THE REVIEW

September started with Labor Day in the United States, honoring the American labor movement and the contributions that workers have made to the strength, prosperity, laws and well-being of the country. It is considered the unofficial end of summer in the U.S. and is recognized as a federal holiday.

Just as September brought Labor Day, the end of summer and the unofficial start of Fall, it also brought Hurricane Irma and Maria and let's not forget 3 Mexico earthquakes (followed by a volcanic eruption), fires on the West coast of the U.S. and a minor tremor in Los Angeles along with a train bomb in London, UK.

Further, flooding in Bangladesh and Houston and now Bali's Mount Agung is on high alert. The world is definitely fighting its' fair share of battles, natural disasters and otherwise.

THE REVIEW for the month of September focus's on "THE FALL" in a literal sense with so many natural disasters and of course the seasonal and symbolic meaning of fall that we're calling "THE RISE" and which embodies Change, Mystery, Preservation, Protection, Comfort, Balance and Letting Go.

Through witnessing "THE FALL", we have also witnessed "THE RISE" of everyone working and pulling together to build up their countries, towns, states, businesses, ventures and each other all over again. Life is full of ups and downs and just as we, our homes, communities, and the leaves on our trees fall, shortly after, re-growth happens and we and the leaves, all rise again, over and over, as often as necessary. This is the way nature works and the circle of life. We wish all a speedy recovery, with much love and light and sincerely hope all rebuild speedily and continue on a better trajectory going forward.

Here's what went down and up in September:

CAUSES AND GOVERNMENT NEWS

THE REVIEW donated to FEMA and UNICEF for Puerto Rico and Mexico AND hopes you did or do too, along with many celebrities such as Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony and Rob DeNiro calling out Puerto rico and Mexico and urging people and the U.S. government to donate and send much needed aid.

To donate to FEMA and help Puerto Rico today, go here:

https://www.fema.gov/volunteer-donate-responsibly

To donate to UNICEF and help Mexico today, go here:

https://www.unicefusa.org/donate/support-unicefs-earthquake-relief-efforts-mexico/32909

Regarding Puerto Rico, all has been devastating and the island was hit by not one, but two massive hurricanes this month, Irma and Maria, back to back.

The good news is that many are now being able to leave and hopefully return as soon as possible and help and relief are now in effect with more on the way. Here's what J Lo is doing for PR and a bit about Kylie Jenner on the tail end to lighten the mood.

Video by: CBS News

Here's a bit more in-depth about PR:

U.S. APPOINTS GENERAL TO OVERSEE A MILITARY RESPONSE TO PUERTO RICO DISASTER

Written by: Frances Kerry and Steve Gorman and reported by: Robin Respaut and David Graham in SAN JUAN and Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey in WASHINGTON for REUTERS®

Additional reporting by Makini Brice, Roberta Rampton, Richard Cowan, David Shepardson and Idrees Ali in WASHINGTON, and David Gaffen and Scott DiSavino in NEW YORK; Editing by Howard Goller, Lisa Shumaker and Paul Tait.

Pics and content by: CNN®, NY DAILY NEWS® and THE WEATHER CHANNEL®, THE SMIRKING CHIMP, THEBLAZE.COM

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO (Reuters)

The Pentagon named a senior general to command military relief operations in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico on Thursday and the Trump administration sent a Cabinet emissary to the island as U.S. lawmakers called for a more robust response to the crisis.

The U.S. territory of 3.4 million people struggled through a ninth day with virtually no electricity, patchy communications and shortages of fuel, clean water and other essentials in the wake of Hurricane Maria, the most powerful storm to hit the island in nearly 90 years.

The storm struck on Sept. 20 with lethal, roof-ripping force and torrential rains that caused widespread flooding and heavily damaged homes, roads and other infrastructure.

The storm killed more than 30 people across the Caribbean, including at least 16 in Puerto Rico. Governor Ricardo Rossello has called the island’s devastation unprecedented.

The U.S. military, which has poured thousands of troops into the relief effort, named Lieutenant General Jeffrey Buchanan to oversee its response on the island.

Buchanan, Army chief for the military’s U.S. Northern Command, was arrived in Puerto Rico as well. He will be the Pentagon’s main liaison with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. government’s lead agency on the island, and focus on aid distribution, the Pentagon said in a statement.

FEMA has already placed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in charge of rebuilding the island’s crippled power grid, which has posed one of the island’s biggest challenges after the storm.

In yet another move raising the administration’s profile in the crisis, acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke, whose department includes FEMA, will visited Puerto Rico with other senior government officials to meet the governor, Puerto Rican authorities and federal relief workers.

President Donald Trump again praised the government’s performance, saying on Twitter FEMA and other first responders were “doing a GREAT job,” but he complained about media coverage, adding: “Wish press would treat fairly!”

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, like Trump a Republican, had earlier called for the appointment of a single authority to oversee all hurricane relief efforts, and said the Defense Department should mostly be in charge.

DISASTER BECOMING “MAN-MADE”

Democratic U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said the crisis was shifting from a natural disaster to a man-made one. The government’s response had been “shamefully slow and undersized and should be vastly upgraded and increased,” he told the Senate.

Blumenthal called for as many as 50,000 troops to better coordinate logistics and the delivery of aid and basic necessities.

Even as FEMA and the U.S. military have stepped up relief efforts, many residents in Puerto Rico voiced frustration at the pace of relief efforts.

“It’s chaos, total chaos,” said Radamez Montañez, a building administrator from Carolina, east of capital city San Juan, who has been without water and electricity at home since Hurricane Irma grazed the island two weeks before Maria.

The humanitarian mission, offered free of charge, was arranged between Royal Caribbean International (RCL.N) and Puerto Rican authorities on a largely ad-hoc, first-come basis that sought to give some priority to those facing special hardships.

Defending the relief effort, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said 10,000 federal relief workers had arrived in Puerto Rico, including troops, and that 44 of the island’s 69 hospitals were now operational.

“The full weight of the United States government is engaged to ensure that food, water, healthcare and other life-saving resources are making it to the people in need,” Sanders told reporters.

Army Brigadier General Richard Kim told reporters that the total military force on the island, including the Puerto Rico National Guard, numbered about 4,400 troops.

The Trump administration earlier lifted restrictions known as the Jones Act for 10 days on foreign shipping from the U.S. mainland to Puerto Rico. While that measure might help speed cargo shipments, Puerto Rico is struggling to move supplies around the island once they arrive.

The U.S. government has temporarily lifted the Jones Act following severe storms in the past, but critics had charged the government was slow to do this for Puerto Rico.

Overall, the island is likely to need far more than $30 billion in long-term aid from the U.S. government for disaster relief and rebuilding efforts following Maria, a senior Republican congressional aide said.

The immediate relief effort was still badly hampered by the damage to infrastructure.

Clearing cargo deliveries at the San Juan port remained slow, and several newly arrived tankers were waiting for a chance to unload their fuel, according to Thomson Reuters shipping data.

“Really our biggest challenge has been the logistical assets to try to get some of the food and some of the water to different areas of Puerto Rico,” Governor Rossello told MSNBC on Thursday. He has staunchly defended the Trump administration for its relief response, which Trump noted in one of his Thursday night Twitter posts.

The military has delivered fuel to nine hospitals and helped establish more than 100 distribution centers for food and water on the island, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

Brock Long, the FEMA administrator, told CNN he was dissatisfied with the federal response to Maria, saying operations had been hindered by damage to the island’s air traffic control system, airports and seaports.

FEMA said full air traffic control services had been restored to the main international airport in San Juan, allowing for more than a dozen commercial flights a day, although that figure represented a fraction of the airport’s normal business.

The island has also seen the gradual reopening of hundreds of gasoline stations during the past few days, while a number of supermarket chains were also returning to business, FEMA officials said.

Regarding the devastating Earthquakes in Mexico, here's an interesting story that explains the uncanny timing and massive implications of the 3 quakes and the unfortunate loss of life and overall negative impact they have caused:

3 STRANGE COINCEDENCE'S AND 1 UNLUCKY FATE: MEXICO'S DEADLY STRING OF EARTHQUAKES

Written and Contributed to by: Trevor Nace for FORBES® Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Pics by: YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images, Google Maps, PEDRO PARDO/AFP/Getty Images, NY DAILY NEWS® and USGS®

There have been enough major natural disasters in the past month to concern even the staunchest climate change skeptic.

Zooming into Mexico, which has experienced a string of earthquakes in the past month that would make Californians living on the San Andreas fault nervous. Now, as we look into the recent earthquakes in Mexico scientists are piecing together clues regarding the strange coincidences between the earthquakes.

The details surrounding the timing, location, and mechanism of the earthquakes leaves scientists puzzled as to what connection they have if any. Piecing together the story is complex as Mexico sits at the confluence of five major tectonic plates: the North American, Pacific, Caribbean, Cocos, and Rivera. This leads to a complex tectonic environment with many literal moving pieces.

