Morning Update: Meet ‘The Toastmaker’; ESPN and Amazon talk streaming; Twitter’s direct message tool; UK Sun online traffic up 25%
Ad Week: If You’re Sick and Tired of Hipstery ‘Maker’ Culture, Watch This Hilarious Video Now
Creatives everywhere fetishise maker culture and the glory of handmade creation. But the line between DIY authenticity and insufferable hipsterism is a thin one, and Internet videos celebrating maker culture—they’re everywhere—can be an absolute horror to sit through. Except for this one.
It offers us a snapshot of one of the purest makers ever—a real artist at his craft. You’ll never look at artisanal creation, or perhaps breakfast, the same way again. Fun video by freelance copywriter Andy Corbett and director/photographer/editor Patrick Kehoe.
Ad Age: Don’t Like That Mobile Ad? Shove It Aside (For Later)
Imagine you’re on your tablet, focused on securing a dinner reservation and concert tickets for your girlfriend’s birthday (which is tomorrow), and you see a banner ad showing a great deal for tickets to an NBA game next month.
What do you do? Tap the “X” to close the ad, so that you can complete your task without temptation staring you in the face? Or do you go for the deal – even if it means going down the rabbit hole to other sporting-event deals and never actually making those birthday plans?
The Drum: Twitter thinks it can help brands boost loyalty and sales with new direct message tools
Twitter is trying to make it easier for businesses to deal with customer service requests by introducing a quicker way to start a direct message.
The site claims that millions of customer service-related interactions take place on the platform every month, with advertisers saying that over 80% of their inbound social customer service requests happen on Twitter.
Hollywood Reporter: Code/Media: ESPN Exploring Streaming Deals With Amazon, Others
President John Skipper said selling ESPN as a stand-alone business was not “good business” during the tech and media conference on Wednesday.
ESPN as a stand-alone streaming service isn’t happening anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean sports fans won’t be able to watch the big game on outlets like Dish, Apple TV or Amazon in the future.
The Verge: Nextbit Robin review: a smartphone in the clouds
Chances are, if you’ve owned a smartphone over the past few years, you’ve used it for countless things: sending messages, using apps, capturing photos and video, or playing games.
It’s no secret that installing apps and games and taking photos and video with your phone rapidly consumes the storage available to you, and it doesn’t take much to hit storage limits on your phone.
The Guardian: Sun website traffic up by more than 25%
The Sun saw its web traffic soar by more than 25% in January, a welcome recovery after it lost audience in the previous month.
Its website recorded a 5% month-on-month fall in average daily web browsers in December, despite dropping its paywall fully for the first time on 30 November.
News UK chiefs brushed off the decline, blaming it on issues including “certain apps” being turned off in the transition to free access, and a seasonal lull in fantasy football game Dream Team.
In this humorous campaign for Dentyne, the brand’s users are so proud of their minty-fresh breath that they deliberately show it off in outrageous ways – and in the confined space of an elevator.
Jeff Low of Biscuit directed a series of short, funny clips for the brand, through agency McCann. They include a pregnant woman who pretends to be in labor just so she can breathe on a guy, a woman who puts her breath in a jar and hands it to a stranger and a man who goes around wearing a harness so he can breathe the word “harness” at very close quarters.
Media agency Zenith Optimedia has finally launched new network Blue 449 in Asia Pacific, led by Zenith Optimedia’s regional MD of international clients Nico Guiridlian based in Hong Kong.
The new network, which is born out of Walker Media, the British media buying Publicis Groupe acquired in 2014, is positioned as ‘the open source media agency’ with a focus on innovation.
BuzzFeed: BuzzFeed Wants to Use a New Measuring Stick to Tell You How Big BuzzFeed Is
BuzzFeed is a very big digital publisher. How big? That’s a question that is harder for BuzzFeed to answer than it would like.
In the past, BuzzFeed would point to the number of people who were visiting BuzzFeed.com, which is a very big number — in the U.S., comScore pegs that number at 80 million people per month.
The double lumberjack shirt in the maker video is pure brilliance.
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