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A car crash in downtown Cleburne required a CareFlite helicopter out of Fort Worth to airlift a young boy with head injuries.

So the story line went for a Bell Helicopter marketing video shot Friday morning off Henderson Street near Cleburne City Hall.

The video was shot to showcase the new Bell 429 helicopter CareFlite uses and as a training piece for CareFlite and local emergency personnel with the Cleburne Fire Department, said Dana Bayne, a Bell marketing spokesman said.

The helicopter is one of the latest from the company, he said. “It’s fast, reliable and the space is huge.”

The craft can carry two patients, he said, and travels at speeds up to 160 knots, about 165 mph.

Bell chose Cleburne for the video shoot because they have contacts with Cleburne fire and rescue, he said.

Piloting the helicopter was Uli Adrian, who has been with CareFlite for eight years. He said Careflite averages about three flights per day all over the North Texas region.

“We did [a similar video] a couple of years ago,” Assistant Fire Chief Keith Scarbrough said. That video was shot in a rural setting. “They wanted to do it with a more urban setting.”

Several Cleburne firefighters, along with the CareFlite crew, participated in the video shoot, which simulated a two-vehicle crash in which a mother and her two children are injured when their car is T-boned by another car, he said.

A boy, played by actor Cannon Arnold from Icon Studios in Dallas, played the accident victim who has to get transported by helicopter. With him were his mom, Meredith Arnold, and sister, Rowan Arnold, also acting in the video.

His mother, made up with a bloody head injury and bruises, casually sipped coffee as she waited for her son’s scene to be shot.

Cannon Arnold was made up with realistic head injuries and other cuts and bruises and placed on a gurney inside the helicopter’s patient bay, where the CareFlite crew, assisted by Cleburne fire and rescue personnel, prepped him for extraction as if he were really seriously injured.

As the crew worked, a camera crew worked around them to shoot the video.

Scarbrough said the simulation and video shoot took much longer than a normal rescue like this. Most rescues take 10-15 minutes, from the time they are toned out to the time the helicopter lifts off with the patient from the scene.

Almost 80 years old, the deodorant Old Spice is learning new tricks for finding customers in the era of smartphones and social media.

The Procter Gamble product, having spoofed itself for years with advice on how to become more “mantastic,” posts to its 2.6 million Facebook followers a steady stream of video games, prize entries, and advertisements as short as two seconds.

Oracle’s Rob Holland, Heineken’s Frank Amorese and BBDO’s Josh Ehart speak at the Data-Driven Marketing on Facebook: CPG Benchmarks That Are Changing the Game panel on the ADARA Stage at Times Center Hall during 2016 Advertising Week New York on September 27, 2016 in New York City.
(Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images for Advertising Week New York/AFP) / mb.com.ph

Creating “thumb-stopping” content is the goal, and marketers are doing everything they can to achieve it. That includes using neuroscience to study which visual and audio cues offer the best bet to grabbing and keeping an impatient smartphone user’s attention.

Estimates show that the average person looks at his or her smartphone as much as 150 times a day. The attention is there, but it’s just not long-lived.

“You get the three-second audition,” said Frank Amorese, media director at Heineken USA. “If you are relying on the 14th or 15th second to do the heavy lifting of the ad, it’s not going to work.”

Ever-changing mobile landscape

Advertisers are in a dizzying race to connect with customers as new mobile-borne social media platforms emerge and evolve.

“The landscape changes every six months,” Amorese said. “It’s changing at an increasingly fast rate.”

Digital ad spending is projected to reach $72.1 billion in 2016, growing at a rate of 21 percent and now comprising almost 37 percent of the overall market, according to eMarketer. Social media accounts for $15.4 billion of this.

Heineken has doubled its spending on digital ads to 30 percent over the last five years.

The dominance of smaller mobile devices has heightened the challenge of capturing the attention of potential shoppers.

Ads must be tailored depending on whether they are being seen on a widescreen television, a tablet or a smartphone and must not demand too much time if a consumer is merely glancing at a feed and not planning on a lengthy stay.

“We have to really identify how do consumers engage with every single platform and then what is the creative experience we need to give them,” said PG chief brand officer Marc Pritchard at the four-day Advertising Week conference in New York this week.

“But it also has to look like one brand because people have 5,000 ads coming at them every day and that’s 10 times what it was just 10 years ago.”

Measuring ‘sharing velocity’

Anna Fieler, chief marketing officer at PopSugar, a women’s shopping and content site, said marketers are devising benchmarks like “sharing velocity” to monitor resonance.

“Shareability is the gold standard of how engaged people are,” she said. “People like it so much that they want to share it with someone else.”

