Posts made in July, 2016

on Jul 25, 2016

By Jennifer Faull State-sanctioned cheating, the Zika virus, political unrest – these are just some of the hurdles facing the Olympics brand as it heads to Rio next week. Of course questions of safety, doping, and politics are not new, indeed they have all overshadowed the sporting event to some degree in the past. However, the problems of Rio 2016 seem to be, as it were, on steroids, dragging the near 3000-year-old Olympic Games brand into one of the most potentially challenging periods in its existence. But there’s one issue alone that’s causing the greatest grief – drugs. The Olympics has been plagued by Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jul 25, 2016

By Gillian West Skincare brand Freederm has won over The Drum readers with its new series of fun and colourful TV commercials, created by Bray Leino. Teaming up with Not to Scale Amsterdam and directors Hello Savants, Bray Leino has tackled Freederm’s brief to take the audience through a bright and colourful world by focusing on simple shapes, linear forms and graphic elements, bringing freedom and wild imagination to life. Inspired by Freederm’s tagline ‘there’s nothing like feeling free,’ Hello Savants applied free-forming transitions throughout the animation to create a number of visual surprises including an ice cream that becomes a comet and a cannonball Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jul 25, 2016

By Stephen Kenwright Yahoo, once a business with a $125bn valuation at the height of the dotcom boom, has agreed to sell its core internet business to Verizon for just $4.8bn. Since Yahoo agreed to let Microsoft serve most of its search queries from 2009 this felt inevitable. This was a search company outsourcing its search engine, freeing it to acquire tech businesses seemingly at random without considering how each would fit into the company’s M/O. Google, in contrast, only makes acquisitions that will support its core purpose: to sell more search advertising organise the world’s information Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jul 25, 2016

By John McCarthy Europol has identified the growing threat of ransomware software that forces access to user data and ransoms it, looking to clamp down on attacks from the software by establishing partnerships with Intel and Kaspersky Lab. An initiative called No More Ransom will bring the private sector tech and cyber experts to cooperate with Europol to study and drive awareness of the attacks than can attack both personal computers and business infrastructure. Kaspersky Lab claims that the number of users attacked by crypto-ransomware rose by 5.5 times, from 131,000 in 2014-2015 to 718,000 in 2015-2016. They have launched a website providing the public with Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jul 25, 2016

By Jenny Cleeton The Scottish arm of PR agency McFrank, has been appointed by the SSE Scottish Music Awards to help raise awareness of the annual event. The partnership comes ahead of the preparation for the Scottish Music Awards in November. McFrank has said it hopes to raise the awareness of the occasion through strategic communications. General manager of McFrank, Claire Morrison, said: “The Scottish Music Awards is a stand-out major event here in Scotland and we are incredibly proud to have been awarded such a prestigious piece of work. There is both a creative and strategic remit with this brief, so it’s right Read full story › Source: The Drum...