Strange Coincidence #1: Timing

The first and most obvious strange coincidence is the timing of the recent Mexico earthquakes. Within 15 days there were three magnitude 6 or greater earthquakes that struck Mexico. While those living in earthquake-prone regions may recognize it's not unusual to have earthquake tremors after a major earthquake, there are a few unusual facts in the timing.

USGS & Google Maps Location of recent Mexico earthquakes

As you'll notice on the map above, the three earthquakes were spread out by as much as 500 miles. This makes the likelihood of the second and third earthquake being tremors low. In addition, the three earthquakes were all a bit different in their mechanism, suggesting they're unrelated. Yet, can it just be a coincidence that three major earthquakes struck Mexico in 15 days and they're not related? It appears too much of a coincidence to throw that hypothesis out completely, yet there's not enough evidence yet to fully conclude.

Strange Coincidence #2: Location

The second peculiarity about the string of Mexico earthquakes is the location. By this, I don't only mean their geographic location on a map, but also their location within the Earth.

The first earthquake to hit, the M 8.1 earthquake near Pijijiapan, Mexico initiated 70 kilometers deep into Earth's crust. The second M 7.1 earthquake struck near Ayutla, Mexico at 51 kilometers deep just 11 days after the first earthquake. Then, the latest M 6.1 earthquake struck near Matias Romero, Mexico four days later at 9.1 kilometers deep.

The three earthquakes are close enough in proximity to make geologists wonder if they're related. Yet, far enough apart for each earthquake to be on its own fault surface and potentially unrelated.

Strange Coincidence #3: Mechanism

Another unusual feature of the recent earthquakes is the mechanism which initiated the earthquake. The cold and dense Cocos plate is subducting underneath the North American plate. This means the primary forces are compressional as a result of the collision. However, in the first two earthquakes, the fault movement which caused the earthquake was extensional (normal faulting).

The occurrence of multiple normal faulting initiated earthquakes within a few weeks could be interpreted as being related. The normal or extensional faulting likely occurred as a result of the underlying Cocos plate "falling" into the mantle after subducting underneath the North American plate.

Approximate location of recent earthquake in subducting slab

The cross-section view of the Cocos plate being pushed underneath the North American plate shows the red dot where the M 7.1 earthquake struck. Hence, it makes sense that there were extensional forces where the underlying plate was bending and breaking off into the mantle. This, however, is fairly unusual and for it to occur multiple times in such a short period leaves questions as to their relation.

1 Unlucky Fate

Mexico and Mexico City find itself in an unusually unlucky location with regards to earthquake threats. As mentioned above, the country sits at the confluence of 5 major tectonic plates that are all vying for position. This means a hotbed for earthquake activity as plates push against one another.

Secondly, Mexico City sits on an old lake bed of unconsolidated sediment. That means anytime an earthquake shakes the area, the unconsolidated sediment acts almost as if it were a liquid.

There are many strange things about the recent earthquakes in Mexico, which will undoubtedly be the focus of intense investigation by the geoscience community.

Trevor Nace is a geologist, Forbes contributor, founder of Science Trends, and adventurer. Follow his journey @trevornace.

ENTERTAINMENT AND EVENTS

THE ANNUAL GIANTS OF BROADCASTING AND ELECTRONIC ARTS LUNCHEON

Written by: ILYSE TERRI, LLC® AND THE REVIEW®

Pics and content by and courtesy of: THE IRTS FOUNDATION®, BLACK TIE INTERNATIONAL for BLACK TIE MAGAZINE®, ILYSE TERRI, LLC®, THE REVIEW® and DAVID BRUSON for VIACOM®

Gotham Hall’s iconic grand ballroom was the venue for this year’s ‘GIANTS of Broadcasting & Electronic Arts’ luncheon, the fifteenth such annual celebration of the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation (LABF).

The annual event is attended by prominent members of the broadcasting, media and corporate community, to celebrate distinguished leadership and achievements in radio and television and was MC'd by Bill Whitaker, Correspondent 60 Minutes. Also in attendance were Anderson Cooper and Richard Leibner, Co-President , Bienstock, A UTA Company & Board of Directors, Library of American Broadcasting Foundation among many notable others.

2017 Honorees

Bill Koenigsberg, President, CEO, & Founder of Horizon Media, Barbara Eden, Actress: I Dream of Jeannie, Joe Field, Chairman & Founder of Entercom Communications, Andrea Mitchell, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent of NBC Newsand Host of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, Jeff Fager, Executive Producer of CBS News’ 60 Minutes, Gary Chapman, Retired Chairman, President & CEO of LIN TV Corp. Standing: David Field, President & CEO of Entercom Communications, Jeff Zucker, President of CNN Worldwide, Michael Fiorile, Chairman & CEO of Dispatch Broadcast Group

Bill Koenigsberg's Acceptance Speech focused on a letter he "penned" to interns that gave great advice to the future of this and all industries and passed on the lessons he has learned and the ones that he is still learning today. Notable excerpts were, "lose the words failure in your vocabulary and be patient, success will come", "give back" and "never think you've arrived, keep moving forward, because the minute you think you've arrived, you will get run over."

David Bruson and Anthony DiCosmo of Viacom and Nickelodeon were in attendance with from left: our founder and CEO, Ilyse Terri Shuster-Frohman, Lashada DiCosmo, Carolyn Churchill of Viacom and Nickelodeon, Barbara Eden, legendary actress and entertainment icon, Brenda Vaccaro and Angela Pierce.

I dream of Genie is an American fantasy and comedy sitcom starring Barbara Eden as a 2,000-year-old genie and Larry Hagman as an astronaut who becomes her master, with whom she falls in love and eventually marries. Produced by Screen Gems, the show originally aired from September 18, 1965 to May 26, 1970 with new episodes, and through September 1970 with season repeats, on NBC. The show ran for five seasons and produced 139 episodes.

Meeting Barbara and her delightful husband was a "dream" and she took the podium to say a few words about her wonderful career and how grateful she is for it all. A real inspiration and still such a looker.

Barbara received a standing ovation and of course, the crowd crooned and smiled at witnessing and being in the presence of such a living lady legend.

Andrea Mitchell and Jeff Zucker of CNN had much to say and spoke very well and Jeff mentioned that although the main reason that he said yes to attend the event was to see Barbara Eden and spent his entire childhood "dreaming of Genie" he also said that the true giant in the room was actually Andrea Mitchell. He stated, "Always a joy to work with and you continue to be an inspiration." about Andrea and went on to graciously thank all of his employee's and co-workers and colleagues for their hard work and dedication to their craft. He stated that they "have no agenda other than to report the truth and will continue to do that."

Joe and David Field of Entercom Communications displayed beautifully how family businesses and father and son relationships should be handled. They also congratulated all in the audience for their achievements. David spoke about his father's wonderful achievements and how they believe that as Jack Myer stated "radio today is like undiscovered beach front property." He also mentioned his excitement over the Entercom and CBS Radio Merger and the future of radio. Father, Joe then took the stage and thanked David for all of his hard work and dedication and success, and also mentioned how as John Donne once said "no man is an island." He then thanked all of his early investors and supporters and his wife, Marie for supporting him and his career "especially in the early years when Entercom was a fledgling company" and how he could never have done it without her. He went on to say "Thank you, thank you, Marie." and also stated how happy he is to be sharing this award and "GIANT" title with his son.

Jeff Fager, Executive Producer of CBS News’ 60 Minutes took the podium to accept his award and during his acceptance speech stated that "60 Minutes cares about fairness and they care about integrity" and that is what he believes has contributed to their success. He also gave kudos to Barbara Eden and agreed with Jeff Zucker on her momentous accomplishments while moving on to thank all of his anchors such as Anderson Cooper and various close colleagues. He thanked his "friend and agent", Richard Liebner and other members of the board for producing such an important event.

There were many more speakers and awards, all well-deserved and we thoroughly enjoyed being in the presence of and witnessing such Giants of the industry. It was a fabulous affair. Special thank you to Viacom and Nickelodeon and especially David Bruson for participating in this event and as always, being extremely gracious. You are a class act, and an immense participant and contributor to this wonderful industry and its' positive impact on the world.

ADVERTISING, BUSINESS AND BRANDS

ADVERTISING WEEK LEFT US FEELING STRONG

FEARLESS GIRL STOLE THE WORLD'S HEART, BUT WHAT DID IT DO FOR "THE ART OF" CLIENT BUSINESS?

Written by: KATIE RICHARDS for AD WEEK® Modifications and additions by: ILYSE TERRI® and THE REVIEW®

Pics and content by: GETTY IMAGES® and ADVERTISING WEEK® and ILYSE TERRI® and THE REVIEW®

She arrived in the middle of the night, seemingly out of thin air. Her arrival was quiet but calculated. The following day—International Women’s Day—millions would know her as the Fearless Girl.

