Chief Creative Officer
Energy BBDO
1) Brands will continue to move back to evocative storytelling versus focusing on functional benefits. We need to win consumers’ hearts before their minds in order to build long-term relationships. Data will have a great role in helping guide, adjust and make the work stronger by understanding consumer responses.
The industry will continue to sharpen its focus on innovation. This year we will continue to see a lot about applying tech and infusing it into everything we do. Over the past few years there have been major advancements in things like wearables, AR, VR, voice, and beyond. The focus ahead will be on building these innovations into the work we create for our clients and the ways we engage with consumers.
We need to continue to play a significant role in our clients’ businesses, where we serve as more than just their creative agency, but as partners who help grow their brands and businesses through creativity, data and innovation. Product innovation is one specific place we can have an even greater impact this year.
2) 2016 was a great year for Energy—a year where we tripled our awards over the year before. This sets the creative bar higher than ever before. In the year ahead we will continue to see great storytelling coming out of our agency, with bigger, bolder creative for more brands, across more categories.
3) Unlock untapped potential. I started putting together new creative teams on different projects to push people outside of their comfort zones. Mixing things up forced people to step up to the plate and showed me what each person was made of while helping ignite passion within each of them to do great work.
4) To surround myself with great minds and to keep pushing to become a better, stronger, more energized agency.
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