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As the 2025 Major League Baseball season gets into full swing, youd expect the league to use its marketing muscle to hype the heroics of its biggest stars. But its anime-style ad campaign takes that idea to a new level. Heroes of the Game mixes the on-field superpowers of players like Shohei Ohtani, Paul Skenes, Julio Rodríguez, Juan Soto, and Aaron Judge with the pop cultural artistry of anime hits like One Piece and Fullmetal Alchemist. Created with ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, the league also partnered with Passion Pictures and Echelle Studios in Japan, as well as acclaimed animation director Hiroshi Shimizu, to make the work. The first ad features a whole collection of players, with individual player spots rolling out over this month. The new work follows earlier collabs with anime series Demon Slayer and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami for the season-opening Tokyo Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs last month. Not-so odd couple It may feel like an odd coupling, but MLB chief marketing officer Uzma Rawn Dowler says the league has used anime in past social posts and fans loved it. And our players are also die-hard anime fans, says Rawn Dowler. Whether it’s Julio (Rodríguez) or Fernando Tatís customizing their cleats with their favorite characters, or Jazz Chisholm wearing a One Piece chain, anime is really popular in our clubhouses and with our players. So we felt like it was a really authentic medium to tell our player stories. The campaign lands at a time that finds baseball flying high. The leagues $12.1 billion in reported 2024 revenue was a record, breaking the previous record of $11.6 billion set in 2023. It also represents a 33% jump in the past decade. Last seasons attendance of more than 71 million fans was the highest since 2017. Television viewership was up across the board, including among the coveted 18-to-34 demographic. If you hit a baseball to Julio Rodríguez, just know you've entered a no-fly zone J-Rod anime goes CRAZY #HeroesOfTheGame pic.twitter.com/kyQq8fFppS— MLB (@MLB) April 13, 2025 Now that it’s got the attention of fansespecially younger onesMLB is focusing on how it can harness their passion for baseball and culture in creative new ways. Back in 2023, the league partnered with Wieden+Kennedy for its Baseball Is Something Else campaign, which this years work continues. Rawn Dowler says the emphasis on specific stars has really paid off, noting, We have young, dynamic, diverse, global players who transcend baseball, and our younger sports fans are increasingly identifying with individual players. So we want to continue to prop up the folks who are the face of our game. The league picks which players to spotlight based on a number of factors, including sheer on-field dominance, and making sure the mix works across a variety of club markets and global audiences. It probably shouldnt be a surprise to find the anime pedigree involved in the new campaign, considering Wieden+Kennedys award-winning, manga- and anime-related work for McDonalds last year. That saw the fast-feeder flip its golden arches as a nod to the fictional spoof store WcDonalds that had become a mainstay of many popular manga and anime TV shows, graphic novels, and video games for the past several decades. The brand went deep to collaborate with celebrated artists on limited-edition packaging, a new sauce, and a series of WcDonalds anime shorts and manga. The next big league event is the inaugural Speedway Classic in August, when the Atlanta Braves will play the Cincinnati Reds on the infield of NASCARs Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee. In the meantime, the league will continue its winning formula of finding creative ways to bring pop culture to baseball, and its superstars to pop culture. It’s just a really exciting time in baseball right now, Rawn Dowler says. The talent level is insane. We have players achieving remarkable feats, and they’re doing it with a little bit of swagger, style, and flair, and so that has allowed us to really showcase and tell the stories of our players.
