While it’s part of a campaign that debuted and continues to run during games in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s “March Madness” basketball tournament, the TV spot “Ambidextrous” out of Young & Rubicam, San Francisco, for client the NCAA offers a genuine method and rationale to its storyline madness.
We open on a young athletic woman dribbling a basketball, first with two hands, then with one as the other hand starts writing out mathematical formulas on a chalkboard.
This high-level dual tasking then extends to a male gymnast who’s tautly suspended in mid-air with one hand clenched to a metal ring, the other pouring chemicals into a beaker in a science laboratory.
Next, a young woman tennis player balances a ball on her racket while her other hand is mapping out computer-aided design diagrams and structures.
Finally we have a male soccer player who’s balancing the ball all over his body while he delivers a virtuoso performance on a violin.
All the while a voiceover relates, “There are over 400,000 NCAA student athletes and just about all of us will be going pro in something other than sports.”
Directed by Grady Hall of Venice, Calif.-based Motion Theory, “Ambidextrous” is a perfect balance of athletics and academics as well as live action (shot by DP Jeff Cronenweth) and visual effects (from the team at Motion Theory).
The Y&R San Francisco team included executive creative directors Scott Larson and Brad Berg, associate creative director/art director Hilary Wolfe, copywriter Brandon Reif and exec producer Debra Trotz.
Motion Theory art director Rob Resella and VFX supervisor Bryan Godwin led the design and visual effects efforts, while 1.1 VFX’s Danny Yoon supervised the compositing.
Editor was Colin Woods of String in Los Angeles.
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