Standing roughly 50 inches tall, hands triumphantly placed upon her hips and facing Wall Street’s iconic Charging Bull statue, she took the world by storm. Created for financial advising company State Street Global Advisors by creative agency McCann New York, the Fearless Girl statue quickly went viral online, garnering over 1 billion Twitter impressions in the first 12 hours, and eventually reaching 4.6 billion Twitter impressions and more than 215,000 Instagram posts over 12 weeks. A petition signed by more than 40,000 people demanded that Fearless Girl stay put, opposite the Charging Bull, through 2018.

The fact that Fearless Girl was created on “a shoestring budget” with no paid media behind it made it even more of a marketing marvel, said SSGA senior managing director and CMO Stephen Tisdalle. The effort reportedly generated $7.4 million in free marketing for the company across TV, social and radio, per Apex Marketing. Some sources place the marketing budget for Fearless Girl around $250,000, although SSGA would not confirm.

She was indeed a viral sensation, but how did a statue of a young girl help SSGA’s business, if at all? According to the company, her purpose was not necessarily to become a worldwide icon but to promote the one-year anniversary of the company’s SHE Fund, which invests only in companies that have women in top leadership positions. So did the company reach its goal of putting more women in C-suites?

Following the debut of Fearless Girl, “We reached out proactively to companies we invest in that do not have women on their boards to actually get them to understand that there is greater performance to be gained [by having women in leadership roles],” said Tisdalle. Of those 476 companies, 76 actively worked to promote women. SSGA voted against reelecting the board chairs of 400 companies.

“We have a huge, well-oiled machine that votes on a whole bunch of board initiatives for the thousands of companies that we invest in,” noted Tisdalle. “We are proactively voting for these types of changes.”

Fearless Girl ended up making a huge impact for SSGA’s SHE Fund. Daily trading volume for the fund shot up 384 percent in the three days following the debut of the statue, and 170 percent over the next 20 business days.

Challenge

SSGA had a perception problem: It’s the third largest asset manager in the world with over $2.5 trillion in assets, but within the consumer space, “few people really know how we invest, why we invest and what we have as an organization,” said Tisdalle. Among those values are creating and promoting gender diversity.

Goal

Get the 3,500 publicly traded companies SSGA invests in to truly focus on creating gender-balanced workforces. “It’s not about politics, it’s about performance,” said Tisdalle, citing a recent McKinsey study showing that if women and men participated in the economy equally, the annual global GDP would increase 26 percent (to $28 trillion) by 2025.

Execution

After McCann settled on a statue to help communicate SSGA’s gender equality message, the agency teamed up with sculptor Kristen Visbal to bring Fearless Girl to life. The team scrutinized every single detail of the girl from where her hands should rest to what her stance should be, making sure that the statue’s appearance would support what SSGA stood for.

Some see the girl’s stance as one of defiance of the bull, but according to McCann New York managing director and McCann XBC president Devika Bulchandani, “It’s not a defiant stance. Forward leaning means ‘I want to participate in the American economy in this notion of American prosperity that Wall Street represents.”

Be thoughtful

Brands want to participate in cultural conversations, but as Tisdalle explained, “Brands who tap into big national or international dialogues need to have the goods and the right partner to be able to do it in a way that is not seen as a stunt.”

Communicate with partners

Keeping the lines of communication open throughout the whole creation process of Fearless Girl was key to its success, according to both McCann and SSGA. The name “Fearless Girl,” for example, wasn’t finalized until three days before her unveiling because the two parties continued exchanging suggestions and ideas up until the final deadline.

Be fearless

For a financial services company to step into the world of experiential advertising and make such a powerful statement about society “was perceived as potentially high risk,” said Tisdalle. But both parties knew the idea was a good one, and through constant communication and a little bravery, SSGA was able to create one of the most celebrated marketing campaigns of the year.

Get it Right

Nothing could be worse when trying to make a profound statement than getting the whole thing completely wrong. The team focus intently on getting the girl and her posture and all pertinent details absolutely right and this took up a tremendous amount of time and effort. After all, if was planned and executed all wrong, it would never have been perceived so right.

TARGET WILL BEGIN INCORPORATING PINTEREST'S LENS VISUAL SEARCH TECHNOLOGY

LENS WILL EVENTUALLY BE INTEGRATED DIRECTLY INTO THE TARGET APP

Written by: DAVID COHEN for ADVERTISING WEEK® with modifications and additions by ILYSE TERRI® AND THE REVIEW®

Pics and content by: TARGET/PINTEREST® and THE REVIEW®

Pinterest Lens visual search technology is coming to Target, starting with the mega-retailer’s registry experience.

Target announced the partnership in a blog post and further elaborated on it all at Advertising Week with Rick Gomez, EVP and CMO of Target and Tim Kendall, President of Pinterest openly speaking about this incredible technology and how they are actively designing brands and products with pre-meditated insight from Pinterest users and for Target "guests".

Further, Target will begin incorporating Pinterest Lens directly into its applications and experiences.

Rick announced "we are investing 7 Billion dollars over the next 3 years to improve our guest experience, both in stores and most importantly, online."

The retailer and Marketing head said that Lens will be integrated into its registry experience “in the coming months,” after which it will be integrated directly into the Target app.

Pinterest introduced Lens—along with fellow visual search tools Shop the Look and Instant Ideas—in February.

Target senior vice president, media and guest engagement Kristi Argyilan said in the blog post, “We’ve partnered with Pinterest for years—it’s a natural fit thanks to our shared passion for creating inspiration and a sense of discovery. Now, Target’s excited to take our partnership to the next level. We’ll be the first—and exclusive—U.S. retailer to bring Pinterest Lens directly into our apps and experiences, creating an incredibly rich and much easier way for our guests to explore, discover and buy millions of products at Target.”

Chief marketing officer Rick Gomez added, “This Pinterest partnership quite literally helps us shorten the distance from when our guests have an idea to when they’re ready to make a purchase. It’s another way we’re making it easy and fun for our guests to explore and find new products. Plus, as we start to understand what shoppers are really looking for, it’ll help us better anticipate—and plan for—the latest styles and trends. We look forward to unlocking new potential, together.”

After the groundbreaking talk by two incredible and gracious speakers, the back of the screening room turned into a branded photo-op where guests could take a pic with a white and very sweet and friendly pit bull with a Target "bulls" eye painted around his left eye.

Of course our CEO and Founder, Ilyse Shuster-Frohman took a pic with the cutie mascot! A great way to end a poignant and "target-ed" presentation.

GIPHY AND OTHERS SPEAK DURING "FAST FOUNDERS" TALK HOSTED BY FAST COMPANY AT ADVERTISING WEEK

Written by: ILYSE TERRI® AND THE REVIEW®

Pics and content by: ILYSE TERRI® AND THE REVIEW®

Alex Chung Founder, THOUGHT CATALOGUE & Director of Strategy @Giphy, Amy Farley Senior Editor @FastCompany, Jeff Goodby Co-Chairman & Partner @Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Bill Koenigsberg President, CEO, & Founder @HorizonMedia all discussed the perils and up-sides of being entrepreneurs and how they got their businesses off the ground and into the sky and how you can too!

Amy Farley spoke about how the focus of the talk would be centered around "founding and growing a company and how to stay relevant during such a complicated and complex time."

Bill spoke about raising his first 15 Million and how daunting but necessary it was and when asked about how to do that he said "go to everyone possible that could be an investor" and "make sure you have an NDA. Serious people, including myself will sign them." Jeff spoke about how his agency, Goodby, Silverstein and partners made a name for themselves by "wanting to do something different" and creating punk-like content that was fast, street style, cheaply produced and "off the cuff" and how they still constantly try to come up with and do something "nuts" to keep viewers engaged with their clients and their content.

Amy asked all the right questions and especially zoomed in numerous times on the obvious shooting star in the room, Alex Chung @GIPHY.

Everyone in Advertising is now talking about short attention spans and busy and fast moving lives and content, not to mention shrinking budgets, and with all that now comes the much wanted and needed 6 second commercial that although isn't able to be purchased yet on big networks and broadcast television, is available online.

They expanded on this during this FAST FOUNDERS talk and in that vain, Giphy was highlighted as the buzz brand of the week. Alex Chung explained how Venture Capital is helping their company grow and "experiment" and how it "works". Here's a little video of him talking about that followed by a great in-depth article by Fast Company on this disruptive company and how they're poised to make history with small content that is sure to be worth BIG money.

IN SIX SECONDS, GIPHY COULD MAKE BILLIONS

With 300 million daily users and every major media company as a partner, Giphy’s got a feeling it can shake up the internet advertising business.

Written by: NICOLE LAPORTELONG for FAST COMPANY® Modifications by: THE REVIEW®

Pics and content by: GIPHY® and ILYSE TERRI® and THE REVIEW®

On a mild Sunday evening in September, a handful of staffers from Giphy gathered in its Los Angeles studios to watch the Emmy Awards. The group congregated in the sleek, modernly furnished space that normally serves as a reception area, and they commandeered the minimalist black couch that is usually for waiting guests, the one opposite the wall of flat-screen TVs that during the week showcases rotating clips from its service.

