Hasta La Creative!

Each year Ad Age honors the best and the brightest of the agency and marketing worlds with our reports including the Agency A-List, our Marketer A-List, Women to Watch and the Creativity 50. This year, we are taking our awards program to the next level with the expansion of the Ad Age Agency A-List into the Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards.

As part of the A-List, we’ve introduced additional honors, such as in-house agency of the year. Also, Creativity’s Top Production Company honors will become part of the A-List program.

While the platform will continue to showcase the top agencies and creative innovators of the year, it will also honor the most creative individuals, the best work and the most promising companies in the advertising, marketing and tech worlds. See the full list of categories below and the descriptions here.

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Editor’s note: Here’s the third 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 previous installment in this series: “Here’s Where Swing State TV Ad Spending Surged in July”

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.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Tracy Kidder’s book chronicles the life of Paul English, a Kayak.com founder who got rich, battled bipolar disorder and found a gratifying outlet in altruism.

A fleeting moment that, like so much of her campaign, is impossible to separate from history.

Que Star Wars é um estilo de vida muita gente já sabe, mas agora foi a vez da Target, loja de departamentos americana, mostrar isso em sua mais recente campanha. O vídeo, intitulado “Existe um rebelde em todos nós“, que você pode ver acima, usa como personagens uma menina, uma mãe e um professor, dentre […]

> LEIA MAIS: Campanha sobre “Rogue One” mostra que existe um rebelde em todos nós

Do you like puns related to actor/rapper Ice-T? Well, The Martin Agency and Geico have just the spot for you.

The Martin Agency’s latest spot the “It’s Not Surprising” campaign for Geico it launched with “Marco Polo” this summer sees Ice-T helping out some kids with their lemonade stand. This leads to some confusion when passers-by keep asking “Is that Ice-T?” to which the young entrepreneurs reply “No, it’s lemonade.” The spot concludes with the line, “Ice-T at a lemonade stand? Surprising,” and contrasting that with how unsurprising it is to save money by switching to Geico.

An annoyed Ice T eventually chiming in with indignation is definitely the highlight of the effort, and helps elevate what otherwise may have been a fairly stale joke above its “Marco Polo” predecessor. The campaign remains a one-trick pony but then that’s sort of The Martin Agency’s whole approach for the client, allowing the agency to riff on a single joke that viewers come to expect and anticipate. For now, “It’s Not Surprising” still seems to have some life in it, but it doesn’t seem like it will take very long for the premise to run thin.

In addition to the broadcast spot, there’s also a “The Art of the Squeeze with Ice T,” featuring about four times as much Ice T, as well as a “Behind the Scenes” video.

Credits:
Agency: The Martin Agency
Chief Creative Officer: Joe Alexander
Group Creative Director: Steve Bassett
Group Creative Director: Wade Alger
Creative Director: Sean Riley
Art Director: Jesse Mitchell
Senior Copywriter: Ken Marcus
Copywriter: Ryan Durr
Executive Producer: Brett Alexander
Broadcast Producer: Brian Camp
Associate Broadcast Producer: Coleman Sweeney
Junior Broadcast Producer: Sara Montgomery
Account Director: Ben Creasey
Account Supervisor: Allison Hensley
Account Executive: Jon Glomb
Account Coordinator: Allie Waller
Business Affairs Supervisor: Suzanne Wieringo
Financial Account Supervisor: Monica Cox
Senior Production Business Manager: Amy Trenz
Project Manager: Karen McEwen
Production Company: RadicalMedia
Director: Steve Miller
Executive Producer: Gregg Carlesimo
Head of Production: Frank Dituri
Editorial Company: Running With Scissors
Editor: Drew Neuhart
Executive Producer: Brian Creech
Producer: Katherine Brackman
Color: Drew Neuhart
Stock Music: Lulatone

Samsung heir apparent Lee Jae Yong has been nominated to the board, teeing him up for a bigger role as South Korea’s largest company struggles with a widening recall of its Note 7 smartphone.

