Venice, Calif.-headquartered commercial production house Cucoloris Films has entered into an alliance with DoRo, a longstanding music video company in Berlin. The deal gives DoRo—which also maintains Berlin-based clips shop Department M—a stateside foothold while Cucoloris gains the infrastructure to move into both domestic and international music video production. Department M’s head of production Nicola Wiseman and director Markus Engel are slated to join Cucoloris’ Venice operation this month…..Seven-year-old Boston-based broadcast design firm LoConte Goldman Design has closed as its partners, president/general manager Patrice Goldman and VP/senior creative director Maria LoConte, have decided to pursue their own ventures. Goldman has launched One80 Visual Communications, Boston, while LoConte has formed another Boston shop, LoConte.2….Asche & Spencer, a music/sound design house in Minneapolis and Venice, has hired Mark Gordon—a.k.a. "Señor Amor"—as its executive producer on the West Coast. He succeeds Hugh Barton who is expected to launch his own firm….Creative director/general manager Paul Agid, producer Evan Sanyour and sales rep Annie Cotton have parted ways with Blink.fx, New York, a subsidiary of New York-based MTI/The Image Group….
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