“U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain’t going! So therefore ain’t no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!” Mr. James wrote on Twitter, where he has nearly twice as many followers as the president.

Mr. Trump also drew an unusually strong rebuke from the commissioner of the N.F.L., whose owners include many donors to, and friends of, the president, as well as from the football players’ union.

The Warriors, in a statement, said they would use a visit to Washington in February to highlight issues of diversity and inclusiveness.

By midafternoon, a spokesman for the University of North Carolina national championship basketball team confirmed the team would not be going to the White House, but he said it was a scheduling conflict, not a response to the day’s back-and-forth.

Many athletes have been moved to comment on race and social justice more frequently in the past year after a series of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans and the support Mr. Trump has received from white supremacists.

Last year, Colin Kaepernick, then a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, began kneeling during the playing of the national anthem, to highlight, he has said, police brutality and racial injustice. He left the team this season and has not worked since, inspiring debate over whether teams are punishing him, while many players have knelt or made gestures in support of him during the anthem.

At the same time, some owners of N.F.L. teams have suggested players should not take part in political demonstrations during the game. None appeared to speak up for Mr. Trump on Saturday, though, with the exception or two by left-leaning owners, they did not criticize him either.

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Mr. Trump’s outbursts against athletes and their leagues came as he was smarting from yet another setback in his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and as he worked to stoke enthusiasm among his core supporters in the deeply conservative state of Alabama, where he attended a campaign rally for Mr. Strange, who many of them regard as an establishment Republican unworthy of their backing.

The president often uses freewheeling campaign speeches and Twitter to berate and insult critics in unvarnished language and to whip up core supporters. In the past week, he branded North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, as Rocket Man and criticized Senator John McCain of Arizona for opposing Republican attempts to dismantle the health care law.

But Mr. Trump’s broadsides this time focused on some of the most prominent African-American athletes in the country, who have international followings and have called out the president for his lack of tolerance and divisive views on race.

They come about a week after the president called on ESPN to apologize after Jemele Hill, one of the sports network’s anchors, who is black, referred to him on Twitter as a “white supremacist” and a “bigot.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Ms. Hill’s utterances were a firing offense.

The denial of a visit to the White House by the Warriors was not the first time the president tried to pre-empt a snub by dealing one of his own; last month, he abruptly announced that he was disbanding two of his business advisory councils after some members said they would resign from them to protest his equivocating response to racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Va., at a march organized by neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

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At the Alabama rally, Mr. Trump said the protests would stop if fans left games when players did not stand for the anthem. “The only thing you could do better is if you see it, even if it’s one player, leave the stadium,” he said.

With the N.F.L. struggling to make the game safer in light of scores of players who have been found to have severe brain damage from hard hits, Mr. Trump complained that the game was being ruined by referees trying to control unnecessarily rough tackles.

“Today if you hit too hard — 15 yards! Throw him out of the game!’’ he said, adding: “They’re ruining the game! They’re ruining the game. That’s what they want to do. They want to hit. They want to hit! It is hurting the game.’’

In an unusually strong rebuke of the president on Saturday, Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the N.F.L., said the president failed to understand how the league and its players work together to “create a sense of unity in our country and our culture.”

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“Divisive comments like these demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the N.F.L., our great game and all of our players, and a failure to understand the overwhelming force for good our clubs and players represent in our communities,” he said in a statement.

Mr. Goodell, who leads a league in which about three-quarters of the players are black while about the same percentage of fans are white, has tried to find a middle ground between the players and his bosses, the owners of the league’s 32 teams.

More than half a dozen owners contributed to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, and many of them donate heavily to conservative causes. Some owners, including Robert K. Kraft of the New England Patriots, consider Mr. Trump a personal friend.

Coincidentally, the owners are now discussing whether to renew Mr. Goodell’s contract, which expires in 2019.

Even before the president’s remarks, the league has been trying to weave its way through an often fierce and uncomfortable debate inside the N.F.L. and among fans about whether the anthem protests disrespect the military and country or are simply an effective way to publicize issues players want to highlight.

Mr. Trump has a history of antagonizing the N.F.L., dating to the 1980s, when he and the fledgling United States Football League successfully sued it for antitrust violations. Though Mr. Trump won in court, his efforts bankrupted the U.S.F.L. His name surfaced in 2014 as a potential buyer for the Buffalo Bills.

