Aug
11
Temptations: Don’t you, forget about me
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Aug
11
Here's Where Swing State TV Ad Spending Surged in July
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Editor’s note: Here’s the second installment of the Ad Age Swing State Advertising Heat Map, presented in partnership with Strata, an advertising software firm owned by Comcast that processes more than $50 billion in ad transactions each year. This monthly view is designed to supplement our weekly Campaign Scorecard posts that appear every Friday in our Campaign Trail section. Some context and analysis from Simon Dumenco follows. –Ken Wheaton
ICYMI, here’s the first installment in this series: “Exclusive: The Swing States Where Political Ad Spending Is Exploding”
As we noted last time, by drilling down into Strata’s hyperlocal TV advertising data — the company works with political ad agencies representing 75% of the total political ad spending — we can get a good sense of the ebb and flow of ad dollars among the batteground states.
Aug
11
Dentsu Aegis to Buy Data and Performance Marketing Agency Merkle
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Dentsu Aegis has signed a deal to acquire a majority stake in data and performance marketing agency Merkle as the network drives toward its goal of becoming a “100% digital economy business by 2020.”
In the deal, which is expected to be complete by next month, Dentsu will buy shares from private equity firm Technology Crossover Ventures and other shareholders, while Merkle CEO David Williams, the management team and staffers will retain a “significant minority interest,” according to an agency statement.
Representatives from Dentsu Aegis and Merkle were not immediately available for comment.
Aug
11
Forget Pokmon Go, Marketers — The Larger World of AR Is Here
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Regardless of whether Pokmon Go becomes the next Pinterest or is just the Pong of our generation, marketers need to get ready. The game has become a wild hit, with more than 20 million people in the U.S. playing it daily, at twice the usage of Facebook. And it signals five new ways to advertise in a virtual world.
First, let’s define the new medium. Augmented reality, or AR, is simply the mixture of digital worlds (images, video and sound) and physical reality, experienced first by today’s mobile screens and eventually by eye goggles with better vision or haptic suits with full-body sensation.
2016 is the year AR arrived. In February, the Florida startup Magic Leap secured $793 million in VC funding for its glasses that project high-resolution animations over real space. Microsoft in March began shipping developer kits for its HoloLens headset. And Facebook has purchased Oculus, a virtual-reality pioneer, for $2 billion. With all the big tech players investing, AR is coming fast.
Aug
11
Watch John Oliver Explain Journalism Circa 2016 — and Jason Sudeikis Champion Clickbait
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On Sunday’s edition of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver’s trademark extended rant took on journalism. Specifically, newspaper journalism — and the causes of its long, sad decline. Among Oliver’s targets: TV journalists who merely re-report what actual newspaper reporters first reported; aggregator websites (including The Huffington Post, which Oliver calls “Arianna Huffington’s Blockquote Junction and Book Excerpt Clearinghouse”); billionaire investor Sam Zell, whose disastrous tenure as the controlling shareholder in the Tribune Company led to its bankrupcy and thousands of layoffs; billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal and immediately started meddling with its journalism; Tronc, as the post-Zell Tribune Company has rebranded itself; and all us cheap-ass content consumers who don’t really want to pay for quality journalism.
Where’s this all heading? To a future in which “Spotlight,” the Oscar-winning movie about newspaper journalism, would look very different. (Spoiler: In a trailer Oliver shows for “Stoplight,” Jason Sudeikis plays a clickbait-loving editor who runs a newspaper called The Chronicle — or, uh, Chorp, as it’s been rebranded.)
UPDATE: The Newspaper Association of America is not amused!
Aug
11
Beam Suntory Makes Agency Moves on Two Bourbon Brands
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Beam Suntory has named Preacher of Austin, Texas, the creative agency-of-record for bourbon brands Knob Creek and Basil Hayden’s. The shop has also been assigned strategic and creative duties across Beam Suntory’s Irish Whiskey portfolio, with a focus on Kilbeggan and Tyrconnell in the U.S.
Walton Isaacson had previously handled Knob Creek and Basil Hayden’s. The agency was behind Knob Creek’s first TV ad in 2014.
New work for Basil Hayden’s is expected to hit this fall, while new Knob Creek advertising will launch in 2017.
Aug
11
Clients Must Provide Transparency, Too
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The escalating controversy over transparency provides all types of agencies with an unprecedented opportunity. With marketers poking, prodding, searching and questioning everything about the current state of advertising, there’s a chance for agencies to initiate profound change — provided they can truly determine what matters most to marketers.
