Michael Schoepf, creative director at Havas Germany, didn’t have a personal connection to Parkinson’s Disease when he decided to do something to help. He was inspired after reading an article about a man with Parkinson’s who said he missed reading after his tremors became too intense.

“That meant so much to him, his whole life. And I don’t know why, but this one sentence struck me because, on the one hand, I’m a copywriter and creative director,” Schoepf told us. “Writing is basically my job…I love reading and I just tried to imagine that taken away from me. That [would] be really a pity.”

• At first, Schoepf thought of making print typography that could be read with tremors—similar to those created for people with dyslexia.
• When he realized a digital product could reach more people and potentially help them do more than read books, he and his design partner, Walter Ziegler, shifted their focus to designing an application that would “compensate [for] tremors in real time,” according to the description of the app, to keep everything on a web browser in-line.
• The free iPad app, now called Staybl, was released earlier this month for anyone with tremors—a category that now includes Schoepf’s mother, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s a year and a half ago, around seven months into the app’s development.

“It’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Schoepf said. “But I don’t like to think that way.”

Making it happen

After pitching his idea to Havas Germany and getting approval, Schoepf and team worked with the German Parkinson Association (GPA) to ensure the app worked for their patients. The agency also worked with Havas’s New York branch to develop the tech side of the app.

Big picture: Josh Loebner, executive director of inclusion and accessibility at Designsensory and a disability advocate, said Havas’s investment in this technology is part of a growing trend of disability inclusivity among brands and agencies.

• Examples include Mastercard, which recently released a card designed for visually impaired users, and Wunderman Thompson, which has an agency practice built specifically for inclusive design.
• “Havas is doing a great job of saying, ‘Hey, we want to welcome more people. We believe in inclusive design as a methodology to ensure as many people as possible can engage with a product or service,’” he said.

Looking ahead: In time, Loebner said he hopes to see agencies and brands consider inclusive design beyond pro-bono campaigns. “I don’t want to say that doing this pro bono was a bad thing, but agencies and brands moving forward definitely need to recognize that disability shouldn’t be considered a charity case in any way,” he said, adding that “Inclusive design could bring revenue, could bring more loyal customers in, and deserves a valuation equitably with other initiatives.”

Read the full story here.—KH

After weeks of negotiations, canceled town halls, and tweets, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will be the new owner of Twitter. The deal, approved yesterday, cost the billionaire $54.20 per share, which amounts to somewhere around $44 billion. Once finalized, Twitter will become a private company.

What’s happening? So far, the plans are murky—even Twitter employees don’t seem to know what to expect. Recently, Musk has hinted at changes he might make to the platform. According to his own tweets, that could include:

• The addition of an edit button (something the company says it’s working on).
• Longer tweets (something the company has already worked on).
• More “spam bot” filtering.
• An open-source algorithm.
• And, perhaps most importantly, a new vision of what Musk considers “free speech.” Some have speculated that this could include reinstating former President Trump’s account, with the @HouseGOP account tweeting at Musk, “it’s a great week to free @realDonaldTrump.”

Good tweet/ad tweet: In a since-deleted tweet, Musk said he was against ads on its subscription offering, Twitter Blue, adding that “the power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive.” But according to the Wall Street Journal, Musk will need to run ads in some capacity to keep the lights on.

Still, advertisers have concerns:

• “Musk has a history of saying some off-color things. It’s possible to see him taking an anything-goes approach,” Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at Mekanism, told Marketing Brew via email. “If that’s the case, I imagine many brands will revisit if it’s a platform they want to be aligned with,” he continued, adding that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Musk’s Twitter shifts away from an ad-supported model entirely.
• Tamara Sykes, SEO strategist and marketing consultant at Next Level Presence, told us over Twitter DM that “Musk’s free-speech declaration, which sounds good to him in theory, doesn’t define how a company he will make private will define free speech. And let’s be honest, historically, that makes anyone who has been in the minority very worried about being exposed to more hate speech without accountability,” she told us.

While it’s unclear how Musk might approach advertising on the platform, some marketers tell us Twitter ads aren’t exactly knocking it out of the park. “Twitter ads generally don’t perform particularly well,” Gahan said. Sheeta Verma, senior digital marketing specialist at Vyond, told us via Twitter DM that Twitter ads “have never been popular in comparison to other platforms that allow ads.”—PB and KH

Each Tuesday, we spotlight Marketing Brew’s readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Elsa Sánchez Bustos is a digital account strategist at Google, a role she told us involves helping SMB advertisers “grow their businesses through paid media strategies.”

Tell us about your career to date. I’m from crazy Mexico City, where I studied marketing at Universidad Panamericana. The last two and a half years, I worked at LLYC, a communications consultancy, where I had the opportunity to gain experience in PR, crisis management, and some community management. I joined Google one year ago, currently working for the onboarding phase of LATAM customers, to help them exponentially grow their business through paid media.

What do you do in your current role? I work at a digital accelerator program inside Google, where we onboard high-potential SMBs from Latin American countries and exponentially grow their business through paid media and customer experience strategies. My role is to work closely with these customers through a consultative relationship, in order to guide them with a digital strategy that best fits their needs and helps them achieve their marketing objective.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? I volunteered in the LLYC Foundation’s project to help position and disseminate Médicins Sans Frontières initiative called Doses of Humanity, in order to support health groups, patients, and other vulnerable populations in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Along with my team, we were able to share the initiative with Tier 1 journalists and media outlets in MX to spread the news.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? “Dream Crazy,” Nike.

What marketing trend are you least optimistic about? Influencer marketing growth in the last years is making social media audiences bombarded with sponsored content on their feeds, making them less likely to engage with both influencers and brands, especially younger audiences.

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Going green: Twitter has banned advertisements that “contradict the scientific consensus on climate change.”

Click: LinkedIn’s move to add links to profile pages could boost click-through rates and referral traffic.

The ’gram: Meta added more AR tools, including better audio processing, to help improve audio editing for Instagram Reels.

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Looking for your next role? Be sure to check out the Marketing Brew Job Board for 150+ new openings!

Today’s featured openings:

• PR Manager, Fine Wine at Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits
• Growth Marketer at Abilitie
• CRM Manager at AMC Networks

See more jobs or post your job opportunities here.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Inside Susan Alexandra’s collab with meme account Starter Packs of NYC
• How Tenderfoot TV’s Donald Albright used his music marketing background to grow a podcast network
• What’s the perfect length and placement for a podcast ad?

Jimmy Donaldson, known better as MrBeast on YouTube, is the platform’s highest-earning creator, according to Forbes, reportedly earning $54 million in 2021 alone. Where are his operations located?

1. Greenville, North Carolina
2. Athens, Georgia
3. Kansas City, Missouri
4. Green Bay, Wisconsin

Keep scrolling for the answer.