Industry vet Jeff Blodgett has been hired as executive producer of Brickyard VFX‘s Santa Monica shop. Brickyard also maintains a home base in Boston. He comes over after five years at Radium/ReelFX as executive producer. He worked out of the Santa Monica office of Radium/ReelFX overseeing visual effects, animation and motion graphics projects primarily for commercials for brands such as Target, Nike, Pepsi, Lexus, and Energizer.
Previously Blodgett spent 10 years at Sight Effects, where he learned the business through his roles as visual effects producer, producer, and senior producer. Jeff has worked on more than 300 commercials over the course of his career.
Blodgett hails from Western Massachusetts and joining a team with a strong Boston foothold was a natural fit. He will be working out of the Santa Monica Brickyard office, and joins just as the company expanded with an additional 3,200 square feet. The space provides a new home for the company’s growing CG team, screening room, conference room, and Autodesk Flame suites.
Steve Michaels, managing partner at Brickyard VFX, cited Blodgett’s experience and “deep ties in the advertising industry…With our recent expansion, we’ve been able to build out our design and CG team and Jeff is the perfect choice to help Brickyard extend our service slate beyond visual effects into more design-centric CG and motion graphics work.”
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