The president’s comments seemed to embolden players. Detroit Lions tight end Eric Ebron questioned why players were told not to talk about politics, yet the president could speak about sports. “Does anyone tell trump to stick to politics, like they tell us to stick to sports?” he wrote. He added “smh” for “shaking my head.”

Michael Thomas, a defensive back with the Miami Dolphins, urged fellow players not to back down. “Continue to use your voices and your platforms for racial equality and to stop injustices in our communities,” he wrote on Twitter. “This is bigger than us!!!”

President Trump took aim at two of the world’s most powerful sports leagues and some of their most popular athletes, directly inserting himself into an already fiery debate about race, social justice and the role athletes play in highlighting those issues.

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In the whirlwind proliferation of publishers uploading video content to Facebook, the story of Jungle Creations stands out as particularly impressive. In just three years, the company’s social video stock now gets over 3.7 billion views per month, and as one of the world’s most-viewed media properties, its solid stable of Facebook Pages averages an extra billion views a month compared to this time last year. With its flagship Facebook channel, ‘VT‘, generating an average of 3.8M views per video, it’s no wonder the industry is sitting up and taking notice.

So successful has the media publisher been in tapping into the public’s insatiable appetite for engaging video content, it has grown far beyond its initial offering. Jungle Creations has firmly established itself as a leading producer of sponsored video content both in the UK and beyond, and is working with some of the world’s leading brands on a range of innovative campaigns aimed at reaching a wider audience. We talked to Jungle Creations about its programming and distribution strategy around social video, and how it has grown its sponsored video package so that the big brands are flocking to work with them. But first, a little about the company and the impact of sponsored video on the UK market.

Jungle Creations: A Viral Phenomenon

So, who are Jungle Creations? One title I had in mind for this post was ‘the biggest media publisher you’ve never heard of’, which while catchy, is no longer strictly true. If you spend any time on Facebook then the chances are a Jungle Creations video has popped up in your News Feed – either because you have subscribed directly to one of its Pages, or because one of your connections has engaged with one of their video uploads.

The publisher has an enviable portfolio of Facebook properties including ‘VT’ (fka Viral Thread), ‘Twisted’, ‘‘Food Envy’, ‘‘Nailed It’, ‘‘Four Nine’, ‘‘Bosh‘,  ‘The Aardvark’, and ‘Joystix’, and it consistently appears in Tubular’s leaderboard of most watched media and entertainment properties, alongside BuzzFeed, Disney, and The LADBible group. Not bad for a company that founder Jamie Bolding started from his bedroom, right?

Top Media Entertainment Properties – Global August 2017. All data via Tubular

Bolding kicked off his multi-million pound venture with a listicle post (“Twenty People You Will Meet at Fresher’s Week” for you fact fans), and the brand has since grown to employ well over 100 people. It operates out of East London, with state of the art video production, and post-producion facilities all under one roof. The fact that all its operations are in-house is a huge plus not only for the publisher, but also for the brands and partners they work with.

The company has fully embraced the verticalization of content on social platforms, and now offers a huge variety of video to many different audiences. Its original channel, ‘VT’, has been joined by a range of others including ‘Twisted’, ‘Bosh’ and ‘Food Envy’ which cater to food lovers, ‘Nailed It’ which uploads videos around DIY, and ‘Joystix’ which is all about the gaming community.

Viral Thread rebranded to ‘VT’ in August, and is shifting its focus to producing more original content. However, engaging viral content uploaded to the page remains a firm favorite with its 18.3M followers, and the views generated on the page made ‘VT’ the third most-watched property on Facebook in August 2017.

The most viewed, and most engaged ‘VT’ upload of the past 90 days is  ‘When you meet someone new and find out they’re rude’. To date, it has attracted 115M views (47.4M in the first 3 days!), and 3.7M engagements in the form of likes, shares, and comments.

Sponsored Video Content in the UK: £100M Industry

The UK market for Facebook branded content is growing at a blistering place, and Jungle Creations are perfectly positioned to bridge that gap between consumer demand and brand outreach. According to a brand new report from Tubular Labs on UK Facebook Sponsored content (which you can download by clicking on the blue button below), the number of UK partners and sponsors publishing branded content on Facebook has grown nearly 300% year-on-year.

