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British ventilator consortium targeting 1,500 units per week

No Touching, No Actors as Advertisers Confront Life in Isolation

(Bloomberg) -- Shaking hands has a publicity problem -- so does walking through crowds, attending a concert and passing out high fives.Scenes like these are disappearing from advertisements as companies come to grips with public health orders to self isolate and limit the spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Ads that were in the works have been shelved and campaigns have to be reworked on a short timeline. Travel and hospitality companies have gone quiet. Meanwhile, with so much of the world on lockdown, it’s not exactly easy to shoot new commercials.“You have to ask what meaning does your commercial have right now, given that everything has changed in the immediate realities of life,” said Mark Lund, chief executive officer of McCann Worldgroup U.K. “How do you avoid that tone deafness which might offend and alienate people?”The U.K. advertising regulator said it got 163 complaints about a KFC television ad in March which featured people licking their fingers. Complaints said it was irresponsibly encouraging unsanitary behavior, according to a spokesperson for the Advertising Standards Authority. When the agency contacted the fried-chicken fast food chain, whose longtime slogan is “Finger lickin’ good,” the company had already decided to pull the ads.Unilever Plc suspended its “Unstoppable” campaign for Domestos, including a video ad that said the toilet cleaner kills germs that are “hiding, breeding, infecting the weak.”Getting InventiveIn addition to new sensitivities around hygiene, advertisers are having to cope with limited resources to make new commercials as production crews and actors self-isolate.“World War II comes to advertising land. What can you make out of this empty washing-up-liquid bottle and a bit of sticky-back plastic?” said Emma de la Fosse, chief creative officer of Digitas Inc.’s U.K. business. “It’s about being inventive.”A cookie brand that Digitas works with had to pivot quickly from a campaign about going out to one about staying in and staying safe, she said. Agencies are getting creative with footage that’s already been shot, and they’re looking at user-generated content and social-media influencers, though the quality can be hit-and-miss, Fosse said.Lund said that McCann has done an ad for grocery store Aldi using existing footage and resurrecting an animated carrot from its Christmas campaign telling shoppers to “go easy” on the vegetables.As the lockdown drags on, advertisers will also have to make the decision about whether to make a bigger pivot on campaigns, such as commissioning more animation and using computer-generated imagery that can be produced by teams of graphic designers, art directors and 3D modelers working from home.“The likelihood is things will take a bit longer, but there is no creative compromise,” said Mark Benson, CEO of global creative ad studio Moving Picture Company. Brands are coming to the studio to complete ads that were already in production with special effects, he said. “For example, an auto spot where the car would have normally been shot by a specialist auto director -- it still can be, but the car will be built by animators in computer graphics instead of shot live-action on location.”New TechnologyAnimation and visual effects studios were already changing the way they work so teams can collaborate remotely, and shifting computing horsepower from office servers to the cloud. The shock of the coronavirus will hasten the move to new video production methods, said Neil Hatton, CEO of film and TV industry lobby group the UK Screen Alliance.“There are parallels with the Japanese tsunami, which accelerated a move from production delivered on tape to production on computer file as the tsunami wiped out the tape-manufacturing companies on the coast of Japan,” said Hatton.For an industry that prides itself on creativity, ingenuity is more important than ever. Advertisers may be facing a worse setback than the 10% retraction in marketing spending that followed the 2009 financial crisis, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matthew Bloxham said. Ads typically cost companies the equivalent of about 11% or 12% of sales and are easy to reduce. The slump is going to spread quickly from the travel and leisure industry clients, who cut their spending immediately, to luxury goods, cars and clothes, he said.Read more: TV Industry Faces Billions in Lost Ads During Sports Hiatus“We know that it’s going to be quite a sharp kind of effect -- the question is how long that effect goes on for,” McCann’s Lund said. “We’re having conversations with our clients about what does the world look like on the other side and what does it mean for brands and how they exist in people’s lives.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Britain orders 10,000 ventilators from F1, aerospace consortium

