Hasta La Creative!

The race to be the next Commander-In-Chief has never been fiercer, with the debates heating up to become the duel of the century. Audi is bringing you our own version of political satire, with two valets duking it out in an epic, knock-down-drag-out fight to the finish for the highest prize of them all. Hint: […]

How Bill Clinton’s affairs, and the Republican nominee’s, shaped the media’s obsession.

Advertising Week 2016 in New York has no single theme, according to Matt Scheckner, the event’s executive director, but the fact that more than a dozen panels are focused on gender, diversity and inclusion is very much deliberate.

This week’s content, he said, is meant to “mirror what are the most timely and topical” issues in the industry and in the world. And this year, the dialogue around gender and race equality, though far from new in the country and in the ad industry, has been reignited by a number of controversial events, whether it be police-related shootings or lawsuits over alleged discrimination.

This summer, Advertising Week partnered with Future Foundation to conduct a gender diversity study of the industry. The survey, which includes responses from 285 executives across the media, marketing and creative industries in the U.S.73% of whom are femalerevealed that 40% of women claim to have encountered gender discrimination in the workplace. The survey also found more than one out of three women (36%) claim to have experienced sexual harassment at work. Advertising Week and Future Foundation will release the full survey on Sept. 28.

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released for public comment an updated version of its Standard Ad Unit Portfolio designed to reflect brands’ needs to reach consumers across multiple devices.

The overhaul will provide new standards for ad characteristics such as file size, weights and aspect ratios in a world where the size and shape of screens continues to proliferate.

“It’s a pretty big change for the IAB because we are moving away from fixed units and toward a more responsive model,” said Alanna Gombert, general manager at the IAB Tech Lab, which spearheaded the effort. “The ad units will adjust themselves based on screen size.”

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Without a true sense of perspective, too often brands fall prey to Shiny New Object Syndromewhere we chase trendy and narrow foundations from which to build our brands.

Over the last 20 years, various brand-building approaches have surfaced as a result of economic, societal and technological changes. For instance, the dotcom boom made insight conversations revolve around how a brand lives online. Then the Great Recession came along, and we wanted to understand the role of a brand in culture.

When digital’s role resurfaced with Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, we re-evaluated the decision-making process and began to explore how consumers and brands interact in the moment to spark a purchase. This, in turn, signaled the end of the traditional path to purchase and hastened conversations of nonlinear purchasing journeys.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The idea that Donald Trump is a carrier of a virus that has infected our body politic has been an enduring subtext of the current presidential election cycle.

In an August 2015 piece titled “The Trump Virus and Its Symptoms” published by the National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley, Charles C. W. Cooke wrote about how “those who have been stricken soon come to believe in earnest that there is no such thing as a fair-minded or legitimate criticism of their swashbuckling charge, and that all embarrassments, mistakes and inadequacies are in fact signs of imminent victory.”

In June of this year, in a Huffington Post piece titled “Trump, His Virus and the Dark Age of Unreason,” Bill Moyers and Michael Winship wrote that a virus that “feeds on fear, paranoia and bigotry” has existed throughout American political history (McCarthyism was one strain) and that “today its carrier is Donald Trump.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com