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In a case seen as a challenge to free speech, Paramount has agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump over the editing of CBS’ 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris in October.Paramount told media outlets the money will go to Trump’s future presidential library, not to the president himself. It said the settlement did not involve an apology.Trump’s lawyer said the president had suffered “mental anguish” over the editing of the interview by CBS News, while Paramount and CBS rejected his contention that it was edited to enhance how Harris sounded. They had sought to get Trump’s lawsuit dismissed.There was no immediate word from the White House about the settlement of the case, which Trump filed in Amarillo, Texas.The case has been closely watched by advocates for press freedom and by journalists within CBS, whose lawyers called Trump’s lawsuit “completely without merit” and promised to vigorously fight it after it was filed.In early February, 60 Minutes released a full, unedited transcript of the interview.Under the settlement reached with help of a mediator, Paramount agreed that 60 Minutes will release transcripts of future interviews of presidential candidates, “subject to redactions as required for legal and national security concerns,” CBS News cited the statement as saying.Trump, who did not agree to be interviewed by 60 Minutes during the campaign, protested editing where Harris is seen giving two different answers to a question by the show’s Bill Whitaker in separate clips aired on 60 Minutes and Face the Nation earlier in the day. CBS said each reply came within Harris’ long-winded answer to Whitaker, but was edited to be more succinct.The president’s lawyer, Edward Andrew Paltzik, said that caused confusion and “mental anguish,” misleading voters and causing them to pay less attention to Trump and his Truth Social platform.Paramount and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone were seeking the settlement with Trump, whose administration must approve the company’s proposed merger with Skydance Media. CBS News President and CEO Wendy McMahon and 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens, who both opposed a settlement, have resigned in recent weeks.The Freedom of the Press Foundation, a media advocacy group that says it is a Paramount shareholder, has said that it would file a lawsuit in protest if a settlement was reached.In December, ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit by Trump over statements made by anchor George Stephanopoulos, agreeing to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library rather than engage in a public fight. Meta reportedly paid $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit against the company over its decision to suspend his social media accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Associated Press
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For over a decade, Canva has made design and publishing accessible to anyone. Now, the company is wrestling with how to harness AI while staying true to its mission of empowering individual creators. Cofounder and COO Cliff Obrecht reveals how Canva is navigating this shiftand why the stakes are so high when it comes to AI-adoptation in the creative industry. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I wanted to ask you about AI. Everybody is talking about it. There’s thisI don’t want to say conflictbut there are creatives who are like, “I want to create my stuff, thank you very much. The algorithm cannot do what I do.” And then there are folks, Canva among them, that say, “No, technology can democratize access to creativity,” and some of the more pure creators might push back on that. How do you think about that issue? I’ve got a couple of strong thoughts, and I’ve got some evolved thinking on that as well. So at Canva, when we launched, a lot of designers said, “Canva, we hate you. You are ruining our industry. You are like letting everyone design.” And then we kind of said back, “Why is a designer, why is that professional, that skill set, defined by being able to use a set of really, really difficult tools?” And so over time, it didn’t take long, within four years, designers didn’t feel threatened by Canva. They saw it as actually a way to do the high value work, and then essentially democratize their work throughout the rest of the organization, so they weren’t stuck 80% of their time doing spell changes, or changing the name on a business card, or creating yet another social media post. They could do the high value brand campaign stuff. We really see AI as just another step in that evolution. I mean, it’s here and it’s here to stay. What I really believe, though, is that the creatives that the models have been trained on really need to be compensated, and that model is still being figured out. We have our creators program at Canva, where we pay out well over $100 million a year in revenue to our template creators, and that’s evolving into how we pay the creators that we train our models on. I think the industry at large is still figuring that out, though, and I don’t think that creatives have got the full value of the corpus of work that these models have been trained on. But I do think creatives need to embrace this new technology. Not embracing AI as a creative is, you can see where it’s going. It seems folly. Yeah. You have to. I mean, I was talking with someone from Google yesterday about their Veo 3 tool. We integrated that into Canva like two days ago. I mean, it’s amazing, though, what it can do. Incredible. Now, it does make it feel like, oh, anybody can be an auteur, which of course is what we want, and maybe it opens things up, but it could also have people push back against it. Well, I think it’s like, with AI, there’s going to be a huge proliferation of content. And I think to cut through that noise, you’re going to have to create something unique and different. And I think that’s what creatives bring to the table, that’s what designers bring to the table, that ability to stand above the pack. If everyone can create this, then a good creative can create something elevated. And I think it’s going to lift the baseline, absolutely. But I think the best creatives are going to be elevated beyond that and celebrated even more. Yeah. As we’re talking, Im reminded, I had a conversation, this is several years back, with Ben Affleck. And I was asking him, “Listen, so many people are