Not all Ads place the brand front and center. Frito-Lay, which spends about 40 percent of its advertising budget on digital media, offers tips on its Facebook feed on professional mentoring and networking, in addition to the usual fare of ads that aim to excite and amuse.

“People are using social media to build their (personal) brand,” said Jeff Klein, vice president of brands and portfolio marketing. Sometimes Frito-Lay just “takes a little bit of a back seat.”

Upload videos like crazy

Much of the buzz at the Advertising Week conference was the wildfire growth of video streaming and broadcast of live events.

Facebook vice president Will Platt-Higgins predicted video could comprise 80 percent of all smartphone content by 2020.

PepsiCo’s Atin Kulkarni and Facebook’s Will Platt-Higgins speak at the Data-Driven Marketing on Facebook: CPG Benchmarks That Are Changing the Game panel on the ADARA Stage at Times Center Hall during 2016 Advertising Week New York on September 27, 2016 in New York City.
(Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images for Advertising Week New York/AFP) / mb.com.ph

“You’ve got the perfect marriage of basically a supercomputer, which is in your pocket, plus super powerful wifi, plus a video composer and a high-definition camera,” he said.

“All of that together creates the perfect storm for all of us to upload videos like crazy and that’s what’s happening.”

The growth of video also opens up new opportunity for rivals like Twitter, which has lagged Facebook in terms of building profits from ads.

Twitter posted 18 percent growth in advertising revenue last quarter spurred by video. It is betting that marketers will see more upside in plans for live events in pro football and other sports.

Video “is the number one ad format for us now and it barely existed a year ago,” said Matt Derella, vice president of global revenue and operations at Twitter. “It’s risen extremely fast and it’s driven by consumer behavior.”

SAINT-HONORÉ – L’homme de Saint-Honoré, au Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, qui était accusé d’avoir tué le chien de son voisin a été acquitté de tous les chefs qui pesaient contre lui, vendredi.

Les faits reprochés à Richard-Yves Chassé se sont produits en octobre 2013.

Le juge a retenu la version de l’accusé qui disait avoir agi parce que le chien s’était attaqué à un des veaux et s’était ensuite dirigé vers lui de façon agressive. Ce dernier a conclu que M. Chassé avait des raisons légitimes d’agir ainsi.

Après trois ans de procédures, l’homme de 62 ans s’est dit soulagé du verdict.

«Après trois ans, on se sent bien, a commenté Richard-Yves Chassé. C’est sûr que le harcèlement qu’on a subi pendant quelques années, ma famille et moi, ce n’était pas facile, mais est-ce qu’on se laisse manger par un animal dangereux pour autant? Je pense que le juge vient de dire non.»

Son avocat, Me Charles Cantin, croit que le témoignage de l’expert de la défense, qui a été retenu par le juge, est l’un des points tournants dans cette cause.

«L’expert de la poursuite amenait l’hypothèse que le chien avait été tiré de dos, ce qui est quand même un fait majeur, alors qu’en défense, on a fait la preuve que le chien a été tiré d’en avant, ce qui supporte la thèse que le chien pouvait avoir un comportement menaçant», a précisé Me Cantin.

Les propriétaires de l’animal, Julie Michaud et Jimmy Dorval, n’ont pas commenté et ont quitté rapidement le palais de justice.

Mme Michaud et M. Dorval poursuivent toujours Richard-Yves Chassé au civil pour 229 000 $.

À l’arrivée des pompiers, vers 13h30, «des flammes sortaient de par les murs» du 481, avenue Saint-Joseph, explique France Voiselle, du Service de protection contre l’incendie de la Ville de Québec.

Le feu s’est ensuite propagé à la toiture du bâtiment, occupé par l’entreprise Transport Roland Savard. Quelque 35 pompiers ont été nécessaires pour éteindre les flammes, qui ont causé pour quelque 200 000 $ de dommages. Un pompier a été légèrement blessé durant l’opération.

France Voiselle précise que l’hypothèse d’un acte criminel n’est pas considérée, mais la cause exacte de l’incendie reste à déterminer. 

Il pourrait ainsi s’agir du cyclone tropical le plus puissant des quatre dernières années dans les Caraïbes et être la tempête la plus violente de l’Atlantique depuis Felix, en 2007.

Matthew n’a cessé de gagner en puissance au cours de la journée de vendredi, passant de la catégorie 2, en matinée, à la catégorie 4, en après-midi, et finalement atteindre, en fin de soirée, la catégorie 5, la dernière et la plus haute de l’échelle Saffir-Simpson de classification des cyclones tropicaux, par le Centre National des Ouragans américain (NHC).

