Hasta La Creative!

Chinese tech giants have been in a rush to go global. Social network Weibo had a U.S. IPO, and e-commerce giant Alibaba is planning one. Tencent’s chat app WeChat has sought users in markets from Argentina to South Africa. Baidu launched a version of its search engine in Brazil.

Those moves made headlines, but in a quieter way, Chinese tech companies have also started putting ads for their apps and games on smartphones around the world.

Si Shen, CEO of Beijing-based PapayaMobile, launched a mobile ad network called AppFlood two years ago to bridge China, the West and beyond.

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For the past couple of years Ad Age has had an editorial partnership with TVGuide.com focused on its Watchlist, a customizable entertainment guide that lets users make a list of their favorite shows, actors, etc. We’re interested in Watchlist because each season the top 10 most Watchlisted new shows tend to have a high probability (up to 80%) of being picked up for full seasons.

For its users, Watchlist is a great service that lets them plan their TV viewing; for us, it’s a sort of massive focus group of informed TV fans (the database of registered users hit 2 million earlier this summer). There’s a “wisdom of the crowds” thing going on here.

A caveat we repeat every time: Keep in mind that Watchlist users are, essentially, publicly expressing hope that these shows will live up to hype — as well as an intent to watch. Series that exhibit early promise and score full-season orders can and do, of course, still end up getting canceled later on (as storylines run out of steam, as networks stick good shows in bad time slots, etc.).

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Quint Studer, founder of the Studer Group, was named as the winner of the first Healthcare Marketing Visionary IMPACT Award by Ad Age and sister publication Modern Healthcare. The presentation will be made Sept. 23 in Chicago during Modern Healthcare’s Strategic Marketing Conference.

This special award will be given each year to an outstanding individual who has ethically advanced public understanding of healthcare issues and made a lasting contribution to the industry. The winner must consistently demonstrate an ability to communicate complex healthcare information in a manner that is compelling, reliable and responsible.

Mr. Studer, who entered the healthcare industry in 1984, rose through the ranks of several organizations to become president of Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, Fla., in 1996, where he helped engineer a financial and quality turnaround. He launched the Studer Group in 2000, which went on to win the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

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General Mills has hired MillerCoors marketing executive Jackie Woodward for the newly created position of VP-global media. She will oversee all paid, owned and earned marketing efforts to “drive high-impact media plans” for the packaged food giant, according to General Mills.

As VP-marketing connections at MillerCoors, Ms. Woodward oversaw media, digital, sports and entertainment marketing, as well as licensing and agency partnership development. She joined Miller in 2006 from McDonald’s, and became VP-marketing services for MillerCoors in 2008 after Miller and Coors merged.

Ms. Woodward was named an Ad Age Woman to Watch in 2004 and an Ad Age Media Maven in 2008.

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After becoming Procter & Gamble’s second-biggest market in the world in 2012, with about 6% of the company’s global sales, China is still a moving target. As the country’s top advertiser and market leader in the biggest package goods categories, P&G is known for developing products that meet the needs of local consumers and building an organizational structure that empowers Chinese talent.

Today, P&G’s Chinese future is in the hands of one of those local hires.

Ellie Xie, general manager and one of Ad Age’s Women to Watch China 2014, is charged with keeping P&G brands like Pampers, Olay and Crest in a market leadership position amid growing competition and a fast-changing marketplace. P&G is by far China’s biggest advertiser, spending almost $1.8 billion a year, about twice as much as L’Oreal at No. 2 at $1 billion and Unilever at No. 3 at $842 million, according to the Ad Age DataCenter’s annual ranking of the top 100 global marketers.

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Cause-marketing aside, most brands are usually not trying to save lives. Marketers are normally trying to sell a product or a service. But first and foremost, that means getting people to engage with, and participate in, what your brand is doing.

And from that participatory side, there is a lot that we can learn from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that’s been sweeping the country.

By now you’ve undoubtedly seen your Facebook feed and Twitter stream flowing with videos of people dousing themselves with ice and challenging others to do the same to raise awareness and money to fight amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Some have argued about the effectiveness of this, but according to the ALS Association, as of Aug. 18, it’s “received $15.6 million in donations compared to $1.8 million during the same time period last year (July 29 to August 18).”

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After five months, the term that grew synonymous with the carrier’s brand is dead.

Earlier this week the wireless carrier announced a discounted family data plan, meant to undercut larger competitors AT&T and Verizon. That offering puts an end to its Framily plan, a multiple-line offering launched in January. Sprint’s future marketing will drop the term and focus on promoting its new plan, the Family Share Pack.

“Right now, we’re going to be very focused on our new value offering,” said Jeff Hallock, Sprint’s CMO. On Thursday, he said, Sprint plans to announce further price cuts on individual plans.

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The playbook for selling luxury goods in China is changing fast as marketers deal with challenges ranging from the drastic crackdown on gift-related corruption to savvy Chinese shoppers who often prefer to buy abroad.

It used to be a straight-forward affairlots of bling, lots of logoslots of sales. Consumers bought brands like Louis Vuitton to show off status and wealth, said Mykim Chikli, CEO, China at ZenithOptimedia.

Today’s landscape is far more complicated, and not getting any easier. A government crackdown on corruption started in 2012 and has caused a sharp decline in luxury sales, especially in categories associated with gifting like watches, jewelry and high-end spirits.

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The New York Times, AOL, Meredith and The Washington Post — what do each of these media companies have in common? Within the past year, all have hired top executives as programmatic ad chiefs. Given that real-time bidding digital display ad spend is expected to grow another 38% in 2014 (after increasing 74% in 2013) and reach $9 billion in ad spend by 2017 (almost 30% of total digital display ad spend), it makes sense that these companies are investing senior-level resources to help embrace and monetize the massive opportunity.

Finally, the industry has realized that the debate is not about man vs. machine, but about how man can manage the machine to deliver the best outcome for all stakeholders involved — media companies, brand advertisers and targeted consumers. We’ve placed a lot of power in programmatic technology’s ability to scale ad buys and find more precise audiences, but human intelligence still remains the most important part of the equation.

More than ever before, a new crop of talent specifically tuned for more technical and analytical business requirements is rising out of the woodwork and taking hold in organizations across the ecosystem, from programmatic ad chiefs at media companies to programmatic media specialists at digital agencies. I predict that it won’t be long before a second CPO joins the C-suite: Along with the chief product officer, the new chief programmatic officer will affect influential strategies in the board room.

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