Blogbook
Behind Auld Lang Syne — the so-called New Year’s Eve song, composed by Robert Burns and sung during New Year and other nostalgic events. Via Mentalfloss:
Every New Year’s Eve, after the champagne has been popped, the ball has dropped, and everyone is feeling very merry indeed, revelers queue up the same song they’ve been queuing up for decades. You know the one—it makes you cry, even though you don’t understand it and know almost none of the words.
A handful of options pop up when you search for the meaning of “auld lang syne”: “times/days gone by,” “old time’s sake,” “long long times/ago,” and even “once upon a time” among them. The most common consensus is something like “for old time’s sake,” which is about as direct an interpretation as you can get, as the word-for-word translation is “old long since.” The line about “for auld lang syne” is essentially, “for (the sake of) old times.” (For the record, it never says the totally nonsensical “for the sake of auld lang syne.”) Beyond the words themselves, there’s even less agreement about exactly how the tune came to be a New Year’s Eve tradition.
The song originated as a poem, but it probably wasn’t written by Robert Burns as is commonly believed—at least not entirely. The poet was simply the first person to write down an old Scottish folk song (it bears more than a passing resemblance to “Old Long Syne,” a ballad that was printed by James Watson in 1711). Burns himself said, “I took it down from an old man,” and whether it was transcribed or co-authored, it’s safe to say that the “Auld Lang Syne” we know today is some combination of an old poem and Burns’s creative input.
Jordan Peele is back, with a trailer for his latest film, Us. Following the smash-hit success of his last film, Get Out, we’re looking forward to this. Via Vanity Fair:
For the last few months, Jordan Peele has played coy on the details surrounding his upcoming film, Us, his follow-up to Oscar-winning debut Get Out. A few details rose to the surface; it was going to be another social thriller, and it was going to have a very wispy poster and a titillating tagline: “A new nightmare from the mind of Academy Award winner Jordan Peele.” It was later reported that Us would star Black Panther pals Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke, as well as Elisabeth Moss; Nyong’o and Duke were set to play a couple, with Moss playing one half of another couple. And that was about all the public knew.
But with the film’s March 2019 release date creeping ever closer, it’s become more and more difficult to keep the film’s secrets under wraps. Now /Film has reportedly acquired the plot synopsis, which has apparently been sent out with recent test screening invites for the project.
Representatives for Peele have not yet confirmed this plot synopsis, though it certainly sounds like something that Peele may have dreamt up. Unplugging might be necessary from time to time, but it’s a nightmarish concept when left in the hands of a horror aficionado. It also sounds just in line with Peele’s plans: the director has said in the past that Get Out is the first in five planned social thrillers he hopes to release in the next decade.
Five!? We can’t wait.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8EG_EON0bY
Equinox kicks off the new year with its 2019 lifestyle campaign — as it tries to remind everyone that it used to be one of the original lifestyle brands. Via Adage:
Equinox is bringing its 15-year-old tagline, “It’s not fitness, it’s life,” back to the forefront of its advertising as it seeks to become a full lifestyle brand. The company is starting 2019 with a new marketing push designed to not only attract those consumers in search of a fresh fitness start, but to also encompass the brand’s myriad new business ventures in areas like hospitality.
A two-minute anthem video, “Life,” directed by Nick Knight, a first-time collaborator with Equinox, kickstarts the effort this month. In the film, a voice describes life’s “series of moments” over video of parkour-style gymnastics, dancing and bike racing. “This is your life, so live better,” the voiceover concludes. Each of the celebrities in the video, including Grammy Award winner Ciara and stuntman Chase Armitage, are intended to represent elements such as “soul,” and “energy,” according to the brand.
Equinox first introduced “It’s not fitness, it’s life,” in 2004, but the mantra has never again been prominent in advertising until the new work, according to Liz Nolan, executive creative director.
“We believe it’s more representative of the truth of our brand today than ever before,” she says.
Vimla Black Gupta, who joined Equinox as chief marketing officer in 2017, notes the campaign will help represent Equinox’s other cross-category offerings to consumers. Later this year, the company is debuting its long-awaited hotel brand. Equinox this year will also begin its retreat business, in which consumers can take fitness trips, and it is dabbling with a new talent management venture for its SoulCycle brand.
