McCann London has bolstered its creative team with a raft of new hires and a promotion. Ross Neil comes aboard as executive creative director. He previously served as ECD at WCRS. Neil will be working alongside McCann London’s CCOs Rob Doubal and Laurence Thomson.
Creative duo Ran Stallard and Jenna Morrissey are joining the team from Ogilvy. Stallard was an art director at Ogilvy where she worked on ads for the likes of Vodafone, Bulmers and Greenpeace. Copywriter Morrissey has lent her creative skills to campaigns for Volvo, Cannes Young Lions and Panadol.
McCann London has also added Jessica Hayes as head of talent. She had been at Google Ventures’ business.
And Lisa Carrana has been promoted to deputy head of art at McCann London.
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
