Video Ga Ga
Kendrick, Timothee, Coldplay, The Vatican, the BBC, NBA, Gemini, Open AI & more.
The Colour Bar plays a glut of interesting videos this week (and no, its not a Super Bowl ‘Best Of’!). A charming laid back interaction between two of the most talented creative icons reminds us that loud and fast need not always be the mantra (thats Kendrick Lamar and Timothée Chalamet, by the way). Coldplay’s partnership Singapore works very well combining all thats good about the band and a wee bit of the the bold. Open AI does its first brand ad, and there are a couple of other very fun spots!
The Colour Bar is where creativity, content, culture, tech, brands & humanity collide.
AI-watch finds me hearing from the Vatican (!), wondering if Meta indulges in torrenting and suspecting Google is lactose intolerant. The BBC does a test on how AI summarises news, with not promising results.
+ Quickies about the biggest movie title on the planet, BBC Studios' handshake in India, the most in-demand library in the US, and the NBA in Asia.
Press play!
Curated/Cuts.
1. Goggins
You might know him most recently as Cooper Howard / The Ghoul from the Fallout series on Amazon last year. Or you might not. He’s an actor and thats all you need to know in this cool spot from GoDaddy which cuts to the insight that sometimes we don’t know exactly what we are doing. They can help us just wing it! Act Like You Know: Go Daddy x Goggins
2. Kendrick & Chalamet
The two icons chat for Super Bowl Half Time show spot. A fine perspective from James Denman: "Instead of attention deficit, the focus creates an attention abundance. A slow immovable object relentlessly moving to its target. Focus, makes success feel inevitable.”
And there’s a part two where the two rap together, too!
3. Open AI brand spot
Yes, OpenAI ’s big super bowl ad happened. This is a research and tech company setting out to become a consumer brand. So what was it? Watch it and get some hot (warm) takes, all here!
What: Framing the ad as the dawn of “The Intelligence Age,” the 30sec spot looks to take us through humanity’s greatest discoveries & inventions— fire, airplanes, television, DNA— culminating in ChatGPT... which it presents as the next disruptive technology.
How: Using the Dot motif (which was refocused as central to their rebrand last week), and a pointillism art style, this spot is made entirely by humans. “We use it [AI] as a concepting tool, so nothing you see in the ad was created by Sora”.
Some varied perspectives, including mine!
“…we do have an opportunity to help them understand both the historical moment we’re in as well as the fact that they can participate today in this new movement and use these tools right now.” Kate Rouch, OpenAI’s CMO.
“Dumbs Down AI for Average Joes”, Trishla Ostwal, adweek
“I don't think people unaware of ChatGPT will know what tf this is about”- Redditer 'avid-shrug'
“OpenAI spends 14 million on an ad created by human artists to promote a company whose mission is to systematically devalue human artists. Got it.” Lori Schkufza 🐰
“It felt humble, and the fact that the animated spot was made by humans is very grounding to how we all need to approach AI.” Kumi Croom
“I get the idea and the desire to place the product/brand into a historical narrative, to at once humanise it and make it seem pivotal. Unfortunately, I find the spot falling short there. And, sorry to say, a bit soulless.” Abhishek Rao (Shakey)
I had shared the motion package of their rebrand last week, so it does seem to be coming together. Let us see how 2025 evolves for them as a brand.
4. Coldplay ♥️ SG
Coldplay just dropped a music video set in our island nation, and in many ways, it’s probably just how you’d expect it to be. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good one!
The fresh MV for Man In The Moon from the extended album Moon Music, is filmed around iconic locations in SG. Even if you didn’t know it was done in collaboration with the STB, you’d probably guess it while watching.
And yet— despite its ‘expected-ness’ and very apparent showcasing of Singapore— it’s not a grating partnership. It’s a fine example of destination marketing wrapped in feel-good vibes and a desire to craft a slightly different narrative. For starters, the lyrics just fit in so much— We were born to be/ Young and free // We were born to be / Family.
Coldplay’s joy, positivity, and warmth flow through. And Singapore? Going beyond the landmarks, maybe not quite how many might perceive it. Stripping away the cliches of clinical, boring, or uniform that often plague Singapore’s persona; this is a worthy effort to peel away stereotypes. Bold visuals are needed to shake off those lazy cliches— here they come from the casting. Sure, the cast is young (expected), but there is a concerted effort to include diverse profiles that radiate a creative and- dare I say- even slightly rebellious energy. (I can imagine the words ‘edgy’, ‘cool’, ‘alternative’, and ‘creative’ bouncing around in brainstorming meetings).