“2019 represents for us our true manifestation as a lifestyle brand, or rather a life brand,” says Gupta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSRPHO-JDEU
Happy New Year! Hope everyone enjoyed the holiday break and here’s wishing everyone an amazing 2019. Have a
Unconventional sleeping arrangements, beady eyes
and slow movements come together in a new New Zealand-produced McDonald’s ad that provides a 60-second summary of New Year’s Day around New Zealand. Dubbed “The Day After”, the campaign launched on New Year’s Eve to give Kiwis a reminder that they can always rely on McDelivery when they’re feeling a little under the weather.It’s been produced specifically for the local market by local ad agency DDB. Chief creative officer Damon Stapleton said that there’s something universal about the spot that he hopes will connect with a wide audience.
“Macca’s has always been there when you need it, and now with McDelivery that’s truer than ever before,” Stapleton said. The ad campaign will play throughout January as the company looks to encourage more Kiwis to use its delivery service.
McDonald’s marketing director Jo Mitchell said that Kiwis can expect more ads like this that celebrate the shared experiences Kiwis might have in 2019.
“Convenience has always been key to what we offer at McDonald’s, and since we launched in 2017, McDelivery has proved to be a popular new iteration of what convenience means for our customers.”
They Shall Not Grow Old is a remarkable documentary by Peter Jackson, remastering and
As the director of elaborate fantasy epics like the “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” trilogies, Peter Jackson has become known for meticulous attention to detail. Now he has put the same amount of care into making a documentary.With “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Jackson has applied new technology to century-old World War I footage to create a vivid, you-are-there feeling that puts real faces front and center and allows us to hear their stories in their own words.
The documentary, which will screen nationwide Dec. 17 and Dec. 27, concentrates on the experiences of British soldiers as revealed in footage from the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Jackson and his team have digitally restored the footage, adjusted its frame rate, colorized it and converted it to 3-D. They chose not to add a host or title cards. Instead, veterans of the war “narrate” — that is, the filmmakers culled their commentary from hundreds of hours of BBC interviews recorded in the 1960s and ’70s.
The result is a transformation that is nothing less than visually astonishing.
“The clarity was such that these soldiers on the film came alive,” Jackson said in a phone interview describing the restoration process. “Their humanity just jumped out at you. This footage has been around for 100 years and these men had been buried behind a fog of damage, a mask of grain and jerkiness and sped-up film. Once restored, it’s the human aspect that you gain the most.”
This beautiful video is a 2018 film supercut consisting of tons of trailers of films from this year spliced together. Includes Into the Spiderverse! Via Gizmodo:
There’s no denying 2018 gave us a lot of great films—but it was also about teasing those great films. In a world where promoting a movie can be almost as important as the movie itself, one supercut gives us a fantastic breakdown of the moments that shook us, broke up, and perhaps even brought us to life.
YouTuber Louis Plamondon (under the name Sleepy Skunk) has released his latest movie trailer mashup, highlighting some of the biggest films of 2018. While there are technically some moments in there that weren’t in the movie trailers—I’m pretty sure we never actually saw the Thanos Snap before the film came out, though it might’ve been in post-release commercials—it’s still a great look at a year gone by.
According to Plamondon, 272 movie trailers are represented in this mashup, and he’s documented every single reference in a Tumblr post. In an interview with io9, he added that the biggest takeaway from this year’s supercut was that he noticed a sizable increase in diversity in front of the camera.
Gizmodo: “This Spectacular Trailer Supercut Celebrates a Year of Film Magic”
Why advertisers are tracking your emojis: part of the continuous media engine hell bent on knowing absolutely everything about you, we’re guessing. Via the Daily Mail:
As if tracking the websites you visit, your location and Google searches
wasn’t enough, now brands may be looking at your emojis to serve up the next advertisement you see.Since 2016, Twitter has offered advertisers the ability to see which emojis users are sending in the app. That data turns out to be a
gold mine for advertisers, which look at your emojis to determine your emotional state, then deliver highly targeted ads depending on your current mood, according to Vox.Twitter noted that advertisers can use the emoji data to show users ads based on their mood, ‘target people who tweet food emojis’ and ‘reach people on their passions.’