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E-Commerce
The ever-increasing power of generative AI has divided the graphic design community. Many are embracing the tools in their workflows, while others believe theyve stolen from culture and commoditized a craft. In any case, we all live in a strange time, when people are often presenting fully generative work as their own. Sometimes thats innocuous. And sometimes thats icky. But now Adobe wants to offer the public a means to distinguish the authentic from the automated. A new created without generative AI tag in Adobe Frescothe company’s drawing and painting appwill let you mark work as being free from the use of generative AI tools, to certify that you created it by hand. The feature is likely to come to other pieces of the Adobe Suite, according to Eric Snowden, SVP of design at Adobe. [Image: Adobe] Fresco is one of our tools that were not including generative AI, and we wanted to make sure that for someone creating these amazing artworks by hand, they have the ability to say, I did not use generative AI inside of Fresco, says Snowden. Those are our customers, too, and we want to support them. If they feel the need to be able to convince clients that they didn’t use generative AI, we want to make that as simple for them to do as possible. The new optional disclosure comes alongside a greater wave of announcements from Adobe this week that double down on generative AI. Adobe is introducing video and vector support to its own commercially safe Firefly model, while also integrating popular generative AI models by third partiesincluding OpenAIs ChatGPT, Googles Imagen and Veo, and Fluxinto its software suite. (More partners, including Runway and Luma, will be coming down the line.) Despite Adobes lengthy, and even delayed approach to building its proprietary AI model, Snowden says enabling these options that Adobe has tacitly criticized is all about customer choice. How Adobe marks work as created without generative AI To certify your work as AI-free, Adobe is using its Content Credentials standard. While originally presented as a means to limit misinformationa topic on which I was more than a little skepticalthis approach to metadata makes a lot more sense in the context of Adobes GenAI workflows. These credentials are basically a running receipt of where you did what to any piece of media inside of Adobe’s system. So it will list if you brought your own photo into ChatGPT to restyle it, and then exported it to Adobe Firefly to turn it into video. (Adobe is labeling any media imported into its software that out of its gaze might already be influenced by GenAI as media of unknown origin on this running receipt.) Granted, provenance is almost an oxymoron in any generative AI workflow: ChatGPT 4 was trained on 13 trillion tokens of data youll never be able to cite. But the Content Credentials standard does offer some sort of ledger of reference to clients or the public at large to how something was created. Its something a creator can point to and explain or defend the source of their work. I think illustration is where we’re seeing [demand] . . . but I don’t think it’s specific to only illustration, Snowden says. Indeed, the competing platform Procreate has taken an anti-GenAI stance, but anti-AI sentiment doesnt apply to illustrators alone. I would imagine there are people in every creative discipline where generative AI is not something they’re interested in, Snowden continues. And if they feel compelled to communicateor they’re again being asked to communicatethat they didn’t use generative AI, we should help them do that. Claiming that any digital work is free from the influence of AI is impossible. For a human gesture to be transformed into a pixel, its filtered through all sorts of algorithms that help smooth and make sense of ones input on a screenand that’s definitely true for Adobe Fresco as well as the other apps in its suite. Long before GenAI arrived, Adobe products were steeped in the benefits of artificial intelligence and similar coded assistance. That said, Adobe is clearly reading the room, and realizing it must acknowledge that many creators find generative AI to be an assault on their viewpoint and livelihoodeven while Adobe is investing more into these technologies that are simply too powerful, and in demand, to be ignored. Everybody’s going to create in such different ways, says Snowden. Which is the exciting thing about working on these kinds of projectsgiving people as much choice as possible.
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E-Commerce
Welcome to the world of social media mind control. By amplifying free speech with fake speech, you can numb the brain into believing just about anything. Surrender your blissful ignorance and swallow the red pill. Youre about to discover how your thinking is being engineered by modern masters of deception. The means by which information gets drilled into our psyches has become automated. Lies are yesterday’s problem. Today’s problem is the use of bot farms to trick social media algorithms into making people believe those lies are true. A lie repeated often enough becomes truth. We know that China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and North Korea are using bot networks to amplify narratives all over the world, says Ran Farhi, CEO of Xpoz, a threat detection platform that uncovers coordinated attempts to spread lies and manipulate public opinion in politics and beyond. Bot farm amplification is being used to make ideas on social media seem more popular than they really are. A bot farm consists of hundreds and thousands of smartphones controlled by one computer. In data-center-like facilities, racks of phones use fake social media accounts and mobile apps to share and engage. The bot farm broadcasts coordinated likes, comments, and shares to make it seem as if a lot of people are excited or upset about something like a volatile stock, a global