The Video of the Week David Beckham delivers AI-generated, deep-fake multilingual malaria awareness Back in Newsletter #146, I highlighted how deepfake videos (convincing but fake audio and video) “present real challenges, and surprisingly, opportunities for publishers”. Here, RG/A, Ridley Scott Associates and video startup Synthesia partnered produce a video of international superstar David Beckham speaking…
1. Creative
The rise of niche content brings major, meta, cultural questions, too Why it is worth keeping an eye on what Discovery does in SVOD This piece above raises excellent, reasonable questions about what “success” actually means for “niche” strategies in creative and in streaming, if not what the value of niche actually *is*. Discovery may…
"We look at what's there... so we know exactly what's going on. We know the trends, we know what works, we know what doesn't work. And we know what brand is doing what." – Yann Lhomme In our ongoing Profile of the Creative Entrepreneur series, we interview inspiring creative entrepreneurs to learn about their journey...
"As the brief writer, what bit of yourself do you put into it? Because otherwise it's just a flat piece of paper that could have been written by a robot." – Tim Hughes a.k.a. The Brief Doctor In this episode in our the Revthinking podcast, Joel Pilger speaks with Tim Hughes, the Brief Doctor. They...
AdAge delivers an inside look into Woven, P&G’s in-house strategy A year later, obvious successes, but more departures than perhaps was anticipated It has been almost a year since we first heard of P&G’s cross-holding company, internal agency model (when I warned in Newsletter #114: “In-house marketers, do not emulate P&G’s new model… yet”) ,…
The Video of the Week Nordstrom makes some fascinating creative decisions for a “top-of-the-funnel campaign” This two minute ad, “An Open Mind is the Best Look”, stars part-time actors and non-professionals and is built around ad-libbed dialogue from Carol Hickey, an acting coach. Nordstrom asks viewers to “Be receptive, be flexible, be present”, and wants…
“The biggest boom” for animated content from Amazon, Apple, Hulu and especially Netflix And studios are now struggling to keep up with a limited talent pool Back in October I wrote about how Dreamworks’ reboot of She-Ra was a next-gen animation business case study, because of how heavily it was relying on Netflix for survival….
"I've just given up on caring about looking stupid and/or failing... I have no qualms trying, and then adjusting." – PJ Richardson at Laundry In this episode in our Profile of the Creative Entrepreneur series, Joel Pilger speaks with PJ Richardson, ECD and co-owner at Los Angeles-based creative studio Laundry. In our ongoing Profile of the Creative...
NBCU rolls out Bluprint, its aggressive D-I-Y rebrand of Craftsy The $230M acquisition is used for an aggressive bet on SVOD NBCU describes its bet with Bluprint to be “a Netflix for lifestyle learning, a Netflix for hobbies” as “an experiment”. And it is a multi-layered experiment at that, with the key question being whether…
"Being based in Denver, what we were able to accomplish outside of, say, one of the major markets like New York or LA, was pretty remarkable." – Joel Pilger RevThinker and Partner Joel Pilger was interview on the School of Motion Podcast by founder Joey Korenman for an honest – even raw – conversation about...