‘If someone puts a thumbs up or a smiley face, show them this ad,’ Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer at 4C Insights, one of the companies working with Twitter, told Marketplace. ‘If they do a frowny face or a thumbs down, show them a different ad, ‘We’ve seen people targeting football and basketball emojis for athletic wear,’ he added. Some emojis are more obvious than others, such as a smiley face emoji, the heart eyes emoji or the crying emoji.
White Ops, cybersecurity company that protects against ad fraud and other forms of automated threats has a new and important PSA out about ad fraud. More about 3ve and Methbot, via the Verge:
The Department of Justice has unsealed indictments against eight people who allegedly ran the infamous online advertising scams 3ve and
Methbot . The defendants, who are primarily from Russia, are accused of collecting more than $36 million from companies who thought they were paying to place ads on websites. But the ads were never seen by a human being — instead, the defendants allegedly used a server farm and a botnet to simulate billions of visits to real pages.A press release states that three of the alleged scammers — Sergey Ovsyannikov and Yevgeniy Timchenko, who were from Kazakhstan, and Aleksandr Zhukov, who was Russian — were arrested over the past month. The other five — Boris Timokhin, Mikhail Andreev, Denis Avdeev, Dmitry Novikov, and Aleksandr Isaev — are still at large. The group allegedly ran two separate but related fraud schemes. The first,
Methbot , took in $7 million between September 2014 and December 2016.The alleged perpetrators made deals with ad networks to place advertisements, then used rented servers to simulate having real internet users visit spoofed web pages and look at ads. The second, 3ve, apparently made $29 million between December 2015 and October 2018. It was based on similar principles, but instead of server farms, it used a full-fledged botnet comprised of 1.7 million infected computers.
Via the Verge: “Eight people charged with running a multimillion-dollar online ad scam”
Why do Women’s Pockets Suck? They’re either too small, or entirely decorative, or are placed in an inconvenient location on the clothes. Via Mic:
People have a lot of feelings when it comes to pockets. In short: They are great only when you have them and only when they are large enough to stuff anything you want inside of them. A snack? A phone? A condom? All of that should be able to fit in fashion’s favorite hidden compartments. But, in lots of women’s clothing in particular, that hardly ever happens.
Entire essays have been written about why women’s pockets are so small. Entire essays have been written about why that’s sexist. Entire essays have been written about how the iPhone has made some fairly useless.
Why are women’s pockets so contentious in the first place? Really, why are they so crappy or totally nonexistent? What role does technology play?
Turns out, pockets have been fashion’s favorite little secret since the 17th century, so this deep love and passion for them is not only sensible, but has also been ingrained into our society for the last 400 years. Oh, and they’ve pretty much been some sexist bullshit from the beginning.
Payless created a prank store called Palessi along with fashion influencers in order to prove a point about the fashion industry. Via Wharton:
An elaborate advertising prank by discount retailer Payless ShoeSource is raising eyebrows and important questions about the ability of marketers to manipulate consumer behavior. The ruse took place in a mall near Los Angeles, where a select group of social media influencers were invited to a private launch party for new Italian shoe designer Bruno Palessi. But after the fashionistas paid hundreds of dollars for what they though was fancy footwear, they discovered they had been duped.
Payless pulled off the marketing ploy to highlight its newest shoes, which are inexpensive designs available at its stores. After making the purchases, shoppers were taken into a back room, told of the trick and given the shoes for free. The idea came from a Brooklyn marketing company, DCX Growth Accelerator, which specializes in what it calls “cultural hacking.”
[…]
When the social media influencers were invited to the fake grand opening for Palessi, they had no reason to suspect they were being duped. That’s because Payless planned every detail, right down to the labels in the shoes and the lighting in the store. The event was held in a defunct Armani store inside an upscale shopping center in Santa Monica, Calif. The company hired interior designers to transform the space with gold mannequins, winged statues and a mini runway. The products were sparsely placed, just like in a real boutique.