By Kathy DeSalvo
Seeking to fill what it perceives as a void in the Midwest market, Bellevue, Wash.-headquartered broadcast design and production boutique Digital Kitchen (DK) is preparing to launch a Chicago office. The shop, slated to open for business in January, will be located in the River North area. President/executive producer Don McNeill heads the new DK branch, having come over after three years as senior partner/executive producer at Ogilvy & Mather, Chicago. Plans call for the shop to be staffed with designers, design editors, Flame artists, producers and engineers. At press time, DK was finalizing agreements with several soon-to-be-announced hires.
Since its inception in 1995, DK has offered broadcast design and production, including digital compositing, titling, graphics, live-action, and visual effects, as well as nonlinear audio and video editing. About 85 percent of its work is commercial driven, with 35 percent coming from Chicago, according to Washington-based DK founder/CEO/ CCO Paul Matthaeus.
Speaking from a business perspective, Matthaeus contended that Chicago lacks a company specializing in classical design and motion graphics. "It’s a big market," he said. "There’s a lot of terrific business there, and it seems there’s a real need for a company like ours."
"Plenty of places around the country do [what DK does] very well, mostly in New York and Los Angeles," added McNeill. "Design has become an important ingredient and a significant line item in every budget … people are starved [for that] in the Chicago market. Agencies see the value and the dividends that result from coming to a company like DK, but there is nowhere to go for that solution in Chicago. There are plenty of places to go if you’ve picked your type font and want traditional cookie-cutter graphics on your commercials."
McNeill commented that while working with an out-of-town design firm early on in the production process is a simple matter, it is a significant help to have in-person contact with artists when dealing with fine-tuning and minutiae in the later stages of a design project.
Among DK’s recent commercial credits is a spot for Artists Against Piracy, a group of recording artists opposed to musical piracy. Created by Los Angeles-based Dailey & Associates, the :30 spot "Circle C," which has recently aired on MTV, aims to create public awareness of Internet sites like Napster where music can be downloaded without authorization.
"Circle C" features typography of a series of words—"practice," "dedication," "sacrifice," "creation," "music" and ultimately "respect"–in each word, the letter "c" is circled. Accompanying the guitar-driven musical track performed by Beck guitarist Lyle Workman is a visual treatment that makes animated lines appear to be vibrating in synch with the music.
The project aptly reflects DK’s working philosophy, says Matthaeus. "The idea here was to have the spot be a metaphor for the creative process and, in so doing, establish an element of empathy between the public and artists that spend their time and energy creating this music. That really drove how we approached it."
"It isn’t just about the design, or just the effects, but the way they’re served up—how they relate to the music and the sound effects. We like to explore a lot, to get stuff up onscreen quickly and see what the general feel is onscreen. Then we go back and adjust and adjust until we’re hitting the right emotional note."
The DK culture will be carried over to the Chicago office, which will feature a central "moshpit" for designers, who will be surrounded by Flame artists and editors. McNeill said that his team will have all of the high-tech gadgets, but emphasized that, more importantly, they will be making a big investment in talent. "The people that will work at DK," he observed, "will have a clear point of view as to why the type should be the way it is and why the messages should look the way they do."
Among DK’s other commercial projects are spots for Nokia, Home Depot, Advil, Ford, Sears and Sony. Recent credits also include designing and producing graphics for the opening titles and several other sequences in Columbia Pictures’ sci-fi feature film The 6th Day, which stars Arnold Schwarzenegger.
DK is repped for spotwork in the Midwest by Chicago-based Tracy Bernard & Associates, on the East Coast by New York-based Single Bid, and on the West Coast by Los Angeles-based Toni Saarinen. Louise Krakhower, also in Los Angeles, will market DK for TV, film and entertainment-related projects.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More