travesty, or celebrity gossipeven though theyre not. Meta calls it coordinated inauthentic behavior. It fools the social networks algorithm into showing the post to more people because the system thinks it’s trending. Since the fake accounts pass the Turing test, they escape detection. Unlike conventional bots that rely on software and API access, bot farm amplification uses real mobile phones. Racks and racks of smartphones connected to USB hubs are set up with SIM cards, mobile proxies, IP geolocation spoofing, and device fingerprinting. That makes them far more difficult to detect than the bots of yore. Its very difficult to distinguish between authentic activity and inauthentic activity, says Adam Sohn, CEO of Narravance, a social media threat intelligence firm with major social networks as clients. Its hard for us, and were one of the best at it in the world. Disinformation, Depression-era-style Distorting public perception is hardly a new phenomenon. But in the old days, it was a highly manual process. Just months before the 1929 stock market crash, Joseph P. Kennedy, JFKs father, got richer by manipulating the capital markets. He was part of a secret trading pool of wealthy investors who used coordinated buying and media hype to artificially pump the price of Radio Corp. of America shares to astronomical levels. After that, Kennedy and his rich friends dumped their RCA shares at a huge profit, the stock collapsed, and everyone else lost their asses. After the market crashed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Kennedy the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Today, stock market manipulators use bot farms to amplify fake posts about hot stocks on Reddit, Discord, and X. Bot networks target messages laced with ticker symbols and codified slang phrases like cmon fam, buy the dip, load up now and keep pushing. The self-proclaimed finfluencers behind the schemes are making millions in profit by coordinating armies of avatars, sock puppets, and bots to hype thinly traded stocks so they can scalp a vig after the price increases. We find so many instances where there’s no news story, says Adam Wasserman, CFO of Narravance. There’s no technical indicator. There are just bots posting things like this stocks going to the moon and greatest stock, pulling out of my 401k. But they arent real people. Its all fake. In a world where all information is now suspect and decisions are based on sentiment, bot farm amplification has democratized market manipulation. But stock trading is only one application. Anyone can use bot farms to influence how we invest, make purchasing decisions, or vote. These are the same strategies behind propaganda efforts pioneered by Russia and the Islamic State to broadcast beheadings and sway elections. But theyve been honed to sell stocks, incite riots, and, allegedly, even tarnish celebrity reputations. Its the same song, just different lyrics. People under the age of 30 don’t go to Google anymore, says Jacki Alexander, CEO at pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. They go to TikTok and Instagram and search for the question they want to answer. It requires zero critical thinking skills but somehow feels more authentic. You feel like youre making your own decisions by deciding which videos to watch, but you’re actually being fed propaganda thats been created to skew your point of view. Its not an easy problem to solve. And social media companies appear to be buckling to inauthenticity. After Elon Musk took over Twitter (now X), the company fired much of its anti-misinformation team and reduced the transparency of platform manipulation. Meta is phasing out third-party fact-checking. And YouTube rolled back features meant to combat misinformation. On TikTok, you used to be able to see how many times a specific hashtag was shared or commented on, says Alexander. But they took those numbers down after news articles came out showing the exact same pro-Chinese propaganda videos got pushed up way more on TikTok than Instagram. Algorithmically boosting specific content is a practice known as heating. If theres no trustworthy information, what we think will likely become less important than how we feel. Thats why were regressing from the Age of Sciencewhen critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning were centralback to something resembling the Edwardian era, which was driven more by emotional reasoning and deference to authority. When Twitter introduced microblogging, it was liberating. We all thought it was a knowledge amplifier. We watched it fuel a pro-democracy movement that swept across the Middle East and North Africa called the Arab Spring and stoke national outrage over racial injustice in Ferguson, Missouri, planting the seeds for Black Lives Matter. While Twitter founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey thought they were building a platform for political and social activism, their trust and safety team was getting overwhelmed with abuse. Its like they never really read Lord of the Flies. People who dont study literature or history, they dont have any idea of what could happen, said tech journalist Kara Swisher in Breaking the Bird, a CNN documentary about Twitter. Your outrage has been cultivated Whatever gets the most likes, comments, and shares gets amplified. Emotionally charged posts that lure the most engagement get pushed up to the top of the news feed. Enrage to engage is a strategy. Social media manipulation has become very sophisticated, says Wendy Sachs, director-producer of October 8, a documentary about the campus protests that erupted the day after the October 7th Hama attack on Israel. It’s paid for and funded by foreign governments looking to divide the American people. Malicious actors engineer virality by establishing bots that leach inside communities for months, sometimes years, before they get activated. The bots are given profile pics and bios. Other tricks include