The vibe felt a bit like a dorm room, as they sat with laptops perched on knees and La Croix cans stationed within arm’s reach, but this is only incidentally a social event. The Giphy folks have been tasked by the Emmys producers to “live GIF” the show, creating those seconds-long video loops used to enliven digital conversations and get shared. The effect is a dizzying bit of pop culture meta-commentary: The show’s value is unlocked in a handful of moments that can be used to comment on the show itself—and then punctuate life’s little moments long after the Emmys are over.

By the time host Stephen Colbert was high-kicking through the opening number along with a group of hooded dancers—a nod to what would be the night’s big winner, The Handmaid’s Tale—Giphy’s team had already populated its homepage with such red carpet preshow gems as Insecure‘s Issa Rae giving a signature “whatever” gesture in her Vera Wang gown, and Better Things creator and star Pamela Adlon deadpanning, “I probably clog my toilet seven to 10 times a week.”

Then came the night’s biggest, and most controversial, moment: Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer rolled a faux presidential podium onto the stage to deliver a send-up of his infamous “largest audience” speech he gave the day after President Trump’s inauguration. Immediately, the Giphy crew began to splice the scene into GIF form. Part of Giphy’s genius lies in not posting the obvious clip, so Spicer himself wasn’t of much interest. Rather, they surveyed the sea of shocked and bewildered faces in the audience, looking for gold. They found it in Veep‘s Anna Chlumsky, her entire body contorted into an OMG expression—eyes bulging, neck veins popping—as she craned out of her seat for a better view of the strange performance. Within minutes, the editors had the three-second clip uploaded onto Giphy. It began to trend almost immediately. A week after the show, it’d been viewed more than 13 million times.

Crazy reaction shots, cats clapping, clips of Joey from Friends baritone-ing, “How you doin’?”, an animated President Obama dropping his mic at the White House Correspondent’s dinner—this is the lingua franca of Giphy, the four-year-old company that has been largely responsible for popularizing a new form of communication. Not only does hyper-abbreviated video allow for more nuance and emotion than a smiley-face emoji ever could, but the limitless nature of GIFs (Giphy reports that it adds millions of moving images daily) also means that picking the right one has become more than just a means of conveying a particular sentiment.

“If I’m sending a Top Gun GIF with Maverick and Goose, that has a different ‘I love you’ relationship from a Disney GIF you might send to your daughter,” says Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, which is a Giphy investor. “That context, that emotion, gets layered back into a text-messaging platform that has historically lacked it. And that makes it more meaningful, more powerful.” The result is that “GIFs are a kind of social currency,” says Dominic Poynter, group communications strategy director at the ad agency Droga5. “The ability to use GIFs in a skillful way that is fresh and new and completely on point has become really important. It’s like being able to text really well. Or take a good selfie.”

Giphy has capitalized on its cultural currency to amass an audience of 300 million people who see a GIF from Giphy every single day, triple its total since just December 2016. They share more than 2 billion GIFs a day across Giphy.com and the many platforms where Giphy is embedded: Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, iMessage, Slack, and even Zendesk, should you ever want to send a Ron Swanson slow burn to a customer-service rep over a late delivery.

Although these numbers are not wholly comparable to other social networks, they are still likely the envy of Snapchat (173 million daily users) and Twitter (the company does not disclose daily users, but Recode has estimated the total at 157 million), both of which are publicly traded companies. The privately held Giphy, though, is still officially in “growth mode,” and cofounder and CEO Alex Chung says, “We think we can grow like probably 3 times what we have now, which is kind of crazy.”

Unlike a lot of digital media executives who scramble to figure out a revenue model only after they’ve built an audience, Chung, who at 42 is old enough not only to remember the 1990s dotcom bubble but to have worked in it, is measured and cool when asked how Giphy, which is reportedly valued by investors at $600 million, will make money. “We have revenue,” he reveals for the first time. “We know we can be profitable in a month if we wanted to. But just like we did with GIF growth, we’re thinking about revenue growth in an exponential and sustainable way.” He and his 75-plus employees have spent years preparing the company for long-term growth. The next phase will unfold as they roll out Giphy’s ad products and measurement tools over the next 12 months or so.

Most people look at the digital advertising landscape and see an unbreakable Facebook-Google duopoly poised to dominate for the foreseeable future. But whenever conventional wisdom forms, there’s often a ripe opportunity to upend it. Chung believes Giphy has that potential. “We all know that internet advertising is a little bit broken,” he says, leaving unspoken the last year’s negative talk about inaccurate metrics, brand safety issues, and tired formats such as banner ads, pop-ups, and even native ads.

Meanwhile, “everyone is moving to the six-second ad format,” he says. “YouTube has done it. Facebook is doing it. We’ve owned that format for years. We have all the tools to make it. We have the largest distribution of that six-second content anywhere in the world—across mobile, desktop, anywhere.” Perhaps most important, Giphy has commercials that look nothing like advertising. “If it’s good,” says COO Adam Leibsohn, “it’s stuff that people want to use—to communicate, to laugh, to inform.”

“We’re thinking about revenue not in terms of millions or hundreds of millions (of dollars), but, like, billions,” Chung says matter of factly. “How do you get to a point where you are making billions in revenue? That’s something that has to be fundamentally disruptive.”

Giphy’s road to this moment started in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills in 2014. Chung had asked a friend who’s a data scientist to analyze all the queries on Giphy, which revealed that “80% of all the searches were cultural content: TV, movies, celebrities,” he says. So the team decided to spend a solid two months on the West Coast taking meetings with movie studios and TV networks in Los Angeles to try to get content rights. Because Giphy was still small—less than 10 employees, in an office on the far west side of Manhattan—it was easiest to just bring everyone along rather than communicate across time zones.

The house was “an Airbnb that wasn’t that great,” Chung says, but it did have a swimming pool and views. To the employees of a young startup, it felt like a mansion out of Entourage. “We were so small, we could literally have a companywide meeting in the pool,” says Brad Zeff, Giphy’s chief content officer.

Chung had spent several years earlier in his career working for Viacom where he had a window into the music licensing process—”probably the most complex licensing in media,” he says—so he knew how to structure deals that would be attractive to entertainment companies. In exchange for getting access to shows like The Simpsons and Broad City, Giphy would work with network and studio marketing teams on their “GIF strategy.” In other words, Chung’s crew would help them set up their pages on Giphy; explain how to make GIFs more discoverable; and even make the GIFs themselves by running content through Giphy’s auto-tagging machine that finds the best moments.

The startup’s strategy was akin to Twitter’s in its early days when it came to Hollywood and offered a kind of white-glove service to get networks, producers, and stars to understand its value. As with Twitter at that time, it was a pre-revenue quid quo pro, which eased the way. “Hollywood is a very lazy lay and will let you do what you want if it’s easy and free,” one digital marketer jokes. According to Liew, who was also an early investor in Snapchat, Chung was the first person to “connect the dots” between entertainment and GIFs in a way that “opened up the entire history of TV and movies to be chopped up.” Giphy’s L.A. summer proved successful enough that Chung would repeat the staff migration—in increasingly larger venues—in 2015 and 2016.

As premium content started to stream in, even from notoriously demanding players such as Disney and CBS, Giphy turned to distributing it widely. Chung and Leibsohn began to carefully map out a plan to “work with social networks to get GIF buttons inside of places where they weren’t,” says Leibsohn. One of the first targets was Facebook, partly because of its huge reach, and partly because, as Chung says, “We knew that if we could get GIFs on Facebook, it would be a thing.”

Back then, in 2014, Facebook did not allow GIFs and had said it would never support the format. Through a bit of engineering derring-do that allowed the GIFs to appear in users’ feeds without violating Facebook’s rules, Giphy succeeded in getting its content on the largest social network, and eventually Facebook officially embraced the format. “Two years later, we were on stage at F8 showing Mark Zuckerberg send [Messenger chief] David Marcus a GIF from Giphy,” Chung says in his calm, even manner one morning in September as he sits with Leibsohn in a dimly lit conference room in the company’s Meatpacking District headquarters.

The two men, who were both philosophy majors in college, ran in the same social circle and bonded over the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. (“We would just hang out,” Chung says, “and play pool, and . . . talk about death,” Leibsohn says, completing the thought. “This is all based in philosophy,” Chung asserts, a bold statement for a company that trades in clips of farting cats saying, “Deal with my sass.”)

Other coups followed. “We got GIFs on Twitter,” Chung says. “No one had ever done that before. GIFs on Slack. No one had done that before. We kept putting GIFs everywhere that you possibly could. We have GIFs in Outlook. Our mission was always to get distribution where no one has ever gotten distribution. And we keep doing that.” Leibsohn, who frequently finishes Chung’s thoughts (and vice versa), adds, “Especially if there’s something static. We’re like, why is that not moving?” (Make Everything Move is a company motto.)

This steady expansion of where Giphy’s content is available has helped the company scale at a dizzying rate. “I think of them as the Google for GIFs,” says ICM Partners’ head of digital ventures Jonathan Perelman. “That’s just where you go.”

