In this week’s Our Take, an ultra-luxury resort makes a music video, we check out a beauty campaign with a difference, AVATAR motion suits lead the way in new medical advancements, a short film shares an insight into life with Alzheimer’s disease and a new social platform is about to spill the tea on inclusivity.
Dance Tracks and Decadence
This week we saw the grand opening of Atlantis The Royal in Dubai featuring an unforgettable, albeit controversial, performance from Beyonce. $24 mill for a one-hour concert? Sign us up, please.
The use of musical artists to promote the ultra-luxury hotel seems to be a key marketing strategy for the resort with Queen Bey being the most recent collaborator, but not the first.
Ahead of the opening, GRAMMY® Award-winning artist Tiësto joined forces with singer/songwriter Tate McRae to create a commissioned track titled “10:35”, for the hotel.
Call it a single or a glorified advert for Atlantis The Royal, 10:35’s highly stylised music video shows off the opulence of the resort, from rooms to reception. The music-video dropped ahead of the grand opening and has 11 million views on Youtube.
Atlantis The Royal tapped into the trend of artists filming in grandiose locations and capitalised on it by forming smart partnerships with global icons.
What’s next? Madonna at the Merrion? Shakira at the Shelbourne? Bring it on.
Motion-Suit Medical Marvel
Maybe you’ve sat through all 192 minutes of Avatar, A Way of Water, or maybe you’d rather watch blue paint dry, but in a plot twist we didn’t expect, the medical world HAS been paying attention. Not to the CGI aliens, but to the motion-capture suits the actors wore.
Scientists have adapted the suits to track the onset of diseases which impair movement, with impressive results!
The motion-capture suits combine with artificial intelligence to observe and analyse body movements. In tests with this new technology, some genetic disorders were detected far earlier than with standard testing methods.
This advancement in diagnosing genetic disorders could massively impact treatment, including faster development of drugs and speed-up clinical trials for rarer diseases. The use of motion-capture suits could also be applied to conditions involving the brain and nervous system, heart, lungs, muscles, bone and a number of psychiatric disorders.
Still not sure about the blue aliens though.
Glitch in the Universe
An Alzheimer’s charity has released a powerful short film that helps us understand what it’s like to live with Alzheimer’s Disease.
Created by BBDO Germany for the Alzheimer Forschung Initiative and based on the insight that Alzheimer’s is literally a glitch in a person’s brain, the film expertly uses visual effects and editing techniques to replicate the confusion and frustration often experienced by sufferers each and every day.
Filmed from the first-person perspective of a woman going about her daily life, we see her experience various interruptions (glitches) that, combined with the striking sound effects, convey a sense of discomfort for the viewer.
It’s an impressive and emotive piece of video with the first-person vantage point bringing the audience into the fold of what is daily struggle for over 50 million people worldwide.
Check out the short video here.
Spill The Tea
If, like the rest of the World, you’ve been waiting with bated breath for the demise of Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover, you might want to check out Spill, a new social platform that puts the cha-ching in content creation.
Created by two former Twitter employees, Alphonzo Terrell and DeVaris Brown, who saw a problem in the tech industry when they discovered they were the only two black guys in their department.
Responding to studies showing that Tweets written by African Americans are 1.5 more likely to be flagged as offensive than those of White native English speakers, Spill is re-writing AI to be more reflective and inclusive of linguistics beyond White culture.
Similar to Twitter, Spill will feature a live newsfeed where users can keep up to date with all things pop culture, current affairs and memes. The platform also aims to reward creators who are most-often overlooked by traditional social media platforms, mainly Black women and members of the Queer community.
The platform isn’t available for use just yet, however you can reserve your handle right here.
Age and beauty
Beauty products are often sold to us via the dewy complexions of teenage skin, but one brand is seeking to change the eternal youth narrative. L’oreal Paris has launched a campaign across the Nordics using user-generated content exclusively from women aged 45-85.
13% of Instagram users are aged over 45, with Gen X-ers being the fastest-growing demographic on the app. Talent ranges from 65-year-old blogger and model Susanne Histrup to Finnish entrepreneur and author Merja Mähkä whose videos are helping to promote Rosy Oil-Serum directly to L’oreal Paris’s target audience. Will this prompt other brands to be more inclusive in their influencer targeting?