Les météorologues prévoient lundi une grande tempête lors de l’arrivée de l’ouragan sur la côte méridionale de la Jamaïque, où est située la capitale ainsi que la seule raffinerie pétrolière du pays. Le phénomène pourrait aussi frapper les zones touristiques de l’île, comme Montego Bay, au nord.

La Jamaïque a déclenché une surveillance du cyclone, car le pays s’attend à des conditions météorologiques dignes d’un ouragan d’ici 48 heures.

Le gouvernement est en état d’alerte élevé, selon le porte-parole du cabinet du premier ministre, Robert Morgan. Des équipes de secours, la police et l’armée ont été mobilisées et des refuges ont été ouverts dans toute l’île, a-t-il précisé. La dernière grande tempête à avoir touché la région est l’ouragan Sandy, en 2012.

En Colombie, la région côtière frontalière avec le Venezuela est visée par une alerte à des conditions de tempête tropicale pour les 12 prochaines heures.

Cuba et Haïti doivent pour leur part s’attendre à vivre des conditions climatiques caractéristiques de tempêtes tropicales au cours des deux prochains jours.

La vitesse et la progression de Matthew devraient décroître progressivement en cours de soirée et samedi, selon le NHC.

Matthew devrait cependant demeurer un ouragan jusqu’à dimanche, selon les météorologues.

A Calgary, Alberta-based upstart technology firm DeepMarkit Corp has identified a gap in the market for digitised marketing campaigns by the underserved small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) sector.

DeepMarki t has created an online platform that allows SMEs to create mobile phone video games that immerse people’s everyday reality in the digital realm as part of their marketing campaigns. A 2008 study had found that gamification leads to 14% increase in knowledge retention.

DeepMarkit has recently launched its beta stage FetchBot platform, developed as a white label, cloud-based system gamification creation platform. FetchBot allows small businesses to create their own customised video game promotions for a considerably scaled budget – hundreds, not thousands of dollars in upfront costs.

“Many companies already do this, but it remains out of reach to SMEs due to the considerable costs and human resources it usually involves, COO Kevin Kraft explains to Engineering News in an interview.

NEW MEDIUM
Many corporations use marketing and software development specialists to create their gaming campaigns over the course of months, with costs running in the multiple tens of thousands of dollars. While online-gaming-as-marketing would seem to be an obvious choice for most companies looking to target consumers and retail audiences, undertaking these promotional campaigns can be time and cost prohibitive for SMEs, Kraft says.

A number of business-to-consumer corporations already use gamification in their marketing mix, such as ‘Starbucks for Life’ as an extension of the Starbucks Rewards programme, Fitbit and many loyalty points programmes. In fact, Fitbit reported last year that 85% of Fitbit users said it encouraged them to be more active, pointing to the efficacy of gamification.

Businesses turn to video games to generate customer loyalty conversion, seeing a bank using gamification to increase the conversion rate sevenfold to 14%, against the typical 2% conversion. In 2015 alone the internet advertising industry was worth $60-billion, having grown about 20% over 2014 at around $50-billion.

Further, gamification is also being used to inject new excitement into long-time promotional campaigns, such as McDonald’s ‘Monopoly’ and Tim Horton’s ‘Roll-up the Rim to Win’ to engage their customers on desktop and mobile alike, providing incentive for these restaurant patrons to visit more frequently.

Kraft pointed to the current excitement for Pokémon Go, small businesses are looking for alternative options to enter gamification to drive floor traffic and sales. A recent Pokémon Go article by AdWeek points to how shops and restaurants can become ‘Pokestops’ for players during the augmented reality scavenger hunt. “However, these kinds of marketing options tend to be short-term fixes, with less flexibility in targeting specific customers,” Kraft stated.

BETA PHASE
DeepMarkit has several client campaigns currently underway in the beta stage since going live in July. Clients can create their own gamification campaign by using one of the ready-created games available on the online platform, and customise it as they go along.

In conducting its market analysis of the gamification space, the team behind DeepMarkit, led by the past founder of Chartwell Technology and former software architects from Amaya Gaming, determined that the company does not have a direct competitor in the area, a serendipitous convergence of self-serve software-as-a-service, gamification and branded content trends.

DeepMarkit’s business case for FetchBot notes the following advantages for the SME market.

Its platform will allow clients greater opportunity to access gamification as a low-cost, high-margin marketing-channel, providing do-it-yourself customization of game campaigns to build brand awareness, acquire customer data, and drive commercial transactions.

“The ability to create multilayer promotions including instant win, sweepstakes and giveaways on a device-agnostic platform, compliant with regional/state and federal gaming laws, and automated for ease of use,” Kraft stated.