staggering bot activity to occur in local time zones, using U.S. device fingerprinting techniques like setting the smartphones internal clock to the time zone to where an imaginary user supposedly lives, and setting the phones language to English. Using AI-driven personas with interests like cryptocurrency or dogs, bots are set to follow real Americans and cross-engage with other bots to build up perceived credibility. Its a concept known as social graph engineering, which involves infiltrating broad interest communities that align with certain biases, such as left- or right-leaning politics. For example, the K-pop network BTS Army has been mobilized by liberals, while Formula 1 networks might lend themselves to similar manipulation from conservatives. The bots leach inside these communities and earn trust through participation before agitating from within. Bot accounts lay dormant, and at a certain point, they wake up and start to post synchronously, which is what we’ve observed they actually do, says Valentin Châtelet, research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council. They like the same post to increase its engagement artificially. To set up and manage thousands of fake social media accounts, some analysts believe that bot farms are deployed with the help of cyber criminal syndicates and state sponsorship, giving them access to means that are not ordinary. View this post on Instagram
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E-Commerce
Substack and Patreon are vying to become creators primary revenue stream. For most influencers, payouts from platforms like Meta or Google arent enough to build a sustainable career. Rather than spending their days hawking products, many creators are turning to direct fan support, and two companies dominate that space: Patreon and Substack. Patreons latest move targets streamers. Its native livestreaming feature, currently in demo and set for a broad rollout this summer, could attract gamers and broadcasters alike. But Substack beat them to it, launching a similar live video tool just three months earlier. As the two platforms expand their offerings, the rivalry for creator loyalty is heating up. The market for creator livestreams Video already performs well on the platform: Its Patreons second-highest-earning media category after podcasting. Many Twitch streamers rely on Patreon as a more stable source of subscription revenue, preferring it to Twitchs unpredictable payouts. With the addition of live video, Patreon is betting that more of these streamers will shift even larger parts of their operations to its platform. Creators can use livestreams to attract new free members, but they can also use it to encourage free members to pay to upgrade to unlock a Live so that creators are earning the most from their fans, writes Drew Rowny, Patreons VP of Product, in an email to Fast Company. Native livestreams will also be a part of our existing ticketed events experience on Patreon. Live will become a part of our tools that already convert 700,000 free memberships to paid each month. But Substack, which was founded four years after Patreon, already has the upperhand. The platform introduced livestreaming to top-performing creators in September, then expanded access sitewide in January. Video is now central to Substacks strategy: 82% of its 250 highest-earning creators are using audio and video in their work. Since its inception, Substack has been a refuge for journalists leaving legacy mediaand its live video feature is now drawing in television anchors as well. Don Lemon and Jim Acosta both stream on Substackand sometimes, they stream together. As of 2025, roughly one in three live videos on the platform are cohosted with another Substack creator. Earlier this month, former MSNBC host Chris Matthews announced hell be streaming there, too. The important thing about live video, community features, or any other publishing tools is that they aren’t just standalone featuresthey’re connected to a network that helps publishers grow both audience and revenue, Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie writes in an email to Fast Company. That’s what Substack does exceptionally well. Who will win the creator subscription market? Second-stream creator revenue has been Patreons domain for over a decade. But Substack has recently inched its way, courting TikTok creators with big-money incentives. To some extent, the budding strategy has worked. When Hannah Neeleman, the infamous trad wife behind Ballerina Farm, wanted to venture outside of TikTok, she started a Substack newsletter. So have a good many shopping influencers, wanting to more easily insert affiliate links. Not long ago, Patreon would have been these creators only option. Of course, Substack doesnt think of itself as a Patreon competitor. It wants to be known as a wider social media platform, and not just a subscription serviceeven if it continues to tout its five million paid subscriptions. Substack is a destination people visit specifically to discover new voices and find creators to subscribe to,” McKenzie says. “Users willingly engage with all content forms while there, whether it’s livestreaming, reading, watching videos, or listening to podcasts. In that sense, Substack is truly a 360-degree platform, offering creators everything they need. It’s more comparable to YouTube than to Patreon. That doesnt mean Patreon is losing its grip. The company emphasizes that more than half of the $290 billion creator economy comes from direct-to-fan paid programs. The growth of other platforms could just be a sign of an expanding industry. Were seeing more and more platforms helping creators to connect directly with their fanswhich is a great thing for the creator economy, Patreons Rowny writes. Creators can build tighter communities, grow their audience more, and earn more income on Patreon. Were laser-focused on helping creators manage and grow their direct-to-fan businesses.