And that requires clients/marketers to be transparent, too.
The opportunity starts with redefining an agency’s internal view of success. For decades it’s been about new business. Winning lots of it. Getting in the hunt, making the headlines, being perceived as hot, and mastering the art of the pitch and presentation. That worked for years, as long as the agency did its job and won awards.
Aug
11
Jaguar Land Rover Taps Havas Formula to Handle Public Relations in U.S.
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Jaguar Land Rover has hired Havas Formula as its agency of record for automotive and lifestyle PR in the U.S., following a competitive review.
The review, which was handled internally with Jaguar Land Rover’s purchasing department, had four final competitors, but the automaker initially reached out to 15 agencies, said Stuart Schorr, VP of communications for Jaguar Land Rover North America. He said the budget on the account in the U.S. is “just into seven figures.”
Previously, ASG Renaissance handled automotive PR for the company and DKC focused on lifestyle. Representatives from the two incumbents were not immediately available for comment.
Aug
11
Adventures in Botsitting
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After trying to make my own existence obsolete by creating a bot, I’ve discovered that I must continue on in my corporeal being, as bots still have a few kinks. But this attempt at bot creation offered a good taste of what bots can do, what they can’t, and what marketers will need to overcome in the short term.
The bot, which connects to my corporate Facebook Messenger page, took several tries to get right, and it will always be a work in progress. While I had been curious to create a bot for a while, I wasn’t motivated to launch one until I read a Medium article by Esther Crawford, “How I Turned My Resume into a Bot. (And How You Can Too!)” I skipped ahead to the “you can too” part, which has four steps. One of those four steps actually has five steps, and most of those five steps are so foreign to a non-coder that they read like Ikea instructions written entirely in Swedish.
In the process, I registered for four services: GitHub, Twilio, Smooch and Heroku. If you know what most of them do, you’re far ahead of where I was when I started. To spare details from weeks of attempts at working like this, the bot worked for a little while, then it stopped, and then tech support stopped responding.
Aug
11
Giancarlo Swings, Serena Returns in Latest Nike 'Unlimited' Spot
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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, UnitedHealthcare rolls out a sporty spot featuring an enthusiastic mom who takes a slam dunk too far; Snapple shows an oddball family portrait session based on one of its many under-the-lid facts; and Chase puts the Cyr wheel skills of acrobat Isaac Hou on display.
Booking.com presents Chelsea Peretti and Jordan Peele’s first dance at their wedding as imagined by the website — with bride and groom wearing armor, swaying among roses to the sounds of Bobby Lee’s recorder “music.”
Aug
11
Disney to Start a Sports Streaming Service — but It's Not ESPN Over the Top
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Walt Disney Co. on Tuesday reported quarterly profit that beat analysts’ profit projections, as strong performances from films including “Captain America: Civil War” and “Finding Dory” countered a challenging period for TV and consumer products.
Disney also said Tuesday that it will buy a minority stake in BAMTech, a technology and streaming company formed by Major League Baseball, and will start a web-based sports network under the ESPN brand as part of that deal. The new streaming sports network will not carry the same content as the existing ESPN cable networks, however.
The company will pay $1 billion in two installments, now and in January 2017.
Aug
11
One in Four Influencers Asked Not to Disclose Paid Promotion
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One out of four influencers have been asked not to disclose their commercial arrangements with a brand, according to a survey by influencer marketing and media platform SheSpeaks.
The finding, based on responses from 347 influencers, follows on the heels of the Federal Trade Commission saying last week that it plans to get tougher on paid promotion disclosure.
The fact that 25% of respondents said brands have explicitly asked them not to disclose that they were compensated for their influencer work even surprised Aliza Freud, SheSpeaks founder and CEO, who said the number should be zero. “Any decent influencers are highly aware that they have to disclose and do it properly,” she said.
Aug
11
GE Creates World's First 'Connected Volcano'
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Digital industrial company GE, which has been at the forefront of using new technologies to tell its story, is creating the world’s first “connected volcano” and sharing the journey on social media.
To do this, GE is partnering with explorer Sam Cossman at Qwake, a company that combines global expeditions with cutting-edge technology. GE is the digital and software partner for an expedition Mr. Cossman is leading in Nicaragua to connect sensors to a live volcano in order to gather data for early warning systems and other purposes.
