MEC has hired Susie Burns as head of content planning to work within its Wavemaker content division. Burns joins from Mediacom Beyond Advertising, where she was an associate director and content lead on Direct Line who recently won a gold IPA Effectiveness award. In her new role she will report to Ben McKay, the managing director of MEC Wavemaker.
Burns is responsible for helping clients make strategic and purposeful investments in content right around the buying cycle, with a clear and accountable measure of success. She will act as a single point person for content planning across creative, experiential, partnerships, paid media, social media and SEO.
Burns said: “At MEC, the team use data and insights to answer the client’s business need with a combined content and media solution. Wavemaker has the foundations set up to really embed themselves into their clients overall marketing strategy. The team are already creating great ideas and executing them well and I can’t wait to build on them and generate even better work for our clients.”
McKay said of Burns, “She brings with her a wealth of experience in navigating large brands having previously helped lead clients such as Shell, Dulux and Coca Cola in their content marketing efforts. Susie also brings a passion for audience-first content strategy and measurement, which is something that sits right at the heart of Wavemaker’s approach.”
During her seven years at Mediacom, Burns worked on Direct Line Group, TUI and Coca-Cola, among others.
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
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