Tiffany Vazquez, Giphy’s senior film editor, says she knew Giphy had gone mainstream in February of 2016 when Conan O’Brien tweeted: “Just searched ‘blasé otters’ on Giphy so I could show you how my kids react every night when I come home from work.”

“He didn’t @ us or tag us,” Vazquez says. “That was a huge moment.”

In the 18 months since then, Giphy’s centrality has only grown. Giphy has evolved into “a turnkey part of our digital marketing campaigns,” says Dana Flax, director of digital and social media at HBO. “It’s kind of automatic at this point that we launch a Giphy presence for every campaign.”

HBO has more than 30 Giphy pages featuring in excess of 7,000 GIFs. Not just for obvious water-cooler shows like Game of Thrones, but also off-the-air series such as The Larry Sanders Show and The Comeback, proving how Giphy can keep older material culturally relevant and potentially introduce it to new audiences. In advance of the October return of Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO launched a Giphy page for the upcoming season, and within two weeks, GIFs of classic Larry David moments (“Can I apologize for the apology?”; accidentally tripping Shaquille O’Neal during a Lakers game) had been viewed more than 30 million times. “It allows us to take this show that’s been off the air for six years, reinsert it into the zeitgeist, and create opportunities for fans to use this content in their communications with each other,” Flax says. “We see GIFs have become their own form of digital communication, and as a brand, we want to make sure that our series and our characters are part of the shorthand that these younger generations are using with each other.”

Giphy does all it can to assist this effort by creating extensive databases for popular content. Leading up to the season premiere of the fourth season Broad City this fall, Giphy’s editorial team broke up almost every line and moment from the show’s previous seasons and made them available to users. Giphy did the same thing with the Oscars, working with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create GIFs that go all the way back to 1937.

Even entertainment companies that don’t have an official partnership with Giphy rely on the service for fan engagement. Fans of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise avidly upload GIFs of their favorite characters’ eye rolls and bitchy take-downs—if ever there was a platform for the line, “Take a Xanax,” it’s Giphy—as the shows air. In fact, all of the Bravo content on Giphy is user generated, says Adam Zeller, VP of social media for Bravo & Oxygen Media, who credits the company for supplying fans with the tools, such as the Giphy camera and keyboard, to create their own content. “What we like to say at Bravo is that a picture is worth a thousand words, and a GIF is worth a million,” Zeller says.

As Giphy starts to explore monetization routes, though, its honeymoon period with Hollywood may come under pressure. Beyond view counts, which were only introduced in late August (much to marketers’ relief), and information on where a GIF travels (from Facebook to Twitter to iMessage, for example), brands and shows are mostly in the dark as to who’s viewing their GIFs. When I ask one marketer about more nuanced data, he jokes, “I’d love it if you’d ask Giphy for that.”

At this point, brands are accustomed to using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to target, say, young women under the age of 25 who are horror fans, in advance of a film release or new TV season. Chung says that in the months ahead, “We’ll be putting out a lot of different technology around tracking for our partners. It will be very comparable to what Facebook and everyone else has.”

Unlike Facebook, though, which has asked brands to pay for the traffic it once provided for free, Chung insists, “We’re not going to charge people for what we’re doing now.” Leibsohn acknowledges that they’ve already had these conversations with Giphy’s content suppliers, and “our plans for [making money] are cooperative to the interests of all of our content partners.”

Giphy is looking ahead to how it can get entertainment companies not only to give it decades of content to parse into bite-sized moments, but also to create exclusives. “We want to have content that’s purpose-built for us,” says Zeff, Giphy’s content chief, his tall, angular frame arranged on a magenta couch with the word “Chill” lit up above it in the company’s L.A. studio. “With our partners, maybe that involves ancillary characters, ancillary story lines. How can we use the content that we’re making with our partners in a way that goes beyond simply an encapsulation or a singular moment from a show. We want to figure out what the next frontier is.”

Zeff, nor anyone else at Giphy, would offer more specifics, but the company says at least one TV series is actively pursuing this strategy, creating GIFs as part of its production process. The approach bears some similarities to what Snapchat has done with snackable, digital series built around network shows The Voice and The Bachelor (and perhaps less appealingly, to the mid- to late-2000s when TV series created “webisodes” to throw obsessives a bone). On Giphy, of course, this content will be even shorter, setting up an interesting creative challenge: How do you evolve the GIF from a medium that showcases a moment to one that relays a narrative?

By adding more original content, including material that it is making itself with a growing network of artists and overseen by a producer who’s worked at SNL and The Colbert Report, Giphy is trying to distinguish itself just the way Netflix is with series like Stranger Things in an effort to create more user demand. By live-GIFing things like the Emmys or the Game of Thrones premiere, there is suddenly an urgency to going to Giphy as events are unfolding in order to be in tune with the culture. “What’s happening on the internet now? What happened on the internet yesterday?” Zeff asks. “We want to be a reflection of that and have a sort of distillation of that represented on our home page at all times.”

In this vision, Giphy is more than just a conversational helper but a kind of ambient, always-on channel, much like the radio, or in more contemporary terms, like Cheddar, the digital financial-news network for millennials launched last year by former BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg. “When not watching 5 episodes of Ozark,” Steinberg wrote in a Medium post last month articulating his vision for what he calls post-cable networks, “people are going to want to watch something, live . . . to see ‘what’s happening in the world.'”

Although the current vogue favors wide social distribution over trying to create a destination, Giphy.com and its app, which currently draw 250 million users a month, are an underrated asset for the company. “We’ve started seeing more and more people just hanging out to watch content,” Chung says. “We’re like a TV network to some extent,” Leibsohn adds. “We program, we schedule, we have tune-in blocks.” He goes on to suggest that Giphy can be highly creative in serving its content partners, targeting specific regions, times, and distribution services on Giphy’s network.

“Everyone is fighting for this one-hour primetime segment, right?” Chung says, referring to the increasingly expensive battle between Amazon, HBO, Hulu, Netflix, and others to create a Game of Thrones-style, must-see global epic. In contrast, his focus is to “make content that people leave on all day. You know, that isn’t fully interactive content that I have to sit there and pay attention to. We think we can own those 23 hours of the day.”

While Hollywood partnerships are enabling Giphy’s explosion, consumer brands are essentially sending the startup the popular GIF of Fry from Futurama shouting, “Shut up and take my money!”

Last year, the ad agency CP+B created a campaign for Hotels.com in which its spokes character, Captain Obvious, runs for president. At the same time it made the spots, it put the expressive goofball in front of a plain white background and captured a series of reaction shots, from a sarcastic “okay” to an enthusiastic “raise the roof,” and posted them to Giphy. The goal was for the GIFs to be used in social discussion around the actual election; the 40 Captain Obvious “ran for President” GIFs have been viewed more than 150 million times. This fall, Converse had a Giphy hit with a set of reactions from Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) tied to a back-to-school campaign. “Giphy is one of the last remaining pure platforms,” says Quinn Katherman, one of CP+B’s creative directors who works on the Hotels.com account. “If brands want to play there successfully, they have to find a way to contribute to the conversation, not just insert themselves into it.”

Leibsohn, who spent eight years working in advertising before cofounding Giphy, believes most internet advertising is just a series of increasingly desperate instances of brands trying to crash a party to which they weren’t invited. “You’re talking about an intimate communication,” says Winston Binch, chief digital officer and a partner in the ad agency Deutsch. “People will reject things that feel inauthentic. That’s the challenge for brands.” To that point, Leibsohn and Chung only want to invite the Nike (or Converse) person into the conversation, for example, because she’s wearing cool kicks, or he and his friends were just talking about Nikes. “And then they leave,” Chung says. “That is a different, authentic experience with branded content that just doesn’t exist on the internet.”

Giphy’s goal, then is to “own” the six-second ad format and create ads (or convince brands to create ads) that exude that genuine spirit—though, tellingly, this medium is still very nascent. “It’s taking a long time for marketers to understand the value of what a short-form piece of video means in their value chain,” says Jason Krebs, chief business officer at Tenor, a rival GIF company that is preparing to roll out paid ad campaigns with brands. “How does this drive success for them? Just like when you’re in TV and any highly successful medium, the first question is, okay, did we get the exposure that we wanted? Did it get exposed to the right target audience, and was it in the right environment? But then the next question is, ‘Okay, great, now we got exposed. Did it help my business?’ That’s where we’re trying to prove that out to marketers now.”

While working toward this goal, Giphy believes it has something critically valuable to brands: Access to the private feelings of hundreds of millions of consumers. “There are very few places that connect where everyone is, and everyone’s talking, and can tell you why they’re talking about you in every possible context,” Chung says. “When you think about that from a revenue ad platform point of view, that’s the power.”

It’s a potentially salivating proposition: Demographic specifics plus users’ tastes and interests plus an understanding of their emotional behavior. “In the same way that we learn massive amounts from Google Search and what people are searching for on YouTube,” says James Poulter, senior global social media manager at Lego, how people use Giphy is “an expression of their intent for Lego as a brand.”

