For both passenger and airline, a Twitter conversation can make more sense than a phone call. There is no time spent on hold, and the carrier's response can be both quick and measured. But the effectiveness of a social-media missive depends on the airline to which it is directed.
A study by Stratos Jet Charters, an Orlando-based air charter firm, analysed 1.3m tweets sent to airlines during the holiday season, between November 20th and January 9th (see table). It found that the quickest airline to respond to tweets is Volaris, a Mexican budget carrier, followed by JetBlue, Etihad and our very own Kenya Airways.

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Starbucks is building its biggest-ever café in New York City.

Starbucks announced plans for a 20,000-square-foot Roastery in Manhattan. It’s based on the Seattle Roastery it opened in December 2014, but even larger.

“Biggest Starbucks ever headed to N.Y.C.,” the company said in a tweet.

The Roastery is a café that also serves as a showcase for the roasting of coffee beans. A company promo shot depicts a mustachioed baristas dispensing coffee from a steampunk-style brew tap made of copper and glass. Roasters in aprons handle burlap bags and shiny vats of raw beans in another.

“Let’s create the Willy Wonka of coffee,” says Starbucks (SBUX) president Howard Schultz in a video on the company web site.

The company described the Roaster as “coffee as theater” with its “small batch process taking center stage.”

Starbucks plans to open the Roastery in 2018 in the trendy Meatpacking district. It will be located in a nine-story building, 61 Ninth Avenue, that’s under construction and scheduled for completion next year.

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The committee chose Design A for its do-over. The second new Tokyo Olympics 2020 logo is by Japanese artist Asao Tokolo and was one of 15,000 logos submitted last year after Tokyo scrapped its first logo following accusations of plagiarism.

Belgium’s Theatre de Liege, whose logo Tokyo 2020’s resembled too closely, decided to not pursue legal action after Tokyo organizers dumped the logo. A contest was soon after announced calling for entries for a new Tokyo 2020 logo. The themes the selection committee called for included:

• Power of sport
• Achievement and efforts
• Inclusivity
• Innovation
• Futurism
• A Japan and/or Tokyo character
• World peace
• Recovery and reconstruction (following the 2011 tsunami)

“White against indigo blue—it’s a very clean-cut expression,” Tokolo told the Japanese press. The final, 45-piece, blue-white check pattern is traditionally Japanese, known as ichimatsu moyou and captures refined elegance. As any tourist or fan of Japanese culture knows, this indigo and white design is a staple of the nation’s food, fashion and other cultures. 

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Samsung Electronics is already a big winner for this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, scoring the award for Marketer of the Year. The brand will be honored during the festival in June.

"When you look at Samsung's wins at Cannes Lions, even just last year, what strikes you is the diversity of Lions that they are taking home through their overarching commitment to creativity. They're excelling across the board, including in areas such as healthcare communications, craft and branded content, as well as picking up a Titanium Lion," Terry Savage, chairman, Lions Festivals, said in a statement.

At the 2015 festival, Samsung walked away with 27 awards for some of its work including the innovative live-saving technology to be fitted onto big trucks, the Samsung Safety Truck—which was also awarded the Gravity Award for Adweek's Project Isaac Awards honoring creative innovation, last year—from Leo Burnett Argentina. The agency and brand scored a Titanium Lion for the work.

In the past year, Samsung has continued to create innovative campaigns, pushing further into virtual reality and collaborating with companies like Vice and 20th Century Fox to bring VR experiences to life for consumers. Other recent campaigns include work from Wieden + Kennedy for the Galaxy S7 starring Lil Wayne and a spot from Leo Burnett Italy featuring new technology for motorcycles that check texts, calls and emails.

"At Samsung, enriching people's lives is at the center of everything we do, and our marketing reflects this philosophy," Moon Soo Kim, evp of global marketing center at Samsung Electronics, noted in a statement.

Each year, Cannes Lions selects one marketer that has gone above and beyond, creating campaigns that are both innovative and inspiring. Previous honorees include Heineken in 2015, Coca-Cola and McDonald's.

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Samsung has won the Tribeca Film Festival's first branded content award. With the five-minute short, Hearing Colors, which the festival introduced this year to recognize the best content resulting from the marriage of entertainment and advertising. 

Samsung's effort examines a young man with achromatopsia, a rare condition that leaves people colorblind. But Neil Harbisson's case is a little different: He convinces doctors to implant an antenna in the back of his head that allows him to hear colors. 

