Morning Bulletin: Andre Agassi encore, Amazon Dash & Twitter to pay content creators
Straight off the bat this morning we look at a blast from the past as eighties tennis legend Andre Agassi makes his courtside return, an occasion marked by Lavazza for its latest coffee ad. Amazon Dash hits all the right buttons as it marks its UK launch whilst Twitter is set to embark on a new revenue sharing deal with individual content creators.
Ad Week kicks things off with an unlikely tale concerning coffee maker Lavazza and 150 Andre Agassi ‘clones’ in celebration of the tennis star’s return to the US Open. To mark the occasion 150 actors have been recruited dressed in signature eighties-style clothes, pink headbands and full mullets to star in a new ad for the Italian brand.
China’s ever more severe censorship regime is in focus at Ad Week this morning with a report stating that even celebrities are no longer immune from government interference in news media, with new rules outlawing any fawning over stars and billionaires, glamourising ostentatious fame or wealth and sensationalising the lives of others.
Twitter meanwhile is opting to dole out proceeds from its advertising revenue to individual content creators for the first time, bowing to pressure to implement a more egalitarian distribution of income on the platform.
Ad Exchanger sets Amazon in its sights, categorising the e-commerce giant’s gradual migration from a digital walled garden into an ad platform model as it seeks to coalesce its sprawling suite of properties into a unified product.
The launch of Amazon Dash in the UK, a one-button thumb-size device for making instant repeat orders for household essentials such as toilet roll and tea bags, makes headlines at Reuters. The £4.99 gadget is limited to one product only however requiring multiple purchases to order several items.
A fresh clutch of cyber thefts have thrust security into the spotlight once more at SWIFT, the global financial messaging system. Business Insider says the title has urged its members to implement enhanced security measures in order to safeguard against attack.
Security concerns also sit front and centre at Google following reports that a fault in its log-in page could offer hackers a means of tricking users into revealing their passwords. The potential back door was uncovered by security researcher Aidan Woods who discovered that inserting the prefix ?continue= to any web address directs browsers to a real Google log-in screen, potentially allowing personal details to be harvested or malicious files to be uploaded to Google Drive.
The Times notes that French National Front leader Marine Le Pen is seeking to distance herself from her own party’s toxic brand after ‘purging’ references to the party founded by her father in campaign literature for upcoming presidential elections. The group’s red, white and blue flame logo has also been airbrushed from literature including blogs, the campaign website and posters.
The latest setback for Islamic State also comes to the attention of the paper following the slaying of its chief propagandist amidst reports that he was hit by a coalition airstrike whilst fighting in Aleppo, Syria.