Hasta La Creative!

Like a good party, you should be kicking yourself if you weren’t there. Sunday, July 6 concluded the four-day event known as the Essence Festival. The event celebrated its 20th anniversary with a bang, exceeding attendance expectations while continuing to be the number one gathering event of Black women. While over 100,000 Black women converged on New Orleans, so did Prince, Hollywood, think-tank representatives and staples of the brand world. Like no other event, Essence Festival was an opportunity to engage married, single, millennial, gen x, baby boomers and all socio-economic levels of Black women all together, all at the same time.

Walmart, McDonald’s, State Farm, Verizon, MSNBC and Ford were some of the most visible brands present at the packed convention center and the Super Dome, but other smaller brands made sure to make an appearance as well. The weekend’s activities included networks previewing their fall programs, healthcare brands participating in an empowerment zone, killer concerts and panel discussions on everything ranging from gun control to entrepreneurship and technology — all led by some of the nation’s most important thought leaders.

Why? Because this weekend was ground zero for brands wanting an audience with Black women. And where else could they maximize their marketing dollars to reach every single segment of Black women, as well as a growing segment of the festival, Black men.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

BBH London Joint Digital Officer Mel Exon has been promoted to managing director at the agency. Since joining BBH in 1997, Ms. Exon has overseen award-winning and notable work for clients such as British Airways, Levi’s, Boddingtons, Yeo Valley, Johnnie Walker and Boddingtons. In 2008 she co-founded the agency’s innovation unit BBH Labs. She has been named to Wired UK’s Top 100 digital influencers and recently served as a Cyber juror at this year’s Cannes International Festival of Creativity. Lindsay Nuttall, who joined the agency from the BBC earlier this year, will continue as chief digital officer. Ms. Exon’s move coincides with that of Charlie Rudd, who was promoted from managing director to chief operating officer.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

We know very little about what it’s like to work for RAPP, the New York-based agency with a digital data focus.

However, after scrolling through this BuzzFeed “Brand Publisher” post submitted by an anonymous tipster and written by a person/persons who do work at RAPP, we’re curious.

The purpose of the self-published story seems to be directing the reader’s attention to the agency’s sense of work-life balance.

Some things we learned…

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new and trending TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, a company that catalogs, tags and measures activity around TV ads in real time. The New Releases ran on TV for the first time over the holiday weekend. The Most Engaging ads are showing sustained social heat, ranked by SpotShare scores reflecting the percent of digital activity associated with each one over the past week. See the methodology here.

Among the new releases, McDonald’s takes a wry look at some parenting challenges in a promotion for its Happy Meal (“It’s all good when you’re having fun”), while KFC serves up family dinner in a treehouse in its latest #HowDoYouKFC ad. And racing star Danica Patrick, a sponsored driver for Coke Zero, gets in on Coke’s ongoing “Share a Coke with [insert name here]” campaign (another recent spot in the series lands in the Most Engaging portion of our chart).

As always, you can find out more about the making of the best commercials on TV at Ad Age’s Creativity.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

You’ve built and furnished a home. You regularly tweak and maintain the property so your equity grows. But when you’re away, strangers gain access. They sell your appliances, plumbing fixtures and furniture and when you return, it’s clear the value you’ve worked so hard to attain has evaporated.

Digital publishers are similarly compromised by third parties (Google, Facebook, advertising vendors, social media widget providers and others) that take, use and monetize the customer data the publishers generate. And it’s precisely that behind-the-scenes access to customer data that causes its value to diminish and threatens publisher profitability.

Many publishers remain in the dark about whether third parties obtain their data, and whether they monetize it. A “Publishing Profitability Survey” of nearly 400 U.S. publishing executives showed 78% of them don’t know if third parties access their data and whether or how they are monetizing it. But whether they understand or not, it’s happening virtually everywhere.

Continue reading at AdAge.com