The film is part of Samsung's partnership with Vimeo for its Connected Series, which looks at how modern technology affects the way people communicate.

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Caitlyn Jenner tweeted another piece of news on Thursday: She landed a sponsorship deal with H&M. The Olympic gold medalist will be the face of the brand's athletic line, H&M Sports.

In a statement, an H&M spokesman said, "We have picked Caitlyn Jenner, one of the world's most celebrated athletes, as part of this H&M Sports campaign because we want to illustrate that everything is possible—in sports and in life." H&M provided no further details about the campaign.

Jenner also inked a sponsorship deal with MAC cosmetics in February and helped create the limited-edition lipstick shade "Finally Free," whose sales will benefit the MAC AIDS Fund Transgender Initiative. The effort supports organizations dedicated to improving the lives of transgender people. 

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While it's easy to applaud the show for the way it perfectly navigates the weird social dynamics in an environment where employees and creators believe an app invention could possibly change the world—it likely won't—it also knows exactly how that world would advertise itself. 

The posters are able to take rather generic inspirational imagery and transform it into exactly the kind of indulgent promotion that a Silicon Valley-based company would create with tagline, "Helping humanity thrive." 

Check them out below: 

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Dove and Twitter are now taking a dive to examine how social media affects self-esteem.

The team launched a new phase of its #SpeakBeautiful campaign at South by Southwest Interactive with a tool that breaks down which body-related words people use the most and when negative chatter peaks during the day.

Here's how it works: People first retweet a post on Dove's Twitter account tagged with the hashtag #SpeakBeautiful. Dove then automatically responds to the retweet with a link to a custom microsite. The microsite displays personalized Twitter data as a chart and shows how someone's negative tweets stack up to other women.

According to the brand's own research, 80 percent of women come across negative chatter on social media, with 72 percent of girls saying that they are criticized weekly.

Take a look at the screenshots below as an example of the social stats that Dove wants to highlight.

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is promoting the 2016 Oscars with “We All Dream of Gold”, an integrated advertising campaign featuring host Chris Rock and a range of actors and moviemakers. Print advertisements and posters print feature black-and-white photos of Hollywood stars holding their trophies at recent Oscars shows. The tag line is scripted in gold. A thirty second commercial features excerpts from recently released films. A 15-second spot, “Let’s Do This”, shows this year’s Oscars host, Chris Rock, sprinkling powder on his hands as if preparing for a gymnastics routine. While the “We All Dream in Gold” campaign features a range of African American actors, critics have used “We Dream in White” as a meme to critique the lack of ethnic diversity in the 2015 Oscars nominations.

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In case you missed it, Kanye went on a wild Twitter rant about a week ago in which he said he was $53 million in debt and asked friends and fans to donate money for his personal creative endeavors rather than, say, helping to build a school for impoverished communities on the African sub-continent.
Gabriel Ferrer is a senior copywriter at Alma, the Miami-based multicultural wing of Omnicom's DDB network. He's also a lifelong Kanye West fan. But this particular freakout was the final straw, so Ferrer created the #HelpKenyaNotKanye project, a scrolling site that encourages fans to donate their money to more worthy causes and links out to related charities.

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Now, it's Pepsi's turn to execute a big, fun packaging idea—with a "PepsiMoji" campaign set to launch in 100 markets around the world this summer, featuring emojis on bottles and cans.
The PepsiCo Design & Innovation Center created hundreds of PepsiMoji designs, to be used both globally and tailored for local markets.

All of the designs use Pepsi's circle globe shape and the colors of blue, red and white, creating a universal language system proprietary to the brand.

The campaign extends beyond packaging. Other efforts in 2016 will include a fashion collaboration with Jeremy Scott with a global football program and PepsiCo partnership with UEFA.

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Starting this week, Instagram users can switch back and forth between accounts without signing out, the Facebook-owned company announced today.

In the world of jack-of-all-trades social media managers, this update should be a welcome reprieve. The company has been testing the feature on Android and iOS for months, but until today, it hadn't made any official announcements. However, it's a minor addition that will have brand managers around the world avoiding the hassle that comes with logging in and out every time they want to post a photo or check a notification.

But there is one catch: Users can still only switch among five accounts. Account switching will be available for anyone using version 7.15.

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Beyoncé averaged 147,000 tweets per minute, easily besting Coldplay's 83,000 tweets and Bruno Mars, who garnered 28,000.

