Y&R New York has hired Ryan Blum, Catherine Patterson and Eric Ackley. Blum joins as an executive creative director, Patterson as director of interactive and activation, and Ackley as digital experience director.
Blum will be leading the Navy Partnership and helping to launch Y&R’s Memphis office. He joins Y&R from Publicis Seattle, where he was a creative director on T-Mobile. Prior to that he worked in Dallas at The Richards Group and TracyLocke, on brands such as 7-Eleven, Samsung and Texas Lottery. He helped create The Simpsons Kwik-e-Mart for 7-Eleven, and has won awards in Cannes, The One Show, Communication Arts, the Clio Awards and the National ADDYs.
Patterson was most recently at McCann NY, where she created the agency’s interactive and experiential unit and grew it into a multi-million dollar business. She worked with Sims at McCann and led the Nature Valley Trail View project, which won multiple gold Cannes Lions and the Jay Chiat Award for Strategic Excellence. Her favorite project has been designing the digital and social media launches for the Phoenix Mars Lander program, and she launched a margarita into space for Jose Cuervo last year for National Margarita Day.
Ackley joins from sister agency Geometry Global, where he was an experience designer, developer and creative technologist. He’s worked on projects such as the Great Ritz Holiday Parade, a digital parade for Ritz Crackers; and with brands such as Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, Dos Equis, American Express, Nikon, Volvo and Charles Schwab.
Leslie Sims, chief creative officer of Y&R NY, said that the addition of Blum, Patterson and Ackley “will help us to be led more by creative and digital, to move into areas like user experience and experiential.”
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