Morning Update: Letting employees write the ads; Facebook shutters desktop ad exchange; Vice News lays off staff
Ad Week: Droga5 has Johnsonville employees dream up their own (ridiculous) ads
Undoubtedly eager to take a break from stuffing ground-up meat into sausage casings all day long, employees at Johnsonville try their hand at creating commercials in a new campaign from Droga5 tagged, appropriately enough, “Made the Johnsonville Way.”
“Over the past three months, we interviewed almost 100 Johnsonville members, the people making the sausage, and had them pitch ideas,” Scott Bell, agency group creative director, tells Adweek. “Then we narrowed it down to three and put the full production budget behind them.”
The spot sets up the premise, complete with an employee brainstorming session that yields—what else?—a sizzling “sausage meets car chase” concept.
Ad Age: Facebook shuttering FBX as dollars move from desktop to mobile
Facebook is officially planning to shutter its desktop ad exchange FBX as it pursues the dollars moving to mobile with other products.
FBX lets advertisers use their own data to bid on Facebook inventory in real time and target and retarget audiences, but it’s limited to reaching users on desktop. The company’s Facebook Audience Network, however, lets advertisers buy inventory on both mobile and desktop on and off Facebook.
Campaign: Top Gear team launches UK’s first production company for car brands
Award-winning directors, producers and key members of the BBC’s original Top Gear team have launched the UK’s first production company specialising in advertising and digital content solely for car brands.
Carnage is being run by Ben Hampshire, the former managing director of The Mill in Los Angeles. Hampshire has founded the agency alongside Rogue company partners David Van Der Gaag and Charlie Crompton, as well as acclaimed director Sam Brown.
Brown, who will be Carnage’s executive creative director, is known for directing music videos by top UK artists over the years, such as Adele’s Rolling In the Deep and James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful. Brown has won golds at Cannes and Creative Circle, as well as a best direction Pencil at D&AD.
Poynter: Digital media layoffs continue, this time at VICE News
This afternoon brought additional fodder for predictions of a tremulous bubble in digital media: VICE News, the edgy outlet that’s expanded to become a global presence, announced it’s axing 15 jobs in New York and Los Angeles.
Harriet Salem, a foreign correspondent at VICE News, indicated that the layoffs don’t stop at the U.S. border, tweeting that all of the outlet’s editorial team in the UK has been cut.
The Verge: The New York Times is the latest publication to decapitalize ‘the internet’
Like a cool business dad, The New York Times has finally decided to stop capitalizing the word “Internet.” From June, the publication will be relying on lowercase letters to describe the information superhighway, calling it just the “internet” in both its print and online iterations.
The NYT is joining the Associated Press in ditching the capital-I internet this year, with both bastions of journalistic style choosing to shrink the letter on June 1st. Thomas Kent — the AP‘s standards editor — explained that the internet had become “wholly generic, like ‘electricity or the ‘telephone’.” The word was not trademarked, and not based on a proper noun, he said. “The best reason for capitalizing it in the past may have been that the word was new. But at one point, I’ve heard, ‘phonograph’ was capitalized.”
BBC News: Norway consumer body stages live app terms reading
Norwegians have spent more than 30 hours reading out terms and conditions from smartphone apps in a campaign by the country’s consumer agency.
The average Norwegian has 33 apps, the Norwegian Consumer Council says, whose terms and conditions together run longer than the New Testament.
To prove the “absurd” length, the council got Norwegians to read each of them out in real time on their website.
