Hasta La Creative!

Chili’s Grill & Bar, catering to the Instagram crowd, revamped the look of its dishes to make them look better on social media.

Customers frequently like to take pictures of their food and share the results, putting pressure on the company to refine its aesthetics. Chili’s now places its french fries in stainless-steel containers, sits its burgers up higher on the plate and uses buns with more visual appeal. The company also has its own Instagram account, with more than 25,000 followers.

“We look a lot more at how the food is presented,” said Wyman Roberts, chief executive officer of Chili’s parent company Brinker International.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

In March, we learned that General Motors had decided to move the Chevy Silverado account from Leo Burnett Detroit to Commonwealth//McCann in what the client’s own representative described as “an effort to streamline business and ensure consistency.” After shifting responsibility for promoting the 2013 models to Burnett, GM turned to McCann (which was still technically considered the brand’s AOR) for the 2015 lineup.

A series of staffing changes related to that loss occurred this week.

Here’s the internal memo that went out today to Leo Burnett staffers:

As many of you are aware, we had a staff reduction today affecting many of our friends and colleagues at Leo Burnett Detroit. We needed to make changes to the organization to align our current staffing needs to our revenue. This was a tough day for all of Leo Burnett but we cannot allow it to rob us of the creative momentum we have achieved this year.

Tomorrow the leadership team will meet with their respective groups to talk through today’s actions and answer questions you may have.

We do not, unfortunately, have much in the way of details regarding these changes. An independent source tells us that the layoffs affected the office’s creative department and that the total number of staffers dismissed was greater than twenty.

Updates if we get them.

Cancer Society Asks Media Aid in Print Anti-Cigaret Campaign

For Betty, perhaps this was too little too late. Cigarette ads were banned from TV in January 1971, so months beforehand, the American Cancer Society, preparing for the cigarette industry’s mad rush to print, announced plans for a “major educational effort” to counter a potential uptick in the industry’s advertising. The TV ban would see more than $200,000,000 worth of cigarette money leaving broadcast — so that’s a whole lot of dough left for other channels.

How Do You Tell the World That You Have Opening for a Middle-Aged Gent?

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Pete Marquis and Jamie McCelland — the writing/directing team behind HelloFlo’s “First Moon Party” and “Camp Gyno” — wrote and directed the comical “Theresa the Baristapist” for text/video-chat counseling service In Your Corner.

The ad portrays Theresa, a deluded barista who fancies herself a great unlicensed therapist (thus the term “Baristapist) — or as she puts it “like a Freudian Jesus.” She “can do things real therapists can’t,” like spray a misbehaving child with whipped cream or suggest that you go ahead and kill your boss. The point of the whacky character is to illustrate that “Sometimes the best advice is expert advice.” Theresa is the kind of character who would be terrifying in real life, which makes her work perfectly as a humorous exaggeration of what can go wrong when seeking advice in the wrong places. The spotwas designed with the approach of removing the stigma from therapy with humor.

“The idea came from the insight that people are hesitant to seek actual, professional therapy, but still get it from everywhere—their friends, relatives, their hairstylist, even the barista,” Marquis explained to Adweek. “We wanted to have fun with the idea that she’s giving unlicensed advice with no accountability or concern for anyone’s long-term mental health,” McCelland added.

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 here ran on TV for the first time yesterday. 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, a woman gets spiritual about air fresheners in a spot for Glade. McDonald’s releases another spot with Max Greenfield (Schmidt from Fox’s “New Girl”), this time singing the praises of fanny packs.

And Heidi Klum is everywhere these days. She’s already pitching business ideas in a new ad for Wix.com, and now she’s celebrating the 30th anniversary of Macy’s private brand INC brand by singing “Happy Birthday” in a Marilyn-turned-Avril performance.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Amy Wiedemann, longtime Deutsch accounts staffer who was promoted to an SVP role last summer, has left the agency.

While we just received the news from our tipster, an agency spokesperson says that Wiedemann left Deutsch “several months ago.” Her destination is unclear.

You may recall that Deutsch’s LA office announced a series of management changes back in January including the promotions of Mike Sheldon (now North American CEO), Pete Favat (North American CCO), Kim Getty (West Coast president), Jeff White (North American EVP/CMO), and Linda Sawyer (chairman). Donny Deutsch the younger will no longer play an active role in the agency; we’ve received no updates on his forthcoming USA sitcom since January.

It would seem that Wiedemann’s departure followed these changes.

In eight years with the Deutsch organization, she moved from account supervisor role to that of director and VP; after the agency won Pizza Hut from mcgarrybowen nearly a year ago, Wiedemann was promoted to the SVP position and managed the client’s relaunch/rebranding project. She also teaches marketing communications at Los Angeles’ Loyola Marymount University.

We currently have no information on the reason for her departure or her current status. She hasn’t responded to our request for comment.

So our sources were right: Royal Caribbean did not choose the established player (Deutsch NY), the edgy alternative (Droga5) or the smaller upstart (22squared) in its extended creative review.

The client instead concluded that review today by choosing Mullen, now known as Mullen Lowe, as its lead creative agency to succeed JWT.

A source tells our colleague Andrew McMains of Adweek that the client’s final review–of its media agencies–is now down to three:  Media Storm, Mediahub and defending incumbent Mindshare.

The recent Mullen/Lowe merger raises a couple of questions. First, will the client favor Mullen’s media arm Mediahub for its buying business? Second, who will run creative on the account?

(Given the fact that Campbell Ewald will “return to its roots as an independent agency within the IPG and Mullen Lowe Group portfolios,” that shop will clearly not work on Royal Caribbean. But will current Lowe employees who were not also Mullen employees work on it?)

Expect hiring announcements to come…and expect them to be complicated by the many moving parts of the newly formed Mullen Lowe Group.

(TrendHunter.com) Not everyone appreciates the streamlined design of professional cyclist helmets; that’s why this casual bicycle helmet design is so promising. Inspired by a retro aesthetic, it balances safety…

She may have been talking to a group of (understandably) tired, hungover media buyers, but Gina Rodriguez’s impassioned address at the CW’s upfront presentation had all the emotional impact of an Oscar speech.

Flanked by her cast mates, the “Jane the Virgin” star on Tuesday morning took the stage at New York’s Beacon Theatre to thank the assembled media buyers and advertisers for their support.

“Thank you for letting me do what I love every day,” the actress said. “It may be just money to you, but to us it’s our dreams!” At which point, the carefully trained ear could detect the sound of buyers reaching for their checkbooks.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Three teams of scientists looked at the perceptions that led to the viral phenomenon of the blue and black (or was it white and gold?) dress.