Nick Barham, former global director of W+K Tomorrow, has been named to the newly created role of chief strategy officer for TBWAChiatDay Los Angeles. Barham, 41, will join the agency’s executive leadership team and will oversee strategy functions across all parts of the L.A. group. He will work across all key accounts and report to TBWAChiatDay LA’s president, Carisa Bianchi.
Barham brings with him an extensive background in global, strategic planning and technology. Most recently as global director of W+K Tomorrow in Portland, Barham led a team responsible for creating new revenue and working models, with a focus on sustainability and emerging technology. His clients included Nike, Target, the Gates Foundation and EcoDistricts.
Prior to Portland, Barham was based in Asia, where he worked for Wieden + Kennedy in Shanghai as planning director. At Wieden + Kennedy Shanghai, he was on a management team that helped grow the agency from a single client, China-focused agency to a multi-category offering with the capability to deliver regional campaigns for clients including Nike, Coca Cola and Nokia. Originally from London, Barham has also worked at Karmarama, BBC and BBH.
He rejoins the TBWA network having previously been planning director at TBWAChina. He is a regular speaker at events including PSFK, San Francisco: ad:tech Digital, Shanghai: AAAA Account Planning Conference, Miami; and Go Green, Portland. Barham is also author of Dis/connected (Random House, 2004), a book that explores the different worlds of British teenagers and their vibrant youth culture.
Barham said of his new role and roost, “Throughout my career, I’ve done my best to seek out roles that surprise and challenge me and allow me to keep learning. The unique structure of the TBWAChiatDay LA Group combines agility with scale and presents great opportunities for the work that we create with our clients.”
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More