Colour comes at a cost as Pantone starts charging, a little bird tells us that Elon Musk has officially taken over Twitter and Happy Halloween - Christmas ad spend is set to hit a record high

Pantone shows its true colours

From November, standardised, pre-loaded Pantone Colour Books will no longer be available for free in the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, as the two companies decide they’re on a break. (They’ve changed their licensing agreement).

Customers who wish to use Pantone colours will now have to buy a Pantone Connect licence to access the colours in their Adobe Creative Cloud products. For $15 a month.

Or, if they’re happy to venture in a non-Pantone grey area, get it for free.

Stuart Semple of Culture Hustle - aka the Robin Hood of artistic material - has liberated the Pantone colour palette and is giving it away for free, unless you work for Adobe or Pantone.

FREETONE is a colour palette plugin for Adobe, containing 1280 colours including digital versions of Pinkest Pink, Incredibly Kelinish Blue and Black 3.0.

There’s just one thing. The liberated colours are Pantoneish, emphasis on the ish, and are reminiscent rather than direct copies of the colour book. But according to Semple, they’re indistinguishable from those behind the Adobe paywall.

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Elon Musk acquires Twitter

Elon Musk is officially Chief Twat as he takes over Twitter.

Sorry, Twit*. Good thing you can edit your tweets now. His $44 billion takeover of the company finally closed on Thursday night, with Musk promising that the platform would not become a ‘free-for-all hellscape’.

As one of his first moves, he fired several top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, the platform’s head of legal policy Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sean Edgett.

Later in the evening, he tweeted ‘the bird is freed’.

The closure of the deals ends a months-long saga in which the billionaire attempted to buy Twitter after publicly criticised the company’s management, reneged on the deal, and then entered into a bitter legal battle with the social network.

It remains to be seen how exactly Musk will change the app, but the vague details he has provided include increasing subscriptions, providing alternative algorithms for a more customised experience, improving the app’s data targeting and heavily reducing content moderation to encourage more free speech.

Oh, and bringing Donald Trump back.

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Christmas Ad Spend to hit record high

A record level of ad investment is expected to be set this upcoming Christmas.

A report from the Advertising Association found that UK ad spend for the final quarter of 2022 is set to increase by 4.5% from last year’s record high to a total of £9.5bn.

Search advertising – including eCommerce – is forecast to be one of the quickest growing media over the quarter, rising by 7.3% to a total of £3.4bn. At £1.7bn, TV advertising spend is expected to remain flat during the quarter, but video-on-demand is set to rise ahead of the wider market with expected growth of 4.2%.
The report also found that the UK’s advertising market will grow by 9.2% in 2022, to a total of £34.9bn and by a further 3.9% in 2023, to a total of £36.2bn.

Stephen Woodford, Chief Executive, Advertising Association, said “It is encouraging to see strong figures in Q2, with media channels continuing their recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking forwards, political and economic stability is much needed, given the inflationary and recessionary forces impacting all businesses. As companies navigate these pressures, we see them continuing to prioritise advertising.”