Anwar Khuri has been hired to serve as executive producer of independent agency The Escape Pod and its production arm, Gravity Well Studio. Khuri is responsible for expanding The Escape Pod’s production capabilities and growing the studio to offer clients the full range of production solutions.
Prior to The Escape Pod and Gravity Well, Khuri produced award-winning, national and international multimedia campaigns for notable brands including Burger King, General Motors, SC Johnson, Coors Light, CDW, Kimberly-Clark, Grainger and Dove. He honed his production chops as sr. producer at agencies including Ogilvy & Mather, DraftFCB and McCann Erickson, in addition to founding and serving as executive creative director and production lead for Popskull, a boutique creative agency serving such clients as SkinnyPop and Lyft.
Norm Bilow, managing director of The Escape Pod Group and Gravity Well Studio, said, “In our business, speed to ideas is a competitive advantage. Gravity Well enables us to deliver breakthrough creative ideas and the production prowess to bring them to life at any scale. Anwar’s experience is deep and diverse, ranging from national TV campaigns and experiential activations for Fortune 500 companies to scrappy social content for start-ups, and everything in between. He also ran his own agency, so he knows firsthand how to make ideas happen while stewarding clients’ budgets and the agency’s business goals. With Anwar at the helm, there’s no limit to the range and scale of productions we can provide, both for our full-service clients and studio projects.”
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