watching the movies that you make on their phones. Do you start to think about creating them differently, because so many people are looking at them on a smaller screen?” And he was almost insulted at the idea that, no, no, no. It’s got to be for the big screen. It’s got to be for the big screen. But now I wonder whether you could. AI can do some of those things that make the big screen distinctive, without having to have the same budgets around it. It’s going to be incredible. And we’re about to start running competitions for student creatives. What can you create as a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old, and create your five-minute masterpiece? I think it’s going to really evolve to, I have a daughter, so how can we create her a beautiful custom story that features her doing all the things she loves? It’s going to be creative, and what’s currently movie-quality creative, down to the individual, which is really just going to see so much more creative, and I think it’s a great thing. Also, I’m dyslexic, so I can read, but I don’t read well. I read fast, but I blur things up. So I hate being a rote learner when it comes to reading text. I’m a very visual learner, and a learner that wants to learn by doing. I think what AI is doing is really, it’s allowing, particularly when it comes to education, bifurcating the way people learn and giving them the method that they resonate with most. So for example, you can create a document in Canva, but you can say, “Create this as a presentation,” or you can say, “Create this as a movie,” or, “Create this as a podcast.” And then people can learn and people can consume the way they want to consume. Yeah. Sometimes I think, too, we pigeonhole people. You’re either a creative or you’re not. And some people are like, “Oh, I’m not creative,” but we all are creative if we are given the tools that work for us, right? That’s such a good comment, because when we launched Canva, the comment we would hear time and time again is, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” That’s because the tools were so difficult to use. That’s why we worked so hard and so long on the product, because it couldn’t be daunting. It had to be simple, and we had to make it a game. So our first onboarding, we had a monkey in the canvas, and the first command in onboarding was, put a hat on the monkey. So you had to search for a hat and put it on the monkey, and then you had to add some text. And all of a sudden, you’d just done something that you never thought you’d be able to do, but you had fun doing it. And that just unlocks a whole new mental paradigm. And I think, yeah, AI is going to do that on steroids. Yeah. But it needs that interface to be able to Yeah. And that’s why Canva Code, for example, people are scared by even these AR coding tools that make creating a website so easy, but people find the Canva interface very approachable. So we launched Canva Code because it’s really hitting that, notthe first movers, but the masses that are already using Canva, and we can take them on that journey and unlock a whole new level of opportunity for them.
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E-Commerce
Tripadvisor is hoping a brighter green and accompanying brand refresh will inspire more travelers to turn to the company for experiential vacation bookings. The online travel company, which announced 1% year-over-year quarterly revenue growth in May, traded its almost-pharmaceutical turquoise green for a more vibrant electric lime as part of a brand refresh with creative agency Koto Studio. The company’s logo, an owl named Ollie, remains, but he’s now animated with moving eyes. [Image: Tripadvisor] The last time Tripadvisor launched a meaningful brand refresh was in 2020. The timing, of course, couldn’t have been worse. “We have the new assets of that brand refresh for the first time in airports in April of 2020 [when] there’s like 18 people walking through the airport seeing this thing,” Matt Dacey, Tripadvisors chief marketing officer, recalls to Fast Company. But five years later, it’s trying againwith new lessons about how people travel today. The pandemic “fundamentally changed how people thought about travel,” Dacey says. Tripadvisor has seen a rise in bookings of vacations associated with sports and other events, with customers often speaking highly about tour guides they had on their trips. The emphasis on standout tour guides could mean that today’s travelers are looking for human connections and local experiences. Tripadvisor seeks to capture that sentiment by making user-generated content (UGC) central to its brand. [Image: Tripadvisor] Tripadvisor is also leaning into UGC for a new campaign. The assets are images like a selfie taken by a monkey or a shot of a kayak tipped in the water, and the result is creative storytelling from the point of view of the traveler, not the creative agency. That makes strategic sense, considering how much consumers rely on reviews while planning their travels. In a 2019 TripAdvisor study, 72% of surveyed respondents said they always or frequently read reviews before making decisions about where to stay and eat or what to do while visiting a destination. “People trust people,” the report noted. Who better to tell a story than the person who was actually there? “We just kept seeing image after image that people were actually putting on the platform that was far cooler than probably anything we could have come up with,” Dacey says. Arthur Foliard, a brand designer and executive creative director for Koto, tells Fast Company that user-generated content also provided the inspiration for the brand’s refreshed and expansive secondary color palette. The agency used an internal tool to upload photos, pull out the three most important colors, then simplify those colors into flexible palettes that can be used for different travel locations and seasons. [Image: Tripadvisor] “We liked this idea that if you were in Tokyo during cherry blossom season, then you would have a completely different color, or the vibe of the brand would be very different than if you come here to New York right now,” Foliard says. The brand refresh is just one outward sign of a larger company effort. Tripadvisor has refreshed its app, is fine-tuning its use of AI, and, Dacey says, will launch the largest global travel membership program in the world in the third quarter of 2025.
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E-Commerce
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