Mr. Lee, better known as Jay Y., has been helping run Samsung since his father suffered a heart attack in 2014. Now the scion will have to show if he has the mettle to help steer the company through its deepest crisis in years.

Regulators, airlines and Samsung have warned customers to stop using Note 7 phones, plagued by reports that the batteries catch fire while charging. Samsung has lost $22 billion in market value over two days — suggesting damage to the brand could go well beyond early estimates of $1 billion for the phone’s recall. Samsung released the Note 7 in late August to get a jump on Apple’s new iPhone 7, due in stores later this month. That advantage has now disappeared.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Also on the chart, A Day to Remember opens at No. 2 with “Bad Vibrations,” Drake’s “Views” is No. 3, and the soundtrack to “Suicide Squad” is No. 4.

Nearly everything is expected to become connected over the next decade. Kitchens. Cars. Watches. TVs. Wearables. Smartphones — the list can go on and on. Consumers already use at least six different connected devices each day, according to Nielsen.

But if marketers want to deliver a seamless experience to the same individual across different devices, they’ll likely need to understand, and use, identity graphs.

Identity graphs help marketers match multiple devices to the person who uses them. The question is whether they’re as accurate as often advertised.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

DDB Sydney launched a new broadcast campaign for the ŠKODA Octavia, touting the vehicle as ‘For Those Who Buy the Car, Not the Ad.”

A series of ads center around the theme of car ad clichés. Chances are viewers of all kinds will be familiar with these tropes, from orchestral soundtrack to “that look” every male driver seems to give when cornering a turn, to standing and pointing at a scenic overlook with the car in the background to suspiciously well-behaved children in the back seat.

“Life is a journey,” begins the stereotypical voiceover in one 60-second spot, continuing “It doesn’t matter where you’re going.” Then the voiceover is interrupted by an actress in the passenger seat turning to the camera and saying, “You’re not seriously buying all this are you?”

She points out that she just met the actor playing her husband that morning and that the “real parents” of the “unnaturally well-behaved” children in the backseat must be proud. Near the end of the spot she gets to the point of the effort, saying, “But strip all of this away and what are you really paying for? A car. Wouldn’t you prefer yours to come with everything but the clichés?”

Other spots in the campaign mostly follow a similar formula. In one ad the director is shown giving some rather morbid advice to child actors while touting the vehicle’s safety. Another shows the same couple from the first spot at a scenic location while the actress contrasts the need for car ads to appear sexy with the utility of some of the car’s features.

While the sarcastic, meta approach to advertising is becoming widespread enough to risk becoming a cliché itself, it’s not yet all that ubiquitous in the automotive category. The types of clichés the spot mocks are also rampant enough that any viewers will be very familiar with them and able to spot them in other ads after seeing DDB Sydney’s effort. That should make “For Those Who Buy the Car, Not the Ad” memorable, especially for those lulled into the false sense of sameness at the beginning of the spots.

“It’s not anti-category,” DDB Group Australia managing partner Amanda Wheeler explained to LBB. “It’s anti-cliché.”

“I thought: ‘This is brilliant! Why has no-one thought of it before?’ Initially we wanted to do a more conventional ad which points outs the merits of the car, but another way of doing it was found and it’s one we couldn’t resist,” added ŠKODA Australia managing director Michael Irmer. “I think now that this will make you think of ŠKODA every time you see one of those car brands that uses the clichés.”

Credits:
Agency: DDB Sydney
Chief Creative Officer: Toby Talbot/Ben Welsh
Copywriter: Sam Pascoe
Art Director: Jason Woelfl
Managing Partner: Amanda Wheeler
Creative Partner: Steve Jackson, Ant Melder, Michael Barnfield

Production Company/Post Production: Finch
Producer: Sarah Cook
Director: Jae Morrison
Editorial and Online: Tim Mauger

Music Agency: Nylon Studios
Sound Design: Stuart Welch

Media Agency: Mediacom