Stories by Ian James Wright

This year, Cards Against Humanity’s annual Black Friday stunt takes a political direction. It bought a plot of land on the U.S./Mexico border that would obstruct the building of a border wall, and is sending its customers “an illustrated map of the land, a certificate of our promise to fight the wall, some new cards, and a few other surprises.”

Audio can be a thankless craft. When it’s done well, people don’t notice it. But placing emphasis on sound is a crucial part of telling engaging stories. Here are an Emmy-award-winning video producer’s five tips for stepping up your audio game and bringing your videos to life.

Facebook, Apple, Uber, Nike, Walmart, McDonald’s and more are all members of the unhappy fraternity of brands named in the “Paradise Papers,” a trove of millions of documents leaked to the International Consortium of Independent Journalists (ICIJ) that purport to reveal prominent people and companies using offshore havens to avoid tax.

Scheduling tweets and recycling old content are best practices, but the NRA failed to take into account that it is an extremely crisis-prone brand and scheduled a tweet that looked insensitive in the context of the Texas church shooting. This should be addressed in every brand’s crisis plan.

As so often happens when a violent tragedy strikes and claims human lives, brands were taken along for the sad and sobering ride this week. As the usual questions about gun control and immigration arise for America, questions arise as well for Walmart, The Home Depot and Uber about what and how they should communicate to their stakeholders to reassure and to help.

Spacey was accused of a forceful sexual advance by actor Anthony Rapp, who was 14 at the time. Halperin was accused by 12 women of sexual assault and harassment during his tenure as political director at ABC News. Their statements differ in some very important ways.

Every user will be able to see all ads currently running on Twitter, how long they’ve been running and associated creative, and for political ads, additional information about the advertiser and the amount of money they’ve spent. Ads that do not specifically endorse a candidate for election but instead concentrate on issues are up in the air.

For a B2B brand, marketing at trade shows can be an immense boon, but sadly many struggle to generate new business—often because they aren’t clear about their own goals or fail to develop a comprehensive strategy for the event. Here are some quick tips for what you should do before, during and after the show to make sure your efforts are not in vain.

It takes more time to engage thoughtfully than it does to schedule a few tweets and call it a day, but it’s a solid investment. If you’re going to commit to using Twitter to really build your brand, Adam Snyder of MUFG (Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group) has some advice for you.

Twitter announced the new Video Website Card Oct. 17, an ad format that “combines the power of video with the ability to drive users back to a site to learn more or take action in the moment.” In basic terms, it’s an auto-playing video that, if a viewer taps to learn more, anchors to the top of the screen and continues playing while a website loads below.