Craft, a global marketing production and adaptation agency and a division of McCann Worldgroup, has promoted Shay Fu to managing director of Craft North America. Shay will continue to report to Craig Smith, Craft’s chief information and operations officer.
Fu joined Craft in 2013 as EVP/head of integrated operations, Craft New York, successfully growing the NY studio operations across all disciplines and building its digital production capabilities. Most recently, Fu extended her role to oversee production operations in the U.S. and Canada as head of studio operations across Craft’s North America network.
In her new role as managing director, Craft North America, Fu will retain responsibility for studio operations. Fu will also work under the strategic direction of Craft’s chief client officer, Simon Sikorski, and McCann Worldgroup’s North American leadership to nurture and grow all aspects of clients’ integrated production needs. She will build upon relationships with Craft’s regional and global clients such as Microsoft, L’Oréal and Coca-Cola.
“Under Shay’s leadership and direction, studio performance in North America has improved dramatically,” said Smith. “Her extensive experience in delivering production solutions together with her ability to build strong relationships with our key clients makes her perfectly suited to this key role within Craft.”
Growth Brings Growing Pains–and Bots–To Bluesky
Bluesky has seen its user base soar since the U.S. presidential election, boosted by people seeking refuge from Elon Musk's X, which they view as increasingly leaning too far to the right given its owner's support of President-elect Donald Trump, or wanting an alternative to Meta's Threads and its algorithms.
The platform grew out of the company then known as Twitter, championed by its former CEO Jack Dorsey. Its decentralized approach to social networking was eventually intended to replace Twitter's core mechanic. That's unlikely now that the two companies have parted ways. But Bluesky's growth trajectory — with a user base that has more than doubled since October — could make it a serious competitor to other social platforms.
But with growth comes growing pains. It's not just human users who've been flocking to Bluesky but also bots, including those designed to create partisan division or direct users to junk websites.
The skyrocketing user base — now surpassing 25 million — is the biggest test yet for a relatively young platform that has branded itself as a social media alternative free of the problems plaguing its competitors. According to research firm Similarweb, Bluesky added 7.6 million monthly active app users on iOS and Android in November, an increase of 295.4% since October. It also saw 56.2 million desktop and mobile web visits, in the same period, up 189% from October.
Besides the U.S. elections, Bluesky also got a boost when X was briefly banned in Brazil.
"They got this spike in attention, they've crossed the threshold where it is now worth it for people to flood the platform with spam," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a member of Issue One's... Read More