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Morning Update: Coopers gets a Copyranter serve; Toys ‘R’ Us’ playable catalogue; Check your Facebook privacy settings

coopers pale ale

Digiday: Copyranter: On crap copywriting

Becoming a good ad copywriter is really not hard. It’s much easier than becoming a good actual real writer.

Here’s how to become a good copywriter: Forget grammar (mostly), just write informally, like how people talk to each other. And as David Ogilvy famously supposedly said, “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife” — which is a bit dated and sexist but just replace “wife” with “best friend.” This is a very important insight to remember.

The best ads — online, offline, video, print, whatever — don’t have “clever” lines; they have clever/unexpected visuals/scenarios complemented by understated copy.

AdAge: Playing With Toys: Kids Can Play With The Catalog

Get out your crayons and mobile phones. The Toys ‘R Us holiday catalog drops this week. At 96 pages, “The Great Big Toys ‘R Us Book of Awesome” is its biggest issue ever and includes interactive elements for the first time.

“The Big Book, as we call it internally, is done every year, but this is a significant revamp of the catalog. What we’ve done is add more pages, a lot more product authority, interactive virtual reality and lifestyle spreads,” said Rich Lennox, Toys ‘R Us chief marketing officer. “We felt over time, it had become a little bit too much of a sales promotional vehicle and it had lost some of its magic.”

AdWeek: Blake Griffin Is in the Zone as Kia Kicks Off Another NBA Season

Blake Griffin usually soars over everyone else. But in David&Goliath’s latest Kia campaign, the Los Angeles Clippers star ascends to new heights: a dreamworld where only the most effortlessly cool competitors—and car drivers—reside.

The spot below, titled “Next Level,” timed to the opening of the NBA season this week, is the first of four that will highlight the next-level performance of the 2016 Kia Optima. Griffin, as usual, doesn’t break a sweat in terms of his acting—he really is among the most natural performers onscreen, which suits the plot of “Next Level” perfectly.

The Guardian: Facebook users urged to check privacy settings

Facebook users are being encouraged to double-check their privacy settings after the social network introduced an update to its search feature which adds almost 2 trillion older posts by its members to the index.

Previously, Facebook’s search feature was largely limited to groups, events and locations, with individuals’ public posts difficult to find without directly navigating to the user’s profile page.

Now, the site has indexed more than 2trn posts, and the search function enables users to seek out a specific post from any public profile, whether or not the two are friends on the site.

Techcrunch: The Rise Of The Smartphone Means The End Of Mobile Wallets From Carriers And Banks

A cycle starts when hype of a technology leads to big investments in that technology, which in turn creates more hype. Real-world use of the technology by customers can get lost in the cycle.

Investors and vendors in the fintech industry have heaped plenty of hype on “mobile wallets” — products, often built by wireless carriers and banks, with a stored value of money accessed via a mobile device that can be used for a range of financial services, such as peer-to-peer transactions, merchant payments and money lending.

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