On the heels of the consolidation of the global Johnnie Walker business at Anomaly, the agency has hired four new group creative directors at its founding office in New York. The new GCDs hail from a diverse group of top agencies–72andSunny, Droga5 and Wieden+Kennedy–and will help new clients like Ally Financial, Booking.com, and Petco transform their businesses beyond just “advertising.”
The agency had already handled the U.S. account of Diageo’s Johnnie Walker brand and just this month won global creative duties following a competitive review. The Johnnie Walker global business will be led by Anomaly’s London office working closely with the New York team.
The new hires are Tara Lawall, former creative director at 72andSunny, who will be based in New York along with Donnell Johnson, previously creative director at Droga5, Laura Sampedro, formerly creative director at Wieden + Kennedy London and Carlos Alija, another former Wieden+Kennedy London creative director.
“It’s not the name on the door, it’s the people in the building who give us permission to call ourselves Anomaly–we’ve seen it recently with the addition of Josh Fell in L.A. and the exciting, expanding team in London. This new generation of thinking is going to spark a powerful revolution within our walls. This is what I love about our business,” said founding partner and global CCO Mike Byrne.
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