Morning Update: The Sun to face trial over hacking; Pepsi launches emojis in 100 5-second ads; Twitter now a news site; KL logo ‘a hoax’
The Guardian: The Sun to face trial over phone-hacking claims
The Sun is facing trial over phone hacking for the first time after a high court judge ruled there was enough evidence for claims against the newspaper to be heard in a civil court.
Four claimants, including entertainer Les Dennis, allege that 40 articles printed in the tabloid were obtained through phone hacking, including some while the paper was edited by Rebekah Brooks.
Brooks, who was cleared of all phone-hacking charges in a trial which ended in 2014, returned in September as chief executive of News UK, publisher of the Sun as well as the Times and Sunday Times.
https://youtu.be/cOfATTwlYZ0
Ad Week: Pepsi Embraces the 5-Second Spot, Making 100 of Them for TV and Digital
Sometimes, longer is better. But Pepsi is going super short with its new emoji-themed commercials, creating a slew of 100 five-second spots that will air on TV and in search-triggered digital media this summer.
Agencies Motive and Quietman developed the creative, while Quietman produced all the spots. They show brief, charming, cartoon vignettes of Pepsi bottles doing summery things like skydiving, sunbathing, eating ice cream and more. The visual style is similar to the short spots Pepsi ran for its emoji bottles in Canada last summer. The hashtag, #sayitwithpepsi, also carries over from that earlier work.
Digiday: Twitter now bills itself as a news app, not a social network
Eagle-eyed Twitter users have noticed that it’s now categorising itself very differently in the Apple App Store. In an update yesterday, Twitter now sits in the News category rather than Social Networking.
The change comes two days after Twitter announced its second-quarter earnings, revealing that user growth is still sluggish despite the additions meant to make the service more friendly, like adding Moments and a different timeline. Shifting the category might juice its slowly growing user base. In the first quarter Twitter added just five million new users, bringing it to 310 million active monthly users. Facebook has 1.65 billion monthly active users.
The city of Kuala Lumpur’s new logo and slogan have received a bewildered response from Malaysian advertising executives, with a senior creative saying he thought it was a hoax.
KL’s new brand identity was unveiled yesterday by the city’s mayor, who introduced the new slogan, ‘A city of contrasts and diversity” and the words “Exciting, surprising, enticing” beneath bold lettering. Vijay Anand, the executive creative director of BBDO Malaysia, said he thought the campaign was a “brilliant hoax campaign” to start a debate about how much Malaysians care about the city.
Campaign Live: Iris hires ex-BuzzFeed director of brand strategy Lewis
Digby Lewis, the former director of brand strategy at BuzzFeed, has joined Iris to lead its global content division Content That Pops. Lewis will take on the role of head of platforms and distribution. He will report to Matthew Kershaw, who joined as managing director of Content That Pops in November.
The pair will work on pushing out the proposition globally with teams already in place in Singapore, Amsterdam, Sydney, Shanghai, New York and Sao Paulo. Lewis left BuzzFeed in 2015 after seven months. Before this, he worked as interim general manager at Homemade, the online recipes platform produced by Sainsbury’s.
Axe on Wednesday killed a campaign from DDB Puerto Rico that dealt in regressive, simplistic notions of male-female relationships, signaling once again the Unilever men’s personal care brand’s newfound preference for more grownup messaging about attraction.
DDB launched the campaign, “Sexy Beast,” last week and pitched it to media outlets on Monday. Adweek’s AdFreak blog panned the campaign on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the landing page was gone (pushing visitors to the brand’s Facebook page instead) and the campaign’s YouTube video had been removed.
The Drum: Why the redesigned Tokyo 2020 Olympics logo is more than just a safe bet
Seven months on from the plagiarism row that emerged following the unveiling of the first Tokyo 2020 Olympics logo, the organisers have answered critics with a new and very different design. But is the new logo, pictured above, now playing it too safe or has it hit the mark?Regardless of whether you believe the perceived plagiarism was true or not, for the International Olympic Committee to be tarred with such a brush would obviously go against all its ideals. The organisers could have held out and argued the similarity was just coincidence, which I actually would agree with, but understandably they thought it better to go back to the drawing board.The most debatable decision was the process to crowdsource the new design – opening the creative process up to the Japanese public.
