Articles from AdWeek Advertising and branding

Despite reports that young people are moving away from Facebook, they’re still using the social network in big numbers—fully 66 percent of people 14-34 say they’re frequent users, according to The Cassandra Report, Fall/Winter 2013 edition. Further, usership rises as people get older, suggesting that the youngest teens aren’t moving away from Facebook as much as using other platforms along with it. Nevertheless, other platforms are challenging its dominance, chiefly YouTube, which is frequently used by 68 percent of those 14-34.

Back in the aughts, when Google wanted to recruit developers, it famously put up a billboard with a complex math problem that led to a website with an even more complex math problem. Last year, when Flickr, owned by Yahoo, wanted to recruit developers, it less famously hid a link to its jobs site in the page's source code—which unlike some superhuman math problem, any old muppet from the non-coder underclass can access using the menu bar or keyboard hotkeys. Last week, the buried ad—"You're reading.

In marketing, sometimes the greatest obstacle to greatness can be attempting to re-create greatness. Advertising seems to know only how to cheapen art, making it incredibly rare to find an homage that doesn't feel like a commercialized cardboard cutout of the original. So it was ambitious enough for The Sunday Times and agency Grey London to attempt this ad devoted to iconic moments in art, music and film. But then they doubled down by choosing to create one seamless take that brings each of these masterworks to life.

The Food and Drug Administration is hoping a little fear can go a long way in warning teens of the cost of smoking. In the agency's first national public education campaign ads dramatize the health consequences of smoking mixed with a little bit of vanity to convince teens not to smoke. Created by Draftfcb, in one set of ads, an African-American male teen and a white female teen are told by a clerk in a convenience store that the money they've just laid down for a pack of smokes isn't enough. The male then takes a pair of pliers and rips out his teeth.