Most importantly, you need strong vehicles to shake off lazy cliches— what better than the runaway train that is the biggest band on the planet?
5. Fanning Laundry
And lastly, this odd and very amusing spot from India. If you are a ’fan’ of quirky humour, this one is for you. · Director- Abhinav Pratiman · Early Man Film · Agency Enormous ·
“The price of AI’s extraordinary benefits must not be a world where people searching for answers are served distorted, defective content that presents itself as fact.”
AI-Watch
The BBC has found that AI chatbots are actually unable to accurately summarise news.
51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form.
Additionally, 19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors, such as incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates.
As well as containing factual inaccuracies, the chatbots "struggled to differentiate between opinion and fact, editorialised, and often failed to include essential context".
The Vatican on AI! Last week, the Vatican released a document titled “Antiqua et Nova” (“Ancient and New”) addressing the ethical and anthropological implications of artificial intelligence (AI). The document emphasizes that AI should serve as a tool to complement human intelligence, not replace it, warning against the potential “shadow of evil” inherent in its misuse. The Vatican highlights several concerns, including the spread of misinformation which can “fuel political polarization and social unrest”; the use of autonomous lethal weapons systems; the importance of safeguarding human dignity and the common good in AI development and deployment; calling for careful regulation and ethical considerations.
So Cheesy, Google! Google has re-edited a spot for its leading artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Gemini. It showed Gemini helping a cheesemonger to write a product description, telling him Gouda accounts for "50-60 percent of global cheese consumption". This is demonstrably inaccurate, though Google’s defence seems to be, "multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat.” It appears Gemini might be lactose intolerant. You might recall that last year, it told some users to use ‘non-toxic glue’ to 'make cheese stick to pizza better'.
Torrent, Bad. Newly unsealed emails allegedly provide the "most damning evidence" yet against Meta in a copyright case raised by book authors alleging that Meta illegally trained its AI models on pirated books. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries
AI auctions. Artists call on Christies to pull AI auction that ‘incentivises mass theft of human artists’ work’. (h/t Graham Lovelace) Johan Cedmar-Brandstedt, the ‘ethical AI town crier’, said:
“this could have been a celebratory range of creative and innovative uses of the technology” but for some reason Christies had also “wedged in piracy-powered gen AI slop and pretentious handwaving to muddy the waters, antagonising the rights-aware artist crowd”.
QUICKIES
NBA making moves in Asia: Recently, NBA had announced their global games coming to Macau. This begins in the summer, when the Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns will play a pair of pre-season friendly fixtures against each other. Now, they’ve announced a new immersive basketball and entertainment festival in June, which will culminate with a regional high-school basketball tournament in Asia-Pacific– the NBA Rising Stars Invitational in Singapore. It's the first part of a multi-year deal to bring NBA events to Singapore. Sheila Rasu STB Sport Singapore
More than a third of Southeast Asia uses social media as a source of news. Nearly two-thirds of the entire population are on social media. As with most regions, this becomes an increasingly crucial part of the truth puzzle as trust has become a core issue.
BBC studios Have announced a new production partnership in India with Banijay Asia. “Banijay Asia will have exclusive access to BBC Studios’ extensive unscripted and scripted format catalogue and will produce BBC Studios shows with a distinctly local flavour for Indian broadcasters and streamers.“ This also means it will cease its own production activity in the country.
China’s biggest film has raked in $1B in ~10 days! in one market. Ne Zha 2 is an animated fantasy (sequel). Not only is it the highest-grossing Chinese film ever, it is the first to top $1 billion in sales. This is stellar for a single market; for reference, no movie has ever grossed $1 billion in the USA alone.
Amazon has the most demanded movie library in US (and biggest).
Sky News has announced an overhaul of the newsroom. It’s targeting a “pivot from 70% focused on breaking/live news towards 70% focused on “premium video journalism” by 2030.
Think
Ever wonder that Spotify is held to a rigorous and demanding standard as regards payouts to artists, but the likes of Meta and TikTok are not, in terms of paying their ‘artists’ (creators)? Simon Owens does.
A Stanford student’s confessions on Tiktok, and a call. I secretly wished the TikTok ban had succeeded:
“What does it say about us that we’ve become so dependent on an app that many of us secretly hoped someone would take the decision out of our hands? The failed ban represents more than just a chance to break free from digital dependence – it’s a mirror reflecting our collective inability to set boundaries with technology and assert agency in our choices.“
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