This ad dropped last month, an homage to Singin’ in the Rain, but designed to sell Burberry product.
I love this ad, wonder how much of this is CGI, how much practical effects. No matter, to me, has all the feel of an Apple ad.
Side note: In the original Singing in the Rain, linked above, that’s Carrie Fisher’s mom at the beginning of the scene.
This was full of interesting nuggets, beginning to end. Even the fit and finish bits, of which I thought I’d heard all there was to say, had some new insights.
Great video.
How many HTML tags can you remember? My score was embarrassingly low, but it was fun anyway.
Dana Mattioli, Wall Street Journal:
Jeff Bezos built Amazon.com Inc. from his garage with an underdog’s ambition to take on the establishment. He imbued staff with an obsession to grow fast by grabbing customers using the biggest selection and lowest prices.
And:
That ethos helps keep Amazon booming. Aggressive competition—including wresting market share from rivals—is often a hallmark of a successful business. It’s also why the tech-and-retail giant is the target of rivals, regulators and politicians who say its tactics are unfair for a company its size, and potentially illegal. As the company has grown, so has its capacity to take on an ever-growing array of competitors.
And:
Executives behind the scenes have methodically waged targeted campaigns against rivals and partners alike—an approach that has changed little through the years, from diapers to footwear.
No competitor is too small to draw Amazon’s sights. It cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon’s site, hurting the vendor’s sales so badly it is now a fraction of its original size, the little firm’s owner said.
And:
When Amazon decided to compete with furniture retailer Wayfair Inc., Mr. Bezos’s deputies created what they called the Wayfair Parity Team, which studied how Wayfair procured, sold and delivered bulky furniture, eventually replicating a majority of its offerings, said people who worked on the team.
The article goes on and on, but you get the idea. The sense here is that Amazon wants to replicate every product it sells, discarding partnerships once they have their own version of that partner’s product.
At what point does this turn into unfair business practice?
Buzzfeed News:
Last Tuesday, Facebook launched what it portrayed as a full-throated defense of small businesses. In taking out full-page ads in major newspapers and creating a webpage encouraging people to “Speak Up for Small Businesses,” the social networking giant argued that a change in Apple’s mobile operating system would decimate family-run enterprises by preventing them from targeting people with online ads.
But:
But while the $750 billion company’s public relations effort has presented a united front with small businesses, some Facebook employees complained about what they called a self-serving campaign that bordered on hypocrisy, according to internal comments and audio of a presentation to workers that were obtained by BuzzFeed News.
And:
“It feels like we are trying to justify doing a bad thing by hiding behind people with a sympathetic message,” one engineer wrote in response to an internal post about the campaign from Dan Levy, Facebook’s vice president for ads.
To me, this is a badly thought out campaign that is fooling no one. Usually, a controversial campaign like this would have champions on both sides. I’ve yet to encounter anyone who’s taken the Facebook side of this debate.