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Back in March, to mark International Womens Day, LOreal launched a short film called The Final Copy of Ilon Specht, a 18-minute profile of the advertising copywriter who coined the brands iconic tagline, Because Im Worth It. For the past 50 years, its been the global beauty giants own version of Just Do It. But this is far from the usual self-congratulatory brand hype video. Directed by Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot, the film spotlights the fights Specht had to win in order for her vision to come to life in 1971. Close to 80 years old during filming, Specht didnt pull any punches. She paints a picture of what advertising in that era looked like, both outwardly in the world, and internally as a business. In the ’70s, most of the advertising for womens products were from the perspective of men, or in service to men. This will make you pretty . . . for your man. This will clean the house better . . . for your husband and children. In the film, she describes male colleagues who were always arguing with her and taking credit when something worked. She recalled how during pitch and idea meetings for LOreal Preference hair color, male colleagues had suggested an idea that cast the woman as an object, rather than the subject. I was feeling angry. Im not interested in writing anything about looking good for men. Fuck em, says an elderly, and terminally ill, Specht in the film, before looking straight down the camera to the male camera operator. And fuck you, too. The film won the Grand Prix for the film category at the Cannes Lions of Creativity last week, and is currently streaming on TED, AMC+, and Prime Video. McCann global CEO Daryl Lee credits his colleague Charlotte Franceries, president of McCann Paris and the agencys lead on the LOreal business. The fact that we made this true story about one woman is because Charlotte said to me, we are all benefiting as McCann and as L’Oreal Paris from the power of one woman’s truth and no one knows her name, says Lee. What could have been The original ad for LOreal Preference hair color that first used the line, Because Im Worth It is a single shot of a woman walking towards the camera, explaining why she likes it, and how it makes her feel. @lorealparis Our original Preference ad from 1973. You know the line but do you know the story of the woman behind our iconic tagline? #LorealParis #iamworthit#OnRegardeQuoi #thefinalcopyofilonspecht son original – LOréal Paris – LOréal Paris In the doc, we find out that spot almost never happened. In fact, Specht went behind her bosses’ back to create the ad after her agency produced and the brand approved a spot with almost the exact same script, except it was a man speaking the words on behalf of his wife, walking silently beside him. Its clear that 50 years later it still made Specht angry. Angry enough to not want to talk about advertising or that campaign ever again. But director Ben Proudfoot convinced her to participate. To get Proudfoot involved, producer Brendan Gaul says the key was to give the director 100% creative control. Our intention was to create a film from the beginning, not a piece of advertising that looked like a film, says Gaul. And the distinction there actually is in the creative control. The distinction is also in how the film rolled out. Not as part of an ad campaign, but on the film festival circuit. After premiering at Tribeca X in June 2024, it earned Best Short Documentary at HollyShorts Film Festival, Best Short Documentary and the Best Atlantic Filmmaker Award at Lunenburg Film Festival, Best Documentary Short at the Chelsea Film Festival, and Best Short Film at Hot Springs Documentary Festival. Relevant past and present Franceries says that the entire doc process began as an exercise for LOreal to interrogate the relevance of its longtime tagline. That after 50 years or so, perhaps it was losing a bit of its meaning to people. We needed to keep it but had to give it a much stronger meaning, says Franceries. And the documentary is the most efficient piece of content weve done to convince people about the true meaning. Since its release, the film has attracted more than two billion impressions, and increased brand consideration for LOreal by 70% among viewers. Its a story of the past that does not sugarcoat the role both LOreal and McCann played as corporations and as work environments to contribute to the culture Specht was reacting against. Lee says thats important because it shows how relevant it is to constantly be checking for blindspots, both as a person and a company. And in an environment where more and more corporations are receding away from DEI commitments, the message of the film is as important as it was 50 years ago. The blind spot is always going to be inclusion,” says Lee. Business is now speed, seamlessness and scale, and you have to keep checking yourself to say, Okay, we could do this faster, but someone is not speaking up, or someone is not participating, and they could be the person who unlocks the truth here.’ Specht died in April 2024 at the age of 81. She never saw the finished film. Thankfully, her voice still lives on. “I’m not interested in advertising, I don’t give a shit, she says in the film. Its about humans; its not about advertising. It’s about caring for people because . . . we’re all worth it, or no one is worth it.