Although Poulter admits that he hasn’t seen the data yet, “I’d be really surprised if people are searching for ‘Lego’ when they send a Lego GIF,” of which there are nearly 5,000. “They’re probably searching for happy or sad or LOL or some kind of reaction. What we’d want to do is make sure that we show up with the funniest, or best, or most humorous—kind of the coolest—content in that context. Those are the types of emotions we want to play off. When you feel like something is awesome or amazing, we would love to be one of those brands that you choose as a means of sharing.”

As Leibsohn notes, “Coke says, ‘Open happiness.’ We can show brands, content producers, news places, all of them, that you don’t have to tell anybody to ‘open happiness’ anymore. We can just understand if you are synonymous with happy.” When I ask Poulter if that’s something he and Lego would pay to guarantee, all he’ll say is that it has a “tangible value.”

Chung and Leibsohn don’t seem worried about what that exact value is. “It took four and a half years to get all the content owners together, make the content searchable,” Chung says. “Also, it’s time and relationships,” Leibsohn adds. “We’ve already broken the ground. We’ve solidified all of it.”

“We’re synonymous with the content,” Chung says. “If you search for GIF, we’re No. 1.”

“Forget that,” Leibsohn replies. “You search ‘Happy birthday,’ we’re No. 1.” (This is true!)

“Yeah, we own happy birthday now,” Chung says.

If you can’t make money from owning happy birthday, well, there are 1,716 GIFs tagged “face palm” to send Chung and Leibsohn.

Nicole LaPorte is an LA-based writer for Fast Company who writes about where technology and entertainment intersect. She previously was a columnist for The New York Times and a staff writer for Newsweek/The Daily Beast and Variety.

Overall, Ad Week was a blast. Big topics were Virtual and Augmented Reality and everything in between, including a company that allows you to listen to anyone else's playlist while they're listening-or not. It's a great way to JAM alongside your favorite celebrity during theirs and your workout sesh or to hang with a friend or stranger "virtually" and share and bond over each others playlists. We're planning on linking up with these cool cats in Cali end of October and will report more on them in our next issue-so stay tuned. We will also report overall on the tech side of things after our trip out West where we will follow up with various companies and brands that we came in contact with during Ad Week and that we have come to know via our own resources. We'll explore their overall platforms and capabilities further and bring you the scoop as part of our upcoming OCTOBER TECH edition which will highlight Tech, but also other relevant news-of course.

MUSIC

Spotify's Valuation Skyrockets as Investors Smell the 'Next Netflix'

Written by: DAWN CHMIELEWSKI for BILLBOARD MAGAZINE® Modifications by: THE REVIEW®

Pics and content by: GETTY IMAGES®

SPOTIFY'S VALUATION CONTINUES TO RISE IN PRIVATE TRADES

A signal of strong demand for a stake in the world’s largest streaming music company ahead of it going public.

The Swedish company’s reported $16 billion valuation has risen $3 billion since May, when private trades pegged its value at around $13 billion. Industry insiders and bankers say Spotify’s appreciating value in these private trades is a sign of investor confidence that the service will eventually turn a profit, while some say the intensifying investor interest in Spotify is part of a growing recognition that music streaming has "crossed the chasm," in the words of one source, and become mainstream. They see enormous opportunity for growth in the coming years.

But investment banker Lloyd Greif said that because of Spotify’s 40 percent year-over-year growth in active users, its 50 percent revenue growth from 2015 to 2016 and its rapidly expanding subscriber base -- similar traits to Netflix -- some investors are betting that its stock will rally as has that of the video streaming service, which has seen shares double in value over the past two years.

"This is kind of like trend spotting," Greif said. "Investors may be jumping on the bandwagon of the next Netflix."

The subscription companies aren’t quite analogous, though, music industry and streaming executives such as Jimmy Iovine point out, since the music on Spotify’s paid tier is readily available on-demand for free on sites like YouTube. The feature-length films and series on Netflix are much harder to find for free on the internet. Spotify’s licensing agreements with the major record labels also prohibit it from making its own original music content, while Netflix relies heavily on original films and shows to lure subscribers and control costs.

Spotify’s $16 billion valuation is still modest compared to Netflix $87 billion enterprise value, roughly 10 times last year’s revenues of $8.8 billion, says Needham & Co. media analyst Laura Martin. Applying that same formula to Spotify’s $3.4 billion in revenue would yield a value of over $30 billion -- nearly double its current estimated market value.

But bankers and industry observers say it’s difficult to value a company -- especially one like Spotify, which has seen its losses deepen even as it gains subscribers.

Spotify reports 140 million regular users around the world, 60 million of whom pay monthly subscriptions. But the combination of royalties, distribution costs, salaries and other business expenses dragged the company into the red in 2016, according to public filings.

"It is in many ways a success story," said technology analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research. "But the reality is streaming is challenging for the distributor."

Spotify is planning to make its shares public via a direct listing, versus the more conventional initial public offering, according to sources. Instead of hiring investment bankers to hype the offering and set the price, the stock simply becomes available on the public market -- with the price is set by demand.

Spotify stock could begin trading later this year or early next year.

SWIZZ BEATZ ON HIS 'NO COLOR BOUNDARIES' COLLABORATION WITH BALLY: 'IT'S NOT JUST A HIP-HOP THING'

Written by: SHIRA KARSEN for BILLBOARD MAGAZINE® Modifications and additions by: ILYSE TERRI® and THE REVIEW®

Pics and content by: BALLY®

Rapper and producer Swizz Beatz is serious about art. So serious, in fact, that when he personally reached out to Bally via Instagram asking to collaborate, he wanted to make sure whatever he created was artistic enough to be considered, well, art.

“It’s a dream collaboration,” Beatz tells Billboard of Bally x Swizz, his new, illustration-centric collection with luxury footwear brand Bally, available now. “I’ve been a fan of Bally since back in the day, growing up in the South Bronx. Bally used to be the signature of making it, Slick Rick, Doug E Fresh with "Fresh dressed like a million bucks/Threw on the Bally shoes and the fly green socks," and now to come back years later and be the one to bring things to a new generation...it’s amazing.”

Beatz’s life is one of constant airport hopping—while we were on the phone with him he had just passed through security. So it’s no surprise that the idea to collaborate with the second oldest heritage brand in the world (second only to Hermes) came to him while at London’s Heathrow airport.

“I saw these sneakers at the Bally store there and was like, ‘okay, these are cool. But why doesn’t anyone wear them?’ In Bally’s mind, they thought what they were doing was perfectly fine, because the leather, the know-how, the fabrics; those have always been the best. But they were very conservative about it. That’s not what the young people want,” Beatz says.

As a result, their first capsule collection is unlike any Bally line previously produced, and hopefully will be one the younger set is clamoring for. Textured leather backpacks ($825), lace up high tops ($595), slip-on sneakers ($425) and a handful of luxury accessories (iPhone cases, keychains, sweaters and even varsity jackets ranging from $125 to $1,695) are decorated with Spanish artist Ricardo Cavolo’s folk art-inspired protagonists; pious-looking symmetrical symbols designed in bright, Barcelona-like colors. “When I spoke with Swizz about the concept of the collection, he told he wanted me to create something about when the artist works with total freedom, the creation with no borders, free spirit,” Cavolo said of the inspiration behind his exclusive illustrations. “So I decided to create a few characters representing the artists who let the animal they have inside, out. Working with freedom and no borders means to work with that animal inside of us. These characters are a sort of gods or shamans with his/her spirit animal as totems.”

When asked about choosing Cavolo, Beatz said he wanted an artist whose work felt, at its core, “diverse with no color boundaries.”

“It’s very important for art to be freedom of expression, and I didn’t want people to say this is only a hip-hop thing or only a black thing or only an Asian thing. I wanted people to feel like they can be part of it,” Beatz said. “The world is very fragile right now, people are very fragile right now. At the end of the day being an African American from the South Bronx, people think I should only have one style, one taste. But I broke out of that 20 years ago and I want to help other people break out of that too. We’re inspired by the world, not just our surroundings. When I started traveling decades ago, I started collecting art from all places from the world. When I look at art now, I see cultures and united ideals instead of peoples skin.”

The Bally x Swizz capsule collection is available at bally.com and Bally stores, with products ranging from $125 to $1,695.

We are immense fans of Swizz and his wife, of course, and actually visited his office a while back in NYC. As we were introduced to and met him, he then gave us a private tour of his personal paintings. He's a true artist and the nicest guy. We wish him tremendous success with this venture and all his endeavors.

HOSPITALITY

THE BAIRD/STR HOTEL STOCK INDEX INCREASED 5.3% IN SEPTEMBER, CLOSING THE MONTH AT 4,318. YEAR TO DATE THROUGH THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF 2017, THE INDEX WAS UP 16.6%

Written by: HOTELNEWSRESOURCE.COM Modifications by: THE REVIEW®

Pics and content by: HOTELNEWSRESOURCE.COM

"Hotel stocks posted solid gains in September as investors bid up more economically sensitive sectors, including both the hotel brand companies and the hotel REITs," said Michael Bellisario, Senior Hotel Research Analyst and Vice President at Baird. "Higher interest rates, improved prospects for potential tax reform, and expected hurricane-related demand tailwinds helped stocks easily outperform their benchmarks last month. Fundamentals have remained steady, but investors have extended their investment time horizons and are more optimistic about next year's growth prospects."

