By Sandra Garcia
Christmas is a time to get new stuff. New clothes, new bikes, new gadgets. But this year, the ad industry decided to give us something new and something old. Aw shucks, you shouldn’t have. I’m a firm believer in the saying, "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" and nothing can be more true in case of Amazon.com’s holiday campaign out of FCB, San Francisco. When I was growing up, we had only had two Christmas albums in our house (yes, it’s sad, I know). The first was Alvin & The Chipmunks and the second was Holiday Sing Along With Mitch. No Christmas was complete without listening to Mitch Miller singing "Frosty The Snowman" in unison with 20 other men. So you can imagine my excitement when Amazon.com rolled out a second year’s worth of sweatered men singing together like well-trained boy scouts. This year the guys are a little spunkier. They dance a bit more, change wardrobe from spot to spot and the sets add extra meaning to the songs. My favorite in the package is "Feel Like A Kid" where the singing troupe, dressed in shorts and knee socks, sing juvenile lyrics such as, "Stop copying me" and "Say it, don’t spray it." On the what’s new front, the Gap played a little trick on us. Did anyone notice? Its ads have a slightly different feel to them this year. That’s because for the first time in a long time the company didn’t conceive its holiday campaign in-house. Modernista!, Boston, did. Pretty sneaky sis. I didn’t think it was possible to beat the Gap holiday ads from years past with all the colorful, kaleidoscopic images and happy sleigh bell sounds. They just made me want to run out and buy a multi-colored sweater and scarf and start dancing around. But Modernista! succeeded in maintaining Gap’s brand identity while giving the ads a sensibility that’s smarter, more mature and in general kick ass. My favorite is "Snowflakes." It features people slowly free-falling backwards (the camera angle is from above, as if perched on a cloud). The look on their faces is bliss as they float down through the air to an undetermined place. The tag is: "No two are alike." People as snowflakes. Brilliant. But Christmas isn’t all about books and clothes. What about those essential office supplies? Yeah, I’m talking about Staples. The thing that I enjoy about Staples’ advertising is that the spots often take place in the store’s environment and show lots of product, yet they’re still interesting and funny. Its latest :30 out of Cliff Freeman and Partners, New York, called "Sno-Bot" debuts a robot who can help customers learn about Staples’ technology products. But the robot nearly short circuits when it falls in love with a printer that someone is trying to buy. Every time the lovesick tin can intones, "You-can’t-take-her-I-love-her," I just crack up. Yup, I love the holidays and working at SHOOT is like celebrating Christmas every day. We get lots of brown paper packages and FedEx envelopes and boxes all filled with reels, reels, reels. Something tasty would be nice.
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