Independent advertising agency St Luke’s has brought on board the senior creative team of Phillip Meyler and Darren Keff. The highly awarded pair has worked with St Luke’s on a freelance basis to date, and have now joined permanently as part of the creative department.
Meyler and Keff have spent 15 years working together at some of the U.K.’s top agencies. Before joining St Luke’s, they were creative directors at M&C Saatchi, where their work included the “BetRegret” launch campaign for GambleAware and “Shout Out to my Son” for The Ben Kinsella Trust, an innovative knife crime awareness campaign that infiltrated underground radio stations.
Meyler and Keff’s previous experience includes five years at Leo Burnett where they created big populist work for McDonald’s and more societal behavior changing work such as the “Ban the Box” campaign for Business in The Community. A series of interactive pre-roll films that confronted prejudice towards ex-offenders, the campaign was credited with being the first of its kind to use the “Skip Ad” function and collected over 100 awards globally.
During this time they also produced a controversial front cover for Cosmopolitan that exposed “Honour Killings.” It featured a victim seemingly suffocating in the magazine’s plastic cover wrap to represent how she was murdered by her parents. The campaign resulted in the government declaring a National Annual Day of Memory for victims.
Prior to Leo Burnett, Meyler and Keff worked at JWT where they went from Best Newcomers at Creative Circle to a Gold Lion at Cannes for Polo’s “Snow Stamp.” They also created a host of award-winning work for brands such as Vodafone, Smirnoff, National Centre for Domestic Violence and HSBC.
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