We open on a Melbourne woman in her garden, watering plants. A narrator tells us she’s received a promise that a banker will call her back.
Suddenly her mobile phone rings, she looks at the screen to see it’s her bank and she faints.
A group of handsome young men in business suits comes to her rescue.
A neighbor woman in her own garden witnesses this and then feigns fainting in hopes of getting the same service from a bank.
A slogan is supered on screen, which reads, “Determined to be different,” accompanied by a voiceover that relates, “Just another day in the garden.”
This whimsical offbeat, tongue-in-cheek spot for Commonwealth Bank of Australia was directed by noted feature filmmaker (Amelie, Delicatessan, The City of Lost Children) Jean-Pierre Jeunet via production house Grand Large for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco.
Editor was Hank Corwin of Lost Planet.
Music composers were Andrew Feltenstein and John Nau of Beacon Street Studios.
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