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E-Commerce
When it opened in 2001, watchmaker Timex’s new headquarters building in Middlebury, Connecticut, was an architectural wonder. Its all-glass walls and open floor plan put the entire 275-person company in one big, light-filled workspace, covered by a swooping arched roof. It was a radical embrace of the ideals of openness, collaboration, and anti-hierarchical social interaction. On top of all this, the award-winning building had one additionaland uniquefeature: a hole in the top that shines sunlight down on an ancient time-marking device known as a meridian line. Covering the building at the time, Fast Company noted the building itself is a watch. But now the building is on the verge of being demolished, decades earlier than most buildings of its generation would be threatened. A distribution center has been proposed for development on the site, and Timex, which is now majority owned by a hedge fund, is planning to move out. About the only thing standing in the way of the wrecking ball is a man named Nicholas Stuller. In 2020, the 61-year-old and his family moved to Middlebury, where he runs a financial technology startup. The town of about 8,000 people sits 25 miles outside of New Haven, and is mostly green and bucolic. Its the kind of place where not much changes. So in 2023, many residents were surprised to learn of plans for a speculative 670,000-square-foot distribution center that a group of developers wanted to build there, not far from Interstate 84. Part of the complex, named Southford Park, would sit right on the footprint of the Timex building, known as Watch Hill. To build the distribution center, the Timex building would have to be torn down. [Photo: M3Media Productions] Stuller learned the news at the same time as the rest of the community, but he was even more in the dark: Still relatively new to the town, he didn’t know Timex was located there, or about its unique headquarters. Curious, he took a detour one morning in October 2023 on the way to dropping his daughter off at grade school. Stuller and his daughter pulled up to the building and walked in the front door to take a look. They ended up going on an impromptu tour led by a group of eager company employees. They rolled out the red carpet. An hour and 15 minutes later, I had to take my daughter to school, but they kept on talking about the building, about the company, Stuller says. [Its] a magnificent building, he adds. It’s so unusual. I’ve been in a lot of buildings around the country and the world, and this is a really unique building. I walked out of there saying, wow, something’s got to get done. Irrespective of the distribution center, this building needs to be preserved. So Stuller launched a nonprofit called Save Historic Middlebury with the goal of creating preservation laws in the town, which currently has none. The intent is to establish the legal framework to stop the demolition of the Timex building. For now, there’s little to prevent the building’s owners from knocking it down. Save Historic Middlebury is trying to get the building recognized as a significant historic property. It’s the only building, we think, in the world, let alone the U.S., where the building itself is a working example of the product the company makes, Stuller says. His group has gathered support from a range of preservation groups, including the Sierra Club of Connecticut, the Cultural Landscape Foundation, and Docomomo US. [Photo: M3Media Productions] Former Timex employees are also supportive of the preservation effort. Lou Nugai worked in computer operations for Timex from 1968 until his retirement in 2012, spending time both in the company’s previous headquarters in an office park on the edge of town and in the current building from 2001 onward. It was nice. The floor plan was open. There was good visibility. I liked it quite a bit, he says, noting it was a particular improvement on the previous headquarters. They were completely opposite. I wouldn’t say it was a dungeon, but it wasn’t as bright or cheerful as Watch Hill. Last August Save Historic Middlebury made a formal application to the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office to have the building added to the National Register of Historic Places. When we applied to put the building on the register, not surprisingly the developer who owns the building said, no, we don’t want you to put it on, Stuller says. But because anybody can apply for a building to be included on the National Register, Stuller and his group moved forward. In December, the application was denied at the state level, ostensibly because the building is not at least 50 years old, a general guideline often used to gauge a building’s historic character. It’s one particular person at the state level who just doesn’t like new buildings, Stuller says. Save Historic Middlebury is amending its application and plans to reapply. (The group also briefly filed a lawsuit under the Connecticut Environmental Policy Act to stave off demolition, but withdrew the suit in December.) Timex plas to vacate the building this spring and move into another office building in nearby Shelton. Once it’s vacant, theoretically the property developer could knock it down, Stuller says. Timex did not respond to requests for comment. [Photo: M3Media Productions] In the meantime, other groups in Middlebury have lobbied to stop the development project that would result in the Timex building’s demolition. The Middlebury Small Town Alliance has led a lawsuit against the distribution center’s developers. It doesn’t match our community, says Jennifer Mahr, president of the alliance. Her organization is opposed to the distribution center, but is also in favor of preserving the Timex building. A lot of us agree that something else could be done on that property as is, says Mahr, who was subsequently elected to the town’s governing Board of Selectmen. It’s a perfectly fine building. In January, the group got a favorable ruling from the local superior court judge, who decided that permits issued to the developers were in violation of the town’s wetlands and zoning regulations, effectively halting the project. But an appeal is now being prepared. Lawyers for the developer declined to comment. I’ll be surprised if the appellate court takes the case, Mahr says. I do think that their appeal has run out of steam. Even if the distribution center project falls through, Stuller and his group of volunteer preservationists are concerned that the Timex building is still in danger. He says the group plans to filed its amended National Register application directly to the National Park Service within the next month or two. They’re hoping for a positive response the second time around, but aren’t relying on protection from the top down. Stuller says the building’s fate may hinge on how much support he can gather from the local community and beyond. Once we continue to beat this drum and get the word out, he says, I think there’s decent odds we can convince the people that do control the building to change their plans.
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E-Commerce
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