The platform will also significantly reduce time-to-market for campaign execution (eliminating wait times, avoids campaign development expenses and bureaucracy, the company plan states.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Bilingual (Japanese/English) Product Marketing Specialist, Nintendo of America

Redmond, WA

DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES

• Leads product marketing support of campaign launch activities for assigned titles.
• Trained product spokesperson responsible for interacting with and presenting products to media and consumers.
• Trained corporate spokesperson responsible for demonstrating products in videos, livestreams and live demos in trade show settings. Meets with media to present and discuss products. Responsible for understanding key consumer-facing messaging for assigned projects.
• Supports key product launch activities, community outreach and key branding initiatives based on predetermined strategy as directed by management.
• Provides insight into key product features, writes product marketing brief and prepares comprehensive product content outlines and supports all marketing and promotion activities to ensure accurate representation of product content and strategy.
• Drafts product information roll-out plan proposals and supports PR team in finalizing product PR plans.
• Writes consumer-facing marketing copy for use on Nintendo and retailer websites and Nintendo’s eShop and digital storefronts.
• Supports review of TV, digital and print advertising creative, providing feedback on product accuracy. Actively supports production of advertising creative in the role of product expert and collaborates on selection of game assets for inclusion in final advertising.
• Supports creation of consumer-facing trailers and other video assets designed to communicate key product features including pre-produced videos and video livestreams like Nintendo Treehouse Live. May include hosting or starring in videos.
• Educates internal teams and external agency partners on product features. Demonstrates products to internal teams, external partners, media and consumers.
• Evaluates games for quality and marketability and writes product evaluation reports. Under management direction, contributes feedback to game analysis for product improvements and appropriateness for North American markets.
• Maintains competitive knowledge of marketplace, monitors consumer reaction to assigned products, monitors effectiveness of PR activities and provides analytical reports on game market data.
• Department/Nintendo product champion. Understands game features and anticipates issues, and concerns for the projects in which directly involved.
• Bilingual: Communicates directly with Japanese development teams, coordinating asset approvals and communicating promotional plans as needed.
• Bilingual: Translates written and verbal communications including emails, product evaluations and other documentation, and conference calls with development and promotions teams in Japan.
• Bilingual: Performs interpretation for developer interviews with media.
• Contributes to development coordination and communication; performs some administrative duties.
• Often necessary to change duties, projects or direction on short notice.
• Up to 50% domestic and international travel.

SUMMARY OF REQUIREMENTS

• Two to five years of related experience
• Strong writing skills, including experience writing consumer facing marketing copy
• Strong public speaking and presentation skills
• Strong knowledge and understanding of industry and Nintendo history
• Bilingual: Fluent in English and Japanese with strong bilingual spoken and written communication skills
• Ability to present product information and demos to internal teams and media.
• Ability to maintain a heavy workload on an ongoing basis
• Requires video game development experience in localization, external or internal development
• Professional writing skills, confidence and ability to present on camera and large groups (over 100 people) preferred.
• Excellent game play skills 
• Undergraduate degree in Writing, Communications, Business, a related field, or equivalent education and experience
• Bilingual: Japanese proficiency test Level I or native fluency required
• Valid passport may be required
• Communicates effectively in a variety of settings and formats
• Builds relationships and delivers customer-centric solutions
• Takes on new opportunities and tough challenges with urgency, energy and enthusiasm
• Builds partnerships and works collaboratively with others toward common goals
• Acute attention to accuracy and detail
• Ability to work with highly confidential information
• Excellent organizational skills
• Strong interpersonal and problem solving skills
• Ability to produce high quality results under tight deadlines
• Up to 50% domestic and international travel

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

For decades, business professionals have been bound to traditional office layouts and restricted by the length of their power cables and phone cords in terms of where and how they can work. But new technology and organizational strategy are enabling a more digital workplace that innovative organizations can take advantage of for higher-quality workforces and better productivity.

Marketing departments and agencies in particular can benefit from the mobilization and communication enabled by a digital workplace. As marketing has evolved into a more project-based, collaborative discipline, the ability to flexibly rearrange teams and workspaces offers new opportunities for creative management and execution of campaigns and initiatives. A well-designed digital workspace not only enables your team to freely reorganize around your office, but also flexibly contribute from home elsewhere should the need arise.

A modern, flexible, digital workplace is also a valuable attractor to top marketing talent. Today’s cutting edge marketers will often hesitate to join an organization that they perceive to be rigid and out of date. But a marketing operation that values and supports flexibility and communication will be a magnet to high-performing professionals. It will also grow your potential talent pool by opening up more possibilities of working with exceptional talent that is far away and can only contribute remotely.

I asked the president of my company, Bob Van Rossum, to explain how converting to a more digital workplace affects your marketing. Here’s what he had to say: