Morning Update: Gawker’s last post; Ogilvy hands back award; Isaac Awards winning campaigns; the real cost of advertising
Gawker.com is shutting down today, Monday 22nd August, 2016, some 13 years after it began and two days before the end of my forties. It is the end of an era.
The staff will move to new jobs on other properties in Gawker Media Group, which are lively and intact, and the whole operation will continue under new ownership, after being acquired for $135 million by Univision. But I will not be going with my colleagues. The Gawker domain is also being left behind in bankruptcy. This is the last post.
Mumbrella Asia: Ogilvy finally returns Gold Effie won for rhino horn project that made false claims
Ogilvy has finally handed back an effectiveness award it won for a campaign to curb the rhino horn trade in Vietnam because bogus claims were made in the case study video.
Though exactly which claims were falsified remains unclear, Effies president Neal Davies told Mumbrella this morning that the “correct decision” had been made, and Ogilvy had returned the Gold Effie the agency won in April for the ‘Saving Africa’s Last Wild Rhinos, By Poisoning Them’ project.
Ad Week: Check Out the 26 Boldly Inventive Campaigns That Won This Year’s Project Isaac Awards
In this era of constant change and innovation, to truly invent something is quite rare. But the drive to find new paths and opportunities across marketing, media and tech may be stronger than ever thanks to the indomitable spirit that infuses those worlds (the drive to find new revenue doesn’t hurt either).
Many of those ideas were adapted from existing platforms but transport the end user to experiences they could otherwise never enjoy—such as our Gravity Award winner, McCann New York (and partners), which created a virtual reality bus tour of Mars on behalf of client Lockheed Martin.
Campaign Live: The Cost of Advertising
There has seldom been harmony when it comes to the contentious nature of how agencies make money from clients and the corresponding remuneration models. With bottom lines under pressure, it is inevitable that clients are always demanding faster and better but cheaper.
At the same time, agencies have their own reality: requests to deliver more services for sometimes only a marginal increased cost; the agency talent crunch; and procurement concerns. The result? Fewer advertisers (46%) satisfied with their remuneration agreement – the lowest figure since records began in 1997, according to the latest ISBA/Arc Paying for Advertising report (the previous three-year study was carried out in 2012).
Poynter: How CIR created an investigative series just for Instagram
Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Instagram account has doubled its followers in the past year. And beginning today, those followers, old and new, will get a project created just for them.
“Bad Plea Deals” is the California-based nonprofit’s first project made specifically for Instagram. The investigative series will unfold in 21 chapters posted three times a day for seven days.
Brand Republic: Fox News broke UK broadcasting rules with Brexit coverage
Two separate items about the referendum were broadcast simultaneously in the UK at 9pm and in the US on 23 June on the Your World with Neil Cavuto show, in the hour before polls officially closed at 10pm.
At 9.05pm the show ran a five-minute news segment in which a contributor said: “I mean we are governed by a bunch of bureaucrats that don’t speak English in a funny place called The Hague, which makes no sense at all, and it tells Britain what to do, it takes British money, it doesn’t send much of if it back – it’s a very unfair one-way street when you begin to dig into it and the biggest thing of course is that all of this is all a disguise over the immigration issue”.
Ad Age: Are Brands Optimizing Their Marketing to Death?
Data has been hailed as marketing’s holy grail for decades, a means to pinpoint even the smallest of audiences and efficiently deliver a message to those most likely to buy. But the news last week that Procter & Gamble is scaling back targeted Facebook ads – though not Facebook ads overall – raises a question over whether marketers might be optimizing marketing to death.