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E-Commerce
A Republican-sponsored proposal before Congress to mandate the sale of federal public lands received a mixed reception Monday from the governors of Western states.A budget proposal from Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee would mandate the sale of more than 3,125 square miles (8,093 square kilometers) of federal lands to state or other entities. It was included recently in a draft provision of the GOP’s sweeping tax cut package.At a summit Monday of Western state governors, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said the approach is problematic in New Mexico because of the close relationship residents have with those public lands.“I’m open” to the idea, said Lujan Grisham, a second-term Democratic governor and former congresswoman. “Except here.”“Our public lands, we have a very strong relationship with the openness, and they belong to all of us,” said Lujan Grisham, who was announcing written recommendations Monday on affordable housing strategies from the Western Governors’ Association. “And selling that to the private sector without a process, without putting New Mexicans first, is, for at least for me as a governor, going to be problematic.”Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum was among the leaders from several federal agencies who attended the meeting that runs through Tuesday. He has touted the many potential uses for public lands that include recreation, logging and oil and gas production, saying it could boost local economies.Several hundred protesters in downtown Santa Fe denounced efforts that might privatize federal public lands, chanting “not for sale” and carrying signs reading “This land belongs to you and me” and “keep our public land free for future generations.”Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon voiced qualified support for plans to tap federal land for development.“On a piece-by-piece basis where states have the opportunity to craft policies that make sense we can actually allow for some responsible growth in areas with communities that are landlocked at this point,” he said at a news conference outside the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. “There may be value there.”Lee has said federal land sales under his proposal would target “isolated parcels” that could be used for housing or infrastructure, and would not include national parks, national monuments or wilderness.Land in 11 Western states from Alaska to New Mexico would be eligible for sale. Montana was carved out of the proposal after its lawmakers objected.In some states, such as Utah and Nevada, the government controls the vast majority of lands, protecting them from potential exploitation but hindering growth. Morgan Lee, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
The startup Warp is best known for its modern, AI-empowered take on the terminalthe decades-old, text-based interface that’s invisible to most in a world of touchscreens and mice, but still beloved by programmers and system administrators. The terminal is probably most familiar to the public from movies and TV shows, where its stark black background and arcane command-line language have come to symbolize hacker prowess. Warp added features that make the terminal and its often-cryptic commands less intimidating and easier to use, such as AI-enhanced autocomplete and suggestions, along with a collaborative system called Warp Drive that lets coworkers share frequently used commands and best practices. Now, Warp is betting that a similar kind of interface will help developers command artificial intelligence, in a world where code is increasingly generated and deployed by typing prompts to AI rather than writing it directly. [Image: Courtesy of Warp] “We’re moving from a world where developers traditionally have done most of their work by hand to one where they’re doing their work by prompt with agents,” says Zach Lloyd, Warp’s founder and CEO. Traditionally, developers have worked in an integrated development environment (IDE), which combines tools for navigating files, specialized text editing tabs for writing code, and easy access to tools that compile human-readable code into something computers can run. They’ve also often used terminal software like Warpsor more basic versionsto deploy code to servers, start automated processes, and troubleshoot errors. Zack Lloyd [Photo: Courtesy of Warp] But today, coders increasingly perform these tasks by issuing prompts to AI agents, which can generate code, execute commands to deploy it, and even diagnose problems on their own. “Our thesis is that to support this new workflow, what is needed is a workbench that really is neither the IDE or the terminal,” Lloyd says. Thats why Warp is launching what it calls an agentic development environmenta new class of tool that emphasizes terminal-style panes or tabs for typing prompts to AI agents, along with controls to help supervise the AIs operations. These controls regulate when AI agents need human approval to make changes to code or restrict them from executing certain commandssuch as deleting fileswithout explicit permission. Power users can open multiple tabs to interact with various agents, powered by AI from labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, and can monitor and guide them as they worksimilar to how developers have always invoked command-line tools from the terminal. AI agents can also execute terminal commands themselves under user supervision, useful for everything from managing cloud computing servers to debugging error messages. An enhanced version of Warp Drive even allows users to share information with AI agents as well as with human coworkers. [Image: Courtesy of Warp] “We’ve made this investment even before LLMs of, how do you centralize the team’s knowledge,” says Lloyd. “And that’s super valuable for an agent to access as well.” Since AI is still far from infallible, users can easily edit AI-generated code changescalled diffs (short for differences, in developer jargon)before approving them, or re-prompt the AI to correct errors. Individual Warp users can choose whether to operate entirely via prompts, or to open more traditional panes to edit code line by line, review AI changes, or use the classic Warp terminal. [Image: Courtesy of Warp] Lloyd says that integrating all of these features into a single AI-centric environment gives Warp an edge over other AI development tools like Cursor and Windsurf, which focus primarily on writing code. And by building a complete development environmentincluding coding and terminal toolsWarp has an advantage over Anthropic’s Claude Code, which operates from within a terminal, he says. “We are one layer outside of that, so we can be the whole agentic development environment, which means that we can do things in terms of the user experience that they just simply can’t do,” Lloyd says. “We can have diffs editable, we can do system notifications, we can have a UX for managing agents across all your panes and tabs.” Warp, which already has more than 500,000 users, plans to keep pricing the same as it rolls out these new features, with plans starting at $15 and $40 per month, alongside a limited free version and custom pricing for enterprise editions. Lloyd says revenue is growin fastbetween 5% and 15% per week during 2025and hes optimistic that trend will continue as developers look for tools to efficiently steer and collaborate with AI coding agents. “It just is cool that that interface that we built for doing this with commands works extremely well for agents,” he says.
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E-Commerce
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