Why Disease and Xenophobia Go Hand in Hand

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Pandemics have always been fellow travelers of globalization. A third phenomenon stalks in their shadow: racism.That's worrying. The global threat of Covid-19 seems to be leading not to a unified global response, but to an American president who until Tuesday was describing it as a “Chinese virus” while officials in Beijing stirred up conspiracy theories on social media about a U.S. military origin for the disease. Already, stories are proliferating of people subject to abuse and attacks for “coughing while Asian,” or being turned away from businesses because of actual or presumed Chinese ethnicity.Sadly, there’s nothing new in this. As my colleague Pankaj Mishra has written, the current situation parallels events a century ago, when the first interconnected world economy unraveled into the chaos of World War I. It was disease, as much as war and revolution, that drove that collapse.The age of sail had imposed a natural restraint on both epidemics and migration. It took as long as a month to cross the Atlantic, meaning any infections had already burned themselves out by the time a port was reached. When typhus spread to North America among Irish emigrants fleeing the potato famine of the 1840s under sail, the onboard outbreaks were so notorious that the boats were nicknamed “coffin ships.”Steamships changed all that, opening up ocean transport by drastically lowering its cost and cutting the time needed for transatlantic crossings to less than a week. That helped spark the first era of mass migration as millions of Europeans left for the new world — but it also put the length of a transatlantic journey well within the period when diseases could spread unnoticed.Cholera, which had previously been confined to an endemic area around Bengal, spread among the officers and traders of the British Empire to inflict devastating epidemics on every continent. Smallpox pandemics played a crucial role in the Americas since Columbus’s day, enabling colonialism due to their devastating impacts on indigenous populations. Yellow fever crept up repeatedly from the Caribbean and central America to ravage the southern U.S. In 1889, the first modern influenza pandemic spread rapidly from Russia to North America.Since that era, immigration restrictions and public health measures have often gone hand-in-hand. It’s no coincidence that sites in New York Harbor synonymous with migration such as Ellis Island and Liberty Island started life as quarantine stations. “International mobility is central to the globalization of infectious and chronic diseases,” according to a 2007 bulletin from the World Health Organization. “The history of health and foreign policy reflects long-term links to migration issues.” As people confined to their homes will be well aware, limits on human movement and interaction are crucial to holding back outbreaks of disease. Racism, however, exploits a flaw in human reasoning quite as effectively as infections exploit flaws in our immune defenses. The central fallacy is to assume that if international travel helps spread disease, a perceived “foreign” group is most likely to be carriers. Viruses, though — unlike people — don’t much discriminate by race.(2)The Covid-19 outbreak in Italy is a case in point. Several commentators have claimed without evidence that the source across the north of the country was the large number of Chinese migrants working in Italy’s fashion sector. In fact, tracing the contacts of the infected and finding “patient zero” is a well-established practice in epidemics, and there’s no sign of any significant origins among garment workers. All the research to date suggests the key source was instead a 38-year-old Unilever Plc employee named Mattia from the town of Codogno.Despite the lack of evidence that ethnic groups are responsible for disease, the canard has been frequently been used to justify racist measures. One notorious 19th-century cartoon from Australia’s Bulletin magazine presented China as a malignant octopus attacking the country, two of whose arms were labeled “smallpox” and “typhoid.”It was a similar story in the U.S. Only about 1% of the mostly European immigrants coming to Ellis Island around the turn of the 20th century were rejected for medical reasons. By contrast, some 17% of the more Asian migrant population at San Francisco’s Angel Island was disbarred for sickness, owing in large part to more intrusive screening and vague disease categories applied to non-Europeans. Anti-Chinese measures like San Francisco’s Cubic Air Ordinance were justified on public health grounds as measures to combat “insanitary” overcrowding. For much of the past century, the relative absence of pandemics has put the alliance between racism and disease into remission. Vaccines, antibiotics, sewerage systems and a better understanding of hygiene have proved our most powerful tools for fighting disease. One of the more enduring threats of coronavirus may be the way it changes this calculus. With luck, the connections built up during this era of mass migration will keep xenophobia in check. Trump said Tuesday he would stop using the term “Chinese virus.” That’s a start. (1) Some diseases do appear to be prevalent at different rates among different ethnic groups, such as hepatitis C, although the mechanism for this isn't well understood. Many people with African ancestry are less likely to die from the malaria amoeba thanks to a side-effect of sickle-cell anemia, a blood condition.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies. He has been a reporter for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Guardian.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

BofA says 24 firms elegible for bond-buying schemes of both ECB and BOE

FTSE 100 gains on weaker pound, jump in BAT shares

The FTSE 100 edged higher in a choppy start on Thursday, supported by a jump in the shares of tobacco company BAT and a weaker pound as London braced for a virtual shutdown due to the spread of the novel coronavirus. The internationally focussed FTSE 100 rose 0.7% by 0827 GMT, as exporters benefitted from a plunge in sterling to its lowest level since March 1985. British American Tobacco climbed 3.7% after it said the outbreak has not had any material impact, while shares of other blue-chip companies including Diageo, BP and Unilever rose more than 3%.