Facebook branded content in the UK is estimated to be worth over £100M per year, with the British market for this form of branded advertising growing at nearly 500% year-on-year. You can get the latest insights on sponsored video in the UK by clicking the link below.

Download the NEW DealMaker UK Sponsored Video Content Report Now

Jungle Creations is one of the major players in the UK sponsored video ecosystem,  partnering with household-name brands to publish sponsored content on its Facebook properties. Partnerships with brands are an important part of the Jungle Creations business model, and successful campaigns with Oreo, Stork, and Baileys among many others mean that the publisher tripled its share of sponsored views between Q1 and Q2 2017, and grew their share of sponsors by 65%.

Data for sponsored Facebook videos uploaded during Q2 2017 by UK partners only. Source: Tubular Labs DealMaker

Jungle Creations and Sponsored Video

We spoke to Mitch Strong (Commercial Partnerships Director), and Melissa Chapman (CCO) about how the Jungle Creations works with partners to create sponsored video campaigns while remaining faithful to the JC brand.

Tubular: What sponsored video brand campaigns have you been really excited to work on?

JC: Oreo was our first really big campaign, and we worked with them as part of our ‘Twisted’ channel, to create engaging content around the promotion of two new flavours – Mint Choc Chip and Strawberry Cheesecake. We created 6 recipe videos for the ‘Twisted’ channel, plus two video articles, and a live stream with an influencer to help raise awareness for the new flavours. We guaranteed 8M UK views but actually generated 13M, and the added value of global views was huge because we didn’t cage the campaign.

Note: You can read more about the Twisted/Oreo case study here. The video below, for Mint Oreo Dirt Deserts has generated 3.4M Facebook video views to date:

The brand was so pleased with the return on investment they become a repeat customer, and we recently worked with them on another successful campaign. We created an idea, and sent it over on spec to see if it was something they might be interested in us creating for them. They confirmed they had some budget money left off the back of a different campaign so asked us to create a set of videos based on our idea. We turned the videos around in 3 days and the videos went live the week later. The whole process took only about 3 weeks which is an incredibly fast turnaround for this type of campaign. We continue to work with Oreo to get their brand message out across the UK.

With ‘Twisted’, we also worked with Stork on a new baking range they were launching. The target audience was Millennial women, and housewives with children, which is very much aligned with the ‘Twisted’ audience who are 63% female, mostly aged between 18-35. We created some really cool recipes, for grown-ups, and for grown-ups to create with children. In the past, their digital campaigns have tended to be very traditional but they trusted our creative process.

Tubular: Are most of your campaigns UK focused?

JC: We’ve built up a massive global reach so can support any client that wants their campaigns to go active around the world.

Tubular: Do you have all the resources you need in-house?

JC: Yes, we have everything here – sales, creative, social, video production, post-production, distribution, analytics, paid advertising, and more. We don’t outsource anything, and that’s the USP to agencies and brands. We keep everything under one roof and all departments feed into each other, and fully support each other. Because we immediately see the results from our pitches and our campaigns, we can go directly to the teams involved and discuss what did or didn’t work, and fix anything we need to. It also speeds up the process, both for us and the client, and with the help of Tubular software and data, and our own social team, we have access to all the analytics data we need.

Tubular: Do you put a lot of paid resources behind campaigns?

JC: We can but we try not to. Most of the time we can achieve the results we set out to via organic distribution and promotion. The way we see it, if sponsored content is going to live on any of our channel properties, we are acutely aware of the audience for those channels, and that content should do fantastically well based on the audience we have built up. If we have to put money behind any content we publish to our channels then we haven’t done enough organically to get it where it needs to be.

Tubular: What’s your strategic plan behind building your social channels?

JC: As we’ve expanded over the past 4 years, we’ve created 14 different verticals for very specific audiences, so we can offer almost any one of those verticals as a good fit for a particular brand. That’s a huge advantage because we don’t have to rely on just the one channel, and then constantly adapt that channel to fit the content.

