Indie agency Drake Cooper has hired veteran account management pro Nick Hanlin as its first director of growth. The 100 percent employee owned, Boise-based Drake Cooper has enjoyed record-setting success over the past several years, onboarding more national accounts than ever in its 46-year history, including Blue Diamond Almonds, Challenge Butter, Brookfield Properties, Chevron, and its subsidiary Texaco. Hanlin brings a decade of account management and agency growth expertise to Drake Cooper. He began his career at McCann in New York as an account manager on their portfolio of Reckitt’s OTC products and transitioned to McCann Worldgroup’s Global Growth team, acting as a pitch manager across the agency network’s largest clients, including Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, Microsoft, and GM. After three years at McCann, Hanlin was recruited by Wieden+Kennedy in Portland to manage its Old Spice business, where he helped develop campaigns and led launches of multiple new product lines. He later bounced back to New York City to lead growth for Swedish-turned-global agency Forsman & Bodenfors before joining Drake Cooper. Hanlin’s remit as growth officer is to connect with national and regional brands and help shepherd these clients through Drake Cooper’s creative processes. The shop has full-service capabilities, including strategy, creative, analytics, design, production, and media buying and planning. In addition to pursuing national and regional consumer brands, Hanlin will work to continue burnishing the agency’s exceptional reputation for cause marketing. Drake Cooper has become widely known and respected for helping the Idaho Office of Drug Policy and the governor’s office launch a powerful campaign to combat the opioid epidemic. The agency created a series of gripping ads targeted to teens, young adults, parents, and caregivers, illustrating the stark reality of fentanyl overdoses. When it launched in 2023, the “Fentanyl: All It Takes Is Everything” campaign garnered more than 60 million impressions and delivered a 55% increase in fentanyl awareness among targeted young adults and teens. A new fentanyl campaign from the agency is currently in the works….
OpenAI pulls the plug on Sora, the viral AI video app that sparked deepfake concerns
OpenAI is shutting down its social media app Sora, which went viral last fall as a place to share short-form videos generated by artificial intelligence but also raised alarms in Hollywood and elsewhere.
OpenAI said in a brief social media message Tuesday that it was "saying goodbye to the Sora app" and that it would share more soon about how to preserve what users already created on the app.
"What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing," it said.
The company behind ChatGPT released Sora in September as an attempt to capture the attention, and potentially advertising dollars, that follow short-form videos on TikTok, YouTube or Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook.
But a growing chorus of advocacy groups, academics and experts expressed concern about the dangers of letting people create AI videos on just about anything they can type into a prompt, leading to the proliferation of nonconsensual images and realistic deepfakes in a sea of less harmful "AI slop."
OpenAI was forced to crack down on AI creations of public figures — among them, Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mister Rogers — doing outlandish things, but only after an outcry from family estates and an actors' union.
Disney, which made a deal with OpenAI last year to bring its characters to Sora, said in a statement Tuesday that it respects "OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere."
"We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators," Disney's... Read More