Dear Jeff Bezos,

Your latest financial earnings report really got me thinking. Why do people buy from Amazon today? Two reasons spring to mind:

1. Because Amazon is convenient (customers know they will find everything they need, at a good price that they don’t have to spend hours comparing).

2. Because Amazon is reliable (fast delivery and easy returns process).

In short, Amazon is easy and you know you won’t be disappointed. It does exactly what it says on the tin.

Differentiation is great, but it’s only necessary in a few relevant aspects. Being the first to do ‘XYZ’ may be cool, but online shopping has grown up and today people don’t buy from you because it’s cool - they buy from you because it’s easy and they won’t be disappointed.

Continuing its long tradition of creating memorable and entertaining in-flight safety videos, Dwarves, Orcs and Elves are set to take flight once again as Air New Zealand unveils The Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made ahead of the December release of the final film in The Hobbit Trilogy.

The safety video features members of the cast from all three films in the Trilogy including Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins), Dean O’Gorman (Fili the Dwarf) and Sylvester McCoy (Radagast) – as well as a special cameo from the director, Sir Peter Jackson, and some other familiar faces.

The new video follows the airline’s first Hobbit-inspired safety video – An Unexpected Briefing (2012) – which attracted more than 12 million global online video views, generating huge social media coverage. The Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made wraps up a successful three-year association between the airline and The Hobbit films.

Smart brands are turning consumers into evangelists - and publishers.

Storytelling is a verb, and many brands believe that means they should be telling stories about their brand, which was just another method of spinning one-way advertising. True, a brand’s origin story (think of Apple, HP) can be useful, but the true power in storytelling is when brands create products and content that motivates audiences to talk about the brand and keep them top of mind in ways far less intrusive than traditional advertising.

So if there’s enough confusion about the definition of storytelling, then maybe we need a new word. David Berkowitz recently wrote in AdAge about something called storymaking—where the brand facilitates and taps into the stories people are creating and sharing with each other. You could call it the next evolution in storytelling, or maybe just a proper redefinition of the way brands should be marketing to their audiences. Regardless, storymaking is how brands today are activating their customers and turning them into not only evangelists but also publishers, and it can provide real results.

According to the IAB UK’s recently released Digital Ad Spend Report – done in conjunction with PwC – mobile video advertising has grown 196% over the past two years to £63.9m. This makes it the fastest growing digital ad format, accounting for £1 in every £5 spent on Internet and mobile display ads.  As automated buying also grows to keep pace with the explosion of ads on the format, there are two key benefits that mobile programmatic can bring for brands.

1) The ability to keep pace with change

The pace of change in consumer behaviour does not wait for the advertising community to catch up with it. As brands’ target audiences move en masse towards mobile devices, every advertiser’s programmatic campaign must include a strong mobile element – brands simply cannot afford to ignore the areas where their audiences are paying increasing amounts of attention. This attention is now split across multiple screens and a single programmatic campaign can target and optimize against desired audiences in a holistic and unified fashion.

If you haven’t checked out the winners from this year’s Festival of Media LatAm Awards, then what are you waiting for!? All of the winning case studies are available on Cream so if you want some inspiration, you know what you have to do.

CHECK OUT THE FOMLA 2014 AWARDS WINNERS HERE

We’re also giving you a sneaky glimpse into the FOMLA 2014 Awards ceremony, for those who couldn’t make it and want to see all the winners in all their glory.

For all the highlights, check this out:

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” - Lemony Snicket

Given millennials’ love of short-form video, Instagram, hyperlapses, tweets and the gamification of everything we touch, it’s easy to believe they don’t read long-form media. But it’s simply not true. In fact, according to Crowd Tap, millennials spend nearly 18 hours a day consuming all kinds of media. 18! Granted, millennials consume more than one form of media on more than one device at a time, but this is still a massive amount of time to be consuming anything.

In fact, millennials are reading more than the over-30 crowd: 88% of Americans under 30 says they’ve read a book in the past year, compared with 79% of Americans older than 30, according to the Pew Research Center. Bonus fact: 43% of millennials read from a book every day – it just might not be a paper book.

Want to take advantage of millennials’ penchant for reading? Here’s one millennials’ advice:

Want to know the secret to viral video success? Well if we look at the latest sharing figures from across the social web, all it takes is a great soundtrack, some theatrical backgrounds and a few famous faces thrown in there too; in other words the BBC’s latest ad promoting BBC Music, created by ad agency Karmarama.

Thanks to Unruly’s Viral Video Chart, we can see that the most shared ad globally from across the social web in the last 7 days was ‘God Only Knows – BBC Music’ with 201,161 shares. Its closest competitor was ‘Danny Macaskill: The Ridge’ with 148,667 and ‘Chanel No5: The One That I Want – The Film’ with 94,778 shares in the last seven days.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, not only where have you been, but here it is again:

We recently looked at what happens during one minute on Facebook and Twitter, but what about YouTube? Well, did you know that over 100 hours’ worth of video is uploaded in 60 seconds and more than 2.7 million videos viewed. Wow!

Thanks to YouTubeDownload, check out the infographic below to find out what else happens in one minute, including just how much money the most popular YouTube channels make.