With ‘Twisted’, we saw the opportunity to work with major food and drink brands, keeping in mind there always has to be a consumer, B2C demand too, because you need that growth for it to be sellable to brands. So we keep both those goals in mind when we launch a channel – that there’s a market for this vertical, and also an audience for it. We had a very specific goal for ‘Twisted’ which was to focus on the ‘wild and wacky’ side of food, and that really hit a nerve with our audience.  We built up a following on Facebook of 1 million in just 8 weeks – and we didn’t pay for any kind of promotion! Our audience just got it right away, especially with content like our ‘Camembert Hedgehog Bread’ video.

Our clear goal is to build something that we can take to the agencies and brands and say look at what we’ve got and understand how we can leverage that for you. We are really dedicated to building these channels as the stats look so great on sales decks (for example: 1 million followers in 8 weeks for ‘Twisted’). Our social and content teams love growing the channels and find it very rewarding. So, we put a lot of investment, time, and effort into growing the channels, not only to be able to sell them to brands and agencies, but also to build a solid brand and a voice for Jungle Creations, and that’s invaluable to us.

Tubular: If you’re creating video content for a brand, does it always have to sit on one of your own channels?

JC: 99% of the time it does, yes. We usually state in the contract that we would post any sponsored video content on our channel although we can set the brand up as an advertisers so they are able to carry out digital targeting to hit a niche audience. But we also sometimes supply white-labelled content that they can post on their own channels, which sets us apart from a lot of our competitors.

But influencer/recommendation channels are much better in terms of reach and engagement. For instance, Oreo has many followers but we can generate significantly more engagement for Oreo content on Twisted. Our content team makes sure that when sponsored videos are published, we are nurturing that engaged audience on our channels so there’s that build-up of trust in all our posts. People don’t mind being advertised to, as long as it’s good, entertaining content, and that has always been our mantra. It’s also why we consistently get high engagement on an advert, and that’s why we are confident in selling our service to brands and agencies.

“People don’t mind being advertised to, as long as it’s good, entertaining content”

One bad campaign can effectively ruin your chances with other brands, particularly when we are reliant on a central group of agencies to broker on our behalf. We have faced a few stumbling blocks where the brand has wanted a little more creative control, and we’ll work closely with those brands to gently confirm why their ideas may not work with our audience. We back those assertions up with insights and data and build that trust. We’re not saying no to be arrogant, we saying no because we know what works. It would be very easy to take the money for some of the distribution deals we have been offered, but we also have to consider our channels and the impact one misguided ad can have.

Using Tubular’s Dealmaker software, we can mine the data to find sponsored partnership opportunities and also confirm which brands our competitors are working with. Of course, we’re also aware that our competitors can use the software to mine the details of our campaigns, and we don’t want to give any deals away due to poor performance or judgement on our part – the JC brand is too important. We have such a good track record with all the brands we work with because we don’t just approach a deal from a sales perspective. We’re also going to be looking after that brand from a content perspective and make sure those campaign goals are achieved.

You can find out how Tubular’s Dealmaker software has helped Jungle Creations gain a competitive edge when it comes to brand partnership deals:

Right now, we don’t really create independent video content for brands where it doesn’t feature on our own channels. But as a production house, we may consider this more and more in the future.

Download Our New Report About Sponsored Video in the UK

If you want to know more about how sponsored video in the UK is performing then please download the full report below. It contains invaluable insights for any brand, video marketing team, or creator who wants to know more about about sponsored video opportunities. The research was produced as part of the new Dealmaker software from Tubular Labs.

Download the NEW DealMaker UK Sponsored Video Content Report Now

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (Reuters) – Hurricane Maria, the second major storm to ravage the Caribbean in a month, skirted past the Turks and Caicos Islands on Friday, leaving devastation in its wake that included fresh flooding on Puerto Rico two days after pummeling the U.S. island territory.

Maria, which ranked as the most powerful hurricane to strike Puerto Rico in nearly a century, has killed at least six people there and claimed 19 lives on several other Caribbean islands, according to government officials and local news media accounts.

But even as Puerto Ricans struggled without electricity to clean up and dig out from tangles of rubble, uprooted trees and fallen power lines, another potential disaster was unfolding in northwestern corner of the island, where a dam was on the verge of collapse.

The U.S. National Weather Service warned in a series of bulletins that the dam on the rain-engorged Guajataca River, was failing, causing flash flooding in the area and prompting an evacuation of communities below the reservoir by way of buses.