Beyoncé's performance was also popular on Instagram which said she received the most tagged photos per minute—60—at Levi's Stadium, which hosted the Big Game. 

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After 50 years of sporting an oft-criticized combo of thin waist, thin limbs and large breasts, Barbie finally has a new body. Actually, a few new bodies.

The new Barbie Fashionistas line features different body types—curvy, tall, petite—as well as varied skin tones, face shapes, and hair colors. A far cry from the Barbie of yesteryear. And from a societal standpoint, Mattel's choice to evolve Barbie's figure to include more realistic depictions is a monumental one for a couple of reasons.

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In an era of multimedia activations and long-form sponsored content, music and marketing are so intertwined that seeing pop stars from Selena Gomez to will.i.am has become commonplace at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

The Lions' October decision to replace its Branded Content & Entertainment Lions with a more expansive Entertainment Lions program and a separate Music category therefore feels like a natural step forward.

The Cannes Lions organization cited the "talented entertainers who have the power to connect directly with consumers" in explaining its decision.

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This week, T-Mobile has raised its trolling game by coming up with an amusing drinking game you can play if you listen in to Verizon's earnings call on Thursday morning.

Check out the rules below. Basically, you drink whenever Verizon says anything jargony, dubious or flat-out untrue. It's signed, "From your drinking buddies at T-Mobile."

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The speculation about a successor to Miles Young is over: John Seifert is the new Ogilvy & Mather worldwide CEO, effective immediately. Young will continue as worldwide chairman until Sept. 1, when Seifert also assumes that role.

The 57-year-old Seifert will retain his duties as chairman and CEO of Ogilvy North America, but the agency expects to name a replacement for him in that job.

Last June, when word leaked about the Young's decision to leave advertising for a top administrative post at his alma mater, Oxford University, the news came as a surprise. Since then, Ogilvy parent company WPP has worked with Young, to consider both external and internal replacement candidates.

Ensuring a continuity in Ogilvy leadership was a deciding factor in the CEO, according to Young. "The reason we chose John was he epitomizes the classic Ogilvy values.The critical thing about this brand is the culture behind it. (I've told Seifert:) 'Don't skimp on that.'"

Seifert, who has been part of Ogilvy's worldwide executive committee since 2009, says he'll be sticking with that group's "very robust agenda". More specifically: "Nothing is more important than the work. In this new digital age we need to build client business plans as they relate to the modern business environment. ... I wouldn't trade O&M's assets for those at any other company. The trick is to manage with agility so we can stay focused on the future and be prepared for what's coming."

While Seifert doesn't have the same hands-on managerial international experience as his predecessor, he was responsible for a portfolio of 25 global clients totaling nearly $1 billion in revenue before taking on the leadership of O&M North America in 2009. He has been responsible for clients and held general management positions in Los Angeles, Chicago, Bangkok, and Singapore.

Seifert went back to New York in October 1992 and spent the next four years traveling for American Express about 70 percent of the time. He led the reengineering of American Express internationally when it became centralized in New York and London and launched BP globally in 2000.

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The Cannes Lions festival announced today that it's making a few adjustments to its award categories for 2016 in an attempt to keep up with changing times and technologies. 

The festival has created the Digital Craft Lions, a category that will complement the Cyber and Mobile Lions, but will focus on the execution of a digital campaign and the overall user experience rather than the creative idea itself. Campaigns in this category will be awarded for everything from outstanding typography and user interface design to the use of augmented reality or virtual reality to enhance user experience. 

Within the Digital Craft Lions, there are five subcategories including Form: Image, Sound, Aesthetic; Function: Design, Construction, Experience; Content; Data (including Curation of Data and Data Visualization); and Technology.

In 2015, the festival awarded a Grand Prix in the Cyber category to Under Armour and Droga5 for the "I Will What I Want" campaign starring Gisele Bundchen.

Another big change coming in 2016: the Press Lions, founded in 1992, will now be called the Print & Publishing Lions. The name change is meant to mirror the evolving publishing and print industries.

Additionally, the Titanium & Integrated Lions will be separated into two categories. This year will also mark the first time the Entertainment Lions for Music will be awarded. 

This year's festival will be held June 18-25. Entries open Jan. 21.

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Actor and comedian T.J. Miller was "dumb, and not in a funny way," in the big-screen flop Yogi Bear in 3D. And he's game for trotting out the memory of that critical drubbing if it means driving viewers to a presumably better use of their time—his hosting gig at the 21st annual Critics' Choice Awards.

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