Morning Update: Tinder valued at US$3bn; Facebook publisher traffic plummets; Star Wars Battlefront trailer; Cats dressed up for Xmas
AdWeek: Anna Kendrick Channels Obi-Wan in Star Wars Battlefront Trailer
Office workers, high-school kids, rush-hour commuters, a rock band performing on stage and even Anna Kendrick all vanish, Obi-Wan style, and their earthly accoutrements—clothes, backpacks, guitars—fall to the ground in this captivating two-minute promo for the Electronic Arts game Star Wars Battlefront.
Ultimately, these folks are transported into the pulse-pounding action of the game itself, which is set for release on Nov. 17. The spot, “Be More Powerful,” goes wide today online, and will air during ESPN’s Monday Night Football game between the Chicago Bears and San Diego Chargers.
Digiday: Facebook’s traffic to top publishers fell 32 percent since January
While Facebook makes headlines for cooking up new initiatives with publishers, the actual traffic it’s sending those publishers has fallen sharply.
Referral traffic (desktop + mobile) to the top 30 Facebook publishers (as defined by their reliance on Facebook) plunged 32 percent from January to October, according to SimpleReach, a distribution analytics company. The more reliant the publisher on Facebook, the bigger the hit: Among the top 10, the drop was a steeper 42.7 percent.
Those results line up with those from social traffic tracker SimilarWeb, which looked at the 50 biggest publishers in Facebook from January to September. It found that The Huffington Post’s Facebook traffic fell 60.1 percent, to 16 million. Fox News’ dropped 48.2 percent to 4.3 million. BuzzFeed’s Facebook visits fell 40.8 percent to 23.7 million. Across all 50, the biggest drop in traffic in the period took place from January to February, when publishers’ Facebook traffic fell an average of 75 percent. There was a smaller but also significant drop from March to April.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMH4xmOeKxc
Creativity: Do You Owe Your Cat an Apology This Holiday Season?
The premise behind this ad from Temptations, the cat treat brand, is rather simple (and shameless and funny): While the holidays can be tough on everyone, they might be even more tough on your cat — if you happen to be the kind of cat owner (sorry, pet parent) who thinks it’s adorable to dress kitty up this time of year.
The felines on display here look none too amused, which raises some questions: How many Temptations treats did they get? Were animal agents enlisted to negotiate upward? Do Temptations executives dress up their cats? And in a moral universe — inasmuch as cats have morals — is it OK to dress up Fluffy if you plan in advance to apologize for it with a treat/bribe after the fact?
AdAge: Tinder Owner Match Seeks $3.36 Billion Valuation in IPO
Match Group, the owner of online-dating sites Tinder, Match and OkCupid, is seeking a valuation of as much as $3.36 billion in its initial public offering.
Match Group, a unit of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, plans to sell 33.3 million shares of common stock at $12 to $14 each, the company said in a regulatory filing Monday. Based on the total common stock planned to be sold and 206.7 million shares of Class B stock outstanding after the offering, the company aims to be valued at $2.88 billion to $3.36 billion.
Mumbrella Asia: Former DDB colleagues Karen See and Sharn Bedi launch gender equality consultancy
Karen See has left DDB Group where she was APAC chief communications director for almost nine years to start her own leadership consultancy for women with former colleague Sharn Bedi, the ex-APAC MD of DDB’s healthcare network Remedy.
The consultancy, called Embrace Worldwide, offers advice on gender equality through workshops and coaching and launches with the slogan “Success everyday”. It will be located in Hong Kong, where See lives, and Singapore, where Bedi is based, and serve clients in Australia, China, India, the UK and the US.
The Guardian: Charlie Hebdo editor’s manifesto to be published posthumously in January
A manifesto by the late editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo will be published posthumously next year, publishing company Little, Brown and Company announced today.
The manifesto, entitled Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia and the True Enemies of Free Expression, was written by Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor-in-chief of the popular satirical magazine, who was killed in January after two gunmen stormed the office and killed 12 people.
It was later discovered that Charbonnier, known as Charb, had finished the book only two days before he was killed. The book covers issues related to the nature of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, including Islamophobia and the courage satirists require.