Chart - U.S. Hotel Stock Performance

"Despite the fact that there was a calendar shift with the Jewish high holidays (October last year), preliminary performance results point to a healthy September and a record occupancy level for the first ninth months of the year," said Amanda Hite, STR's president and CEO. "The massive hurricanes in Texas and Florida affected demand and will likely have implications on the development pipeline moving forward. Because of the aforementioned Jewish holiday calendar shift, and the very disruptive hurricane season, September and October data will be hard to parse for trends. By the time a more 'normal' November comes around, the year will basically be done, but we still expect that room demand growth will be slightly higher and ADR growth slightly lower than previously projected."

The Baird/STR Hotel Stock Index for September was ahead of the performance of both the S&P 500 (+1.9%) and the MSCI REIT (RMZ) (-0.7%).

The Hotel Brand sub-index increased 6.2% to 6,249 from August to September, while the Hotel REIT sub-index increased 3.7% to 1,618 during the month.

The Hotel Brand sub-index was set to equal 1,000 on 1 January 2000. Last cycle, the sub-index peaked at 3,407 on 5 July 2007. The sub-index's low point occurred on 6 March 2009 when it dropped to 722.

The Hotel REIT sub-index was set to equal 1,000 on 1 January 2000. Last cycle, the sub-index peaked at 2,555 on 2 February 2007. The sub-index's low point occurred on 5 March 2009 when it dropped to 298.

As of 30 September 2017, the companies that comprised the Baird/STR Hotel Stock Index include: Apple Hospitality REIT, Choice Hotels International, DiamondRock Hospitality Company, Extended Stay America, Hilton Worldwide Holdings, Hospitality Properties Trust, Host Hotels & Resorts, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group, La Quinta Holdings, LaSalle Hotel Properties, Marriott International, Park Hotels & Resorts, Inc., Pebblebrook Hotel Trust, RLJ Lodging Trust, Ryman Hospitality Properties, Summit Hotel Properties, Sunstone Hotel Investors, Wyndham Worldwide Corporation, and Xenia Hotels & Resorts.

FASHION

THE TOP 10 MOMENTS OF NEW YORK FASHION WEEK

Written by: THE NEW YORK TIMES® Modifications by: THE REVIEW®

Pics and content Courtesy of: TOM FORD, CALVIN KLEIN, THE FASHION CHANNEL,CAROLINA HERRERA, FF CHANNEL, HELMUT LANG, THE NY TIMES, FIRSTVIEW; ALYSSA GREENBERG; NINA WESTERVELT, RALPH LAUREN, ANGELA WEISS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, VAQUERA, ALBERT URSO/GETTY IMAGES, JEREMY SCOTT AND REBECCA SMEYNE, NOW FASHION, ECKHAUS LATTA, VOGUE

Calvin Klein packed his front row full of celebrities, and Ralph Lauren brought everyone to Bedford Hills, N.Y. The fashion editors and reporters of Styles and T round up the highlights of the week.

TOM FORD STARTED THE WEEK WITH A BANG

As many designers opted to show in Paris this season, one very important American designer, Tom Ford, did just the opposite: he returned to New York after seasons of jumping all over the map (to London, Los Angeles — and seemingly everywhere in between). Opening New York Fashion Week last Wednesday evening, the designer transformed the Park Avenue Armory into a slick lounge, complete with moody lavender lighting. The show was just as seductive, with crystal-embellished panties, power-shoulder suiting and gauzy bandage evening dresses. After the show ended, the site transformed into an after-party complete with shirtless waiters and Off White’s Virgil Abloh in the D.J. booth. Only a showman like Mr. Ford could inject this much sex and excitement into one evening. — MALINA JOSEPH GILCHRIST, T magazine style director, Women’s

CALVIN KLEIN HAD A MIND BLOWING FRONT ROW

Calvin Klein’s front row included Lupita Nyong’o, Mahershala Ali, Jake Gyllenhaal and Trevor Noah

Raf Simons, the chief creative officer of Calvin Klein, has set out to reflect his vision of the American experience in his clothes. But even before a survivalist tea dress or logo quilt appeared on the runway, his ambition was clear from his front row: as diverse a mix of talent, ages and identities as appeared anywhere else all week. There were so many assorted boldface names, they couldn’t even fit on one bench. The “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah sat next to a very hirsute Jake Gyllenhaal, who sat next to the “Moonlight” star Mahershala Ali, who sat next to Lupita Nyong’o, who sat a few seats down from the artist Sterling Ruby, who sat across from the former Klein icon Brooke Shields, who was next to the rising star and tween Millie Bobby Brown, who was next to the It girl Paris Jackson. And we haven’t even gotten to where Christina Ricci, Kate Bosworth, Kelela, Rashida Jones and Russell Westbrook were. It was enough to bring out the groupie in us all. — VANESSA FRIEDMAN, fashion director, Styles

A FEW DESIGNERS OPTED FOR CLASSIC SITES

As some American designers, including Thom Browne and Joseph Altuzarra, decamped for Paris, others doubled down on New York and showed in some of the city’s most iconic sites. The Row’s Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen staged their show over scones and coffee at the Carlyle; Derek Lam and Gabriela Hearst took over the newly renovated the Pool, in the former Four Seasons space; Brandon Maxwell brought guests to Doubles, the subterranean members-only club at the Sherry Netherland; and Oscar de la Renta overtook Sotheby’s (using the escalators as an extended runway). Perhaps most notable of all was Carolina Herrera, who staged her show in the garden at MoMA — the first time a full-fledged fashion show had been held there. — ISABEL WILKINSON, digital director, T magazine

CAROLINA HERRERA

CASTING WAS SURPRISING-AND BEAUTIFUL

From left, Helmut Lang, Eckhaus Latta, Maryam Nassir Zadeh. Credit Firstview; Alyssa Greenberg; Nina Westervelt

By the second day of fashion week, Gigi and Bella Hadid began to feel like old friends: The sisters, along with a handful of other Instagram-savvy models, are so ubiquitous on runways that they become almost impossible to avoid. No knock against them, but it’s for this reason that when designers cast unexpected models — artists, singers, friends — it’s something of a relief. At Helmut Lang, Shayne Oliver mixed some of Lang’s original muses, like the model Kirsten Owen, with people he had found on the street. Eckhaus Latta cast the pregnant artist Maia Ruth Lee, among other friends, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh mixed models with the actress Hailey Benton Gates and the artist India Menuez.

Best of all was Abraham Boyd, a Detroit-born singer spotted by the director Spike Jonze a year and a half ago, singing in Central Park. Mr. Jonze cast him for Opening Ceremony’s dance-performance show, in which he sang a poignant rendition of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” by Frankie Valli. — I.W.

RALPH LAUREN BROUGHT EVERYONE TO A CAR-THEMED ADVENTURE

By Courtesy of RALPH LAUREN and Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Ralph Lauren Fashion Show

In one of the most personal displays of New York Fashion Week, Ralph Lauren arranged for about 250 guests to be chauffeured from the city to Bedford Hills, N.Y., to view his see-now-buy-now collection — and his famous stable of cars, which include some of the rarest models in the world. In celebration of 50 years in business, the show took place in the garage where Mr. Lauren stores his automobiles, and guests were able to inspect vintage Jaguars, McLarens and Alfa Romeos, among others, over Champagne and hors d’oeuvres before sitting down to a runway positioned among the designer’s beautiful machines.

To an espionage-themed soundtrack borrowed from the 1965 James Bond film, “Thunderball,” male and female models walked in clothing inspired by the cars: silvery Prince of Wales check suits for women, Ferrari-red ballgowns, and fringed tuxedos as deep black as the designer’s 1938 Bugatti, one of the most expensive cars on the planet. After, the crowd of magazine editors and actors including Diane Keaton, Jessica Chastain and Armie Hammer were ushered to yet another level of the garage, where a sit-down dinner of lobster and burgers from the brand’s restaurant, the Polo Bar, were doled out by an army of synchronized — and, of course, classically good-looking — waiters. — ALEXA BRAZILIAN, fashion features director, T magazine

VAQUERA REMINDED US THAT YOUNG TALENT STILL THRIVES HERE

Vaquera’s spring 2018 collection. Credit Albert Urso/Getty Images

The vacuum left by designers departing the New York schedule made space for some of the younger brands on the margins to rush in and fill the void. Truth is, there are still scrawny, fledgling labels operating on a shoestring with more gusto than business plan, and they still make New York Fashion Week their home.

Vaquera, a four-person collective dedicated to hysterical oddity, is one, both shaky in its early days and squarely in the spotlight’s glare. A year ago, they barely had the means to produce their collection. Even now, Bryn Taubensee, Patric DiCaprio, David Moses and Claire Sully said backstage before the show, many of their pieces come in only a single size — designer price tag notwithstanding — but they were just nominated for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, and were juggling curious interviewers from The New York Times and Vogue.

