October 21, 2011
Epoch Films has secured filmmaker Tom McCarthy for commercial representation. McCarthy has received critical acclaim for his writing and direction work for the independent films The Station Agent, Win Win and The Visitor. For the latter, McCarthy won the Best Director honor at the 2009 Film Independent Spirit Awards and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay by the Writers Guild of America. Five years earlier, he earned his first WGA Awards Best Original Screenplay nomination for The Station Agent, which premiered at the ‘03 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Audience Award as well as the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Win Win won the 2011 Humanitas Prize in the Feature Film category. Additionally, McCarthy earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Pixar’s Up, a shared writing credit with Pete Docter and Bob Peterson. McCarthy was recently tapped to pen the Disney sports drama Million Dollar Arm….Alasdair Lloyd-Jones, former co-president and chief strategic officer at San Francisco advertising agency Cutwater, has joined Brooklyn, New York-based creative shop Big Spaceship as partner and chief operations officer….. Boxer Films has signed Italian director Igor Borghi for U.S. commercial representation. He is currently also repped by Mercurio Film, Milan, for clients and agencies in Italy; Madrid-based Brownie for Spain; Magali, Paris, for the French market; and Cream, Munich, for Germany.
October 20, 2006
Commercial production house HKM has formed a partnership with music video shop Streetgang Films. The connection provides a music clip outlet for HKM directors while giving HKM access to talent who could translate well into spotmaking….Hans Hansen has joined and Eric Sorensen has returned to Fallon Minneapolis. Both will carry the title of creative director and continue to work as a team. Hansen and Sorensen come over from Carmichael Lynch, Minneapolis, where as a duo they turned out work for such clients as Porsche and Harley-Davidson….The Joneses has signed Norwegian comedy director Sten Hellevig—a.k.a. Sten—for U.S. representation. He continues to be repped in Norway by The Moland Film Company….Kerry Shaw Brown, a former agency creative who made the transition to director, has joined the roster of Millennium Pictures for U.S. spot representation. He had previously been with production company Uncle….
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