“We are leveraging Predix, GE’s industrial internet software, to help build the foundation of a digital ecosystem Mr. Cossman and his team at Qwake are putting in place at the volcano,” said Sydney Williams, global digital marketing manager at GE.
Aug
11
Influencers Are People, Not Media Outlets
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Twelve years ago I started an influencer agency. I was told I was out of my mind. Leaving a lucrative on-camera position at MTV to move behind-the-scenes seemed mad to most. To me, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. It was abundantly clear that, in a rapidly splintering communications ecosystem, marketers were going to need to wield the power of alpha-consumers if they wanted their messages to resonate. Brands would no longer influence people, people would. They would also need to speak to a new generation that was multicultural, entrepreneurial, savvy, suspicious of authority and obsessed with experience.
It took about a decade, but influencer marketing has finally graduated to the big leagues — endorsed from the CPG industry to automotive, from tremendous PR shops to historically digital agencies, from the streets to corporate boardrooms and everywhere in between.
And this is bad for brands, consumers and influencers alike.
Aug
11
Three Ways to Rev Up Your Company's Marketing Engine
Posted in: UncategorizedMarketing sometimes feels like a race that can’t be won. Not only must one continually edge out the competition to succeed, but the finish line keeps moving. Even as our marketing savvy advances, consumers, who are barraged with messages left and right, continue to find ways to evade our attempts to connect. Maneuvering into a position of advantage indeed takes skill, strategy and practice and is a struggle familiar to any marketing leader.
Rich Smith, CMO of mortgage provider Ditech, grabbed his company’s proverbial wheel in 2014 and navigated Ditech into an enviable lead supported by a cost-effective sponsorship deal with NASCAR. Here are three insights from Mr. Smith that can help any organization’s marketing engines run more smoothly:
1. Chase live events. Ditech became a household name in mortgages in the 1990s, but like many in the industry, the company experienced its fair share of detours over the past two decades. When Mr. Smith joined the team in 2014, it was his priority to refresh the brand. His department then put rubber to the road in a sponsorship deal with Stewart-Haas Racing of NASCAR that September. While the move took some months to gather momentum, Ditech experienced a noticeable boost from having its name televised with each NASCAR event. “It’s been a great relationship for expanding our brand awareness in a relatively low-cost way,” says Mr. Smith.
Aug
11
The State of Chinese Social Media in 2016: What You Need to Know
Posted in: UncategorizedThe Chinese social media landscape moves fast and if you haven’t been paying attention closely, there’s a lot you’ve missed. New platforms have popped up, while main players including Alibaba and Tencent have consolidated their power. In general, China’s social landscape is involved in innovations in video, engagement and payment that have evolved differently and faster than anything in the West. For the last 8 years, Kantar Media CIC has taken the pulse of China’s social landscape. Here are five changes and developments that we think brands, agencies and tech players should understand for 2016.
The BATS, the core of China’s digital and social landscape, have grown ever more powerful
Chinese internet powerhouses Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Sina (referred to by the acronym “BATS”) together have upwards of eight different social media and/or e-commerce platforms, each with hundreds of millions of active users. They are the absolute core of China’s social and digital landscape because of their cumulative 2 billion users. These key players are at the heart of making the Chinese internet viral, informative and practical. Let’s call that “VIP.” The “I” and the “P” are particularly important in differentiating China from the rest of the world. Trusted Information in China can be scarce, while the plentiful information on social media such as news, word of mouth and rumors is often the type of content that cannot be found anywhere else, even with government regulators keeping a close watch. This makes social media more important in China than most global markets.
Aug
11
Agency Says Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson Stole Its Brand Concept
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When Tampa, Fla., branding agency Spark conjured up a brand concept for Gary Johnson back in June, they never intended for the Libertarian presidential candidate’s campaign to actually employ it. Turns out, according to the agency, the campaign did just that, using a very similar color scheme and design elements without permission, and without implementing the thorough “brand system” devised by the agency.
In fact, the Johnson camp is still using a distinctive color scheme, design composition and similar font on its website home page, Twitter and Facebook pages and elsewhere, all of which unmistakably mirror ideas originated with Spark.
In June, the agency published its quarterly magazine, Stick, which featured a variety of articles relating to the “underdog” theme. The agency — which does not work with political clients — decided to take a stab at creating branding specs for an underdog political campaign and chose to use the third party hopeful, former New Mexico governor and triathlete, as its guinea pig.
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