House Divided
Amazon
Barack Obama
Burger King
buzzman
HBO
Heineken
Pandora
premium
Rad.co
Vice Media
wrapper tags