“We feel like we’re in the middle of an identity crisis,” Ms. Sully said. “We want to communicate our work through our crazy shows but also through selling things and trying to figure out how to do that.”

Rather than ape polish and assurance, they leaned into the confusion, and their show had a cheeky verve their more established colleagues could only wish for. It was a thrilling chance to see designers working to figure themselves out in real time, with a gonzo sense of proportion and shape and great bits of art-as-fashion: a hand-drawn Abraham Lincoln T-shirt dress, an oversize bathrobe-gown. As Whoopi Goldberg, who reviewed the show for Interview Magazine (!), wrote: “If I were hosting another Oscars show I would wear the terry cloth. Absolutely. I just think it’s beautiful.” Reason enough to hope for a reprise. — MATTHEW SCHNEIER, reporter, Styles

JEREMY SCOTT

Backstage at Jeremy Scott’s 20th anniversary show. Credit Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

Who knew 1997 would turn out to be so pivotal for fashion? That’s the year no less than three — count ’em — New York designers founded their businesses, and they all celebrated their 20th anniversaries this season: Narciso Rodriguez, Jeremy Scott and Maria Cornejo. Though they have notably different aesthetics ranging from the streamlined (Mr. Rodriguez) to the organically sculptural (Ms. Cornejo), they share the same independent spirit and cleareyed sense of sartorial self. Their longevity can be attributed to the strength of these visions as well as the healthy perspective that comes from the responsibility of running your own business. I don’t know what they were putting in the water back in ’97, but fashion should bottle it. — V.F.

THERE WAS TIME FOR THE WEIRD-AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE IT

ECKHAUS LATTA'S SHOW WAS PACKED

Not only with critics and the editors of major magazines — more than usual, it seemed to me — but also with genuine friends and fans. The brand, which is designed by Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, who met at Rhode Island School of Design, has been on the rise these past few seasons, in part because it presents an increasingly fleshed-out vision, both of clothes and community.

You believed that these people would wear these clothes, both those who milled around after the show eating dumplings and sipping weed-leaf cocktails and those who had featured in it: among them, the singer Kelela, the artist Lucy Chadwick, young Coco Gordon Moore (Sonic Youth scion of Kim and Thurston) and Susan Cianciolo, whose art-house fashion shows for her Run line in the 1990s were in some way the progenitors of Eckhaus Latta’s. That makes a kind of thread, one that connects Eckhaus Latta to its community, to the past and to the future — pull it, and it can take you to interesting places.

If New York Fashion Week is destined to be tarred with the “commercial” brush, it was cheering to remember that there are plenty of others making things devoutly weird, small and hand-crafted. Really, they always have. — M.S.

From left, Susan Cianciolo, Kelela and Lucy Chadwick in the Eckhaus Latta show

Credit Photographs by Nowfashion

PRABAL GURUNG BROUGHT GLORIA STEINEM (AND FINE JEWELRY) TO FASHION WEEK

Prabal Gurung’s new jewelry for Tasaki. Credit Firstview

There were plenty of good moments at the Prabal Gurung show. Unlike many of the front rows this season, which feature up-and-coming actresses, Mr. Gurung’s featured Huma Abedin and Gloria Steinem — the first time Ms. Steinem had ever been to a fashion show. The casting, too, was notable: Gigi and Bella Hadid walked alongside Ashley Graham and Andreja Pejic. But despite all this excitement, it was hard for me to take my eyes off of Mr. Gurung’s debut collection with Tasaki, the Japanese fine jeweler, where he was recently been named global creative director. His pieces, including twisting, architectural earrings (in white gold and pearl) inspired by Surrealism, were the perfect accompaniment to the stunning evening dresses. — M.J.G.

MARC JACOBS ENDED THE WEEK WITH SOUND OF SILENCE

The Marc Jacobs show has always been a loud punctuation mark to New York Fashion Week, but this season, as with his last, was shown in complete silence. It was staged at the expansive, high-ceilinged Park Avenue Armory uptown, and there was no elaborate set, no fancy lighting and no music. All one could hear was the sound of the wildly eclectic clothes — some ornately beaded, others heavy with shimmery scales of sequins — swishing as models walked on the old wood floors. There were turbans pinned with jeweled brooches with almost every look, lots of swirling ’60s-style printed column dresses with black opera gloves, and embellishment in all shapes, colors and forms, including metallic colored tinsel on sandals and sparkly boas. Seating was arranged on metal folding chairs on the perimeter of the wide open space, which made guests on the other side of the room seem tiny and the models, who carried weekend totes and wore fanny packs, look as if they were in transit, roaming a giant old European train station en route to somewhere exotic and very, very far away. — A.B.

Content Courtesy of MARC JACOBS INTERNATIONAL LLC

LONDON FASHION WEEK HIGHLIGHTS

Reported By: VERONICA HEILBRUNNER

Pics and Content By: VERONICA HEILBRUNNER, NATASHA ZINKO, CATWALKING.COM, TOMMY HILFIGER, THE UPCOMING, HELLO MAGAZINE, DESIGNSCENE.NET, JUNGLE MAGAZINE, VOGUE

NATASHA ZINKO

TOMMY HILFIGER

ALEXANDER WHITE

MILAN FASHION WEEK

Video and Content by: ANNA WINTOUR, VOGUE, BRITISH VOGUE

INNOVATION

On a another planet err we mean topic, this came up in September on Space X and we had to share. What can be better than flying to our favorite destination in no time at all? Uhh, we think not much actually. Enter Space X's newest buzz

Written by: ANDY WALKER FOR MEME BURN® and MSN NEWS®

Modifications by: THE REVIEW®

Pics and content Courtesy of: Space X

ELON MUSK'S BFR WILL FLY FROM LONDON TO CAPE TOWN IN JUST 34 MINUTES

Elon Musk may be nuts, but a remarkable number of the South African-born businessman’s ventures have been successful. This month at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia, he announced another “really special” proposal.

His space exploration company SpaceX is pondering a new method of transporting people from one corner of the Earth to the other. And it involves a space vehicle/rocket system called the BFR.

“The BFR will be capable of taking people from any city to any other city on Earth in under one hour,” the company revealed.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX believes a journey from Johannesburg to Sydney could last just 37 minutes using the BFR

More specifically, the company quoted flight times of 39 minutes for a journey between New York and Shanghai, 37 minutes for a Sydney to Johannesburg trip, and a 34 minute flight between London and Cape Town.

Currently, a flight to London from Cape Town requires half a day.

The BFR system will reportedly hold around 100 people, breach the Earth’s atmosphere, reach speeds of 27 000km/h in sub-orbit, and conduct an automated landing on a platform.

Both the passenger-filled space vehicle and launcher will be reusable.

SpaceX gave excited travellers an idea of how the system would work in a video that feels straight out of Mass Effect.

But here’s the kicker:

“Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft,” Musk notes on Instagram. “Forgot to mention that.”

Development of the craft will be funded by the company’s current commercial space contracts. But eventually, the BFR will become the backbone of SpaceX’s ambitions in the Solar System, including transporting cargo to the International Space Station, the Moon and Mars.

As for the first launch date of Elon Musk’s remarkable travel system? Let’s just say you won’t be able to buy a ticket just yet.

ART

MARCEL DUCHAMP AND THE FOUNTAIN SCANDAL IS STILL SHOWING UNTIL DECEMBER AT THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART (April 1 to December 3, 2017), AND A SHOW ON THE SAME SUBJECT AT FRANCIS NAUMANN FINE ART, NEW YORK

Written by: DODIE KAZANJIAN for VOGUE® Modifications by: THE REVIEW®

Pics and content Courtesy of © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp

It’s 100 years since Duchamp upgraded the urinal from an everyday object to the high art of sculpture—by taking it out of the men’s room and putting it on a pedestal. It’s art because Duchamp said so: “Readymade.” One of the world’s most scandalous works of art, it was never actually seen. The original disappeared just before its scheduled debut at the First Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, but the work became famous through replicas, and has been changing the way we look at art ever since.

September was super busy and we're still catching our breathe. From fashion month to Ad Week New York, there was never a dull moment.

In October we'll finish up fashion month with Paris Fashion Week, which ended in October and always brings the heat and of course cover Tech X from #AdWeekNewYork in detail, including #Samsung's downtown NYC tech savvy store and more innovative Tech, AI and VR products. We'll also highlight products and services in the Health and Wellness sector which we'll expand on starting in October and into the New Year.

For now, go ahead and take a picture with you and your favorite Technology product or gadget or Health and Wellness fave and tag and follow us @thereviewinc and @ilyseterri with the hashtag's #TechX, #AWNewYork, #LiveHealthy, #BeWell and #Prosper.

Doing so will automatically enter you to win a special mention in our October post and of course, your pic and product will be posted and mentioned there as well, along with your new business or venture, or a special cause you have chosen to support and donation instructions for our readers.