Roughly 70,000 people live in the area downstream from the earthen dam that was under evacuation, the island’s governor, Ricardo Rossello, said in a late-afternoon news conference.

Christina Villalba, an official for the island’s emergency management agency, said there was little doubt the dam would give way.

“It could be tonight, it could be tomorrow, it could be in the next few days, but it’s very likely it will be soon,” she said, adding that authorities were aiming to complete evacuations Friday night.

Maria struck Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale and cut a path of destruction through the center of the island on Wednesday, ripping roofs from buildings and triggering widespread flooding. Torrential downpours from the storm sent several rivers to record levels.

Officials in Puerto Rico, an island of 3.4 million inhabitants, confirmed six storm-related fatalities: three from landslides in Utuado, in the island’s mountainous center; two from drowning in Toa Baja, west of San Juan, and a person near San Juan who was struck by a piece of wind-blown lumber.

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Earlier news media reports had put the island’s death toll as high as 15.

“We know of other potential fatalities through unofficial channels that we haven’t been able to confirm,” said Hector Pesquera, the government’s secretary of public safety.

In and around San Juan, the capital, people worked to clear debris from the streets on Friday, some working with machetes, while others began to reopen businesses, though they wondered how long they could operate without power and limited inventory.

“There’s no water, no power, nothing,” said Rogelio Jimenez, a 34-year-old pizzeria worker.

Motorists lined up for hours outside the few gasoline stations that were open. “I’ve been here for three and a bit hours,” said Angel Serra, sitting in a blocks-long line hoping to fill up his tank.

Long lines also formed at the handful of automated teller machines that appeared to be working in the region.

DAMAGE ESTIMATED AT $45 BLN

Puerto Rico was already facing the largest municipal debt crisis in U.S. history. A team of judges overseeing its bankruptcy has advised involved parties to put legal proceedings on hold indefinitely as the island recovers, said a source familiar with the proceedings.

The storm was expected to tally $45 billion in damage and lost economic activity across the Caribbean, with at least $30 billion of that in Puerto Rico, said Chuck Watson, a disaster modeler at Enki Research in Savannah, Georgia.

Elsewhere in the Caribbean, 14 deaths were reported on Dominica, an island nation of 71,000 inhabitants. Two people were killed in the French territory of Guadeloupe and one in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Two people died when the storm roared past the Dominican Republic on Thursday, according to local media outlet El Jaya.

Maria churned past Turks and Caicos and was 295 miles (480 km) east of the Bahamas by 8 p.m. EDT (midnight GMT) on Friday, the NHC said. It was packing sustained winds of up to 125 miles per hour (205 km per hour), making it a Category 3 hurricane, but was expected to gradually weaken over the next two days as it turned more sharply to the north.

Officials on Turks and Caicos, a British overseas territory, had ordered residents to remain indoors and businesses to close on Friday as the hurricane neared, bringing a storm surge of as much as 12 feet (3.7 meters) above normal tide levels. But hurricane warnings were later canceled as Maria passed.

Storm swells driven by Maria were expected to reach the southeastern coast of the U.S mainland on Friday, the NHC said, adding that it was too soon to determine what, if any, other direct effects it would have.

In the Dominican Republic, Maria damaged nearly 3,000 homes and sent more than 9,300 to shelters, local emergency response agencies reported.

Maria passed close by the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix, home to about 55,000 people, early Wednesday, knocking out electricity and most mobile phone service.

Maria hit about two weeks after Hurricane Irma pounded two other U.S. Virgin Islands: St. Thomas and St. John. The islands’ governor, Kenneth Mapp, said it was possible that St. Thomas and St. Croix might reopen to some cruise liner traffic in a month.

Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record, killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean and the United States. It followed Harvey, which also killed more than 80 people when it struck Texas in late August and caused flooding in Houston.

More than two months remain in the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, although the busiest period is generally from mid-August to mid-October.

Reporting by Dave Graham and Robin Respaut in San Juan; Additional reporting by Jorge Pineda in Santo Domingo, Nick Brown in Houston, Devika Krishna Kumar and Daniel Wallis and Jennifer Ablan in New York and Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Writing by Scott Malone and Steve Gorman; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Mary Milliken