Blending Spirits. J&B is not just about whisky cola and weekend clubbing. It’s about countless surprising blends, anytime and anywhere. With virtually no access to conventional comm’s and a limited budget, we developed an experimental content campaign with big names of the music scene and used their social media channels to reach and inspire the mass market.
“Children of the New World,” by Alexander Weinstein imagines the world and technology evolving in complex and morally challenging ways.
A push is underway to standardize some forms of measurement across websites that host video, information that is now largely self-reported.
Founded on the ideas of openness and free speech, Twitter pulses with venom, much of it from pseudonymous accounts — the white hoods of our time.
Fox Searchlight has aimed a grass-roots campaign at churches, schools and pockets of political influence to ease the provocative film into communities on edge.
Robert Iger, chief of the mass media company, has a history of reinvigorating the company by making deals, but despite a string of good decisions, shares are dipping and investors are getting antsy.
An investigative journalist said financial and real estate records indicate that the Italian translator Anita Raja is behind the best-selling author of four novels set in Naples.
The 18-year-old singer, whose debut album topped the Billboard chart a year ago, has returned to No. 1 with his new album, “Illuminate.”
Here’s a neat party trick if we’re ever in the same room and you want to see my eyes roll all the way into the back of my head and my entire body shut down as if I were some sort of robot that’s just been unplugged. Turn to our glossary on page 16. See those words? Just start using any of them and I’m done for.
To be fair, if you’re a creative and you start using some of your made-up creative words like ideate, or you turn concept into a verb, I’ll shut down, too. But I’m a creativist at heart. (See, I can make up words, too. Creationist was already taken.) I like smart branding campaigns. I think companies still have to cast a wide net to reach a wide target to convince people beyond power users to sample their wares. Hell, I like seeing a good 30-second spotas rare as those areplopped into the middle of my broadcast or cable TV.
But I also get the quest for extremely precise targeting, the desire for automation and that basic need to feel like you’re spending your marketing dollars on something that delivers concrete results.
In 2008, Mr. Grasse created a liquor brand called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, named for an essay by German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who died in 1940. The spirit, which is made at the Greenbar Distillery in Los Angeles, includes varieties such as Root, which is described as a recreation of a “true pre-temperance alcoholic root tea.”
In 2009, Quaker City acquired a stake in New England’s Narragansett brewery and the shop still handles the brand’s marketing. Last year, Mr. Grasse opened his own distillery in New Hampshire called Tamworth Distilling, which uses local ingredients to make gins, whiskey, vodka, cordials and other spirits. His agency in 2015 also collaborated with E&J Gallo Winery on the creation of Lo-Fi Aperitifs, which is described as a blend of California wine and cold-extracted whole botanicals.
Because his agency only works on alcohol, “I can actually go in and have an honest conversation about what is wrong with your business,” he said. “And because I actually understand your business because I am in your business, I can actually guide you in a way that an ad agency can’t. Because ad agencies are generalists and as generalists, you can’t really help me with anything,” he said.
Advertising Age Player
brightcove.createExperiences();
LG is giving the star treatment to its new high-end LG Signature brand. The Korean electronics brand, which maintains a U.S. headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., is promoting the line with a series of marketing events, digital episodes and print and TV ads. First introduced earlier this year and now available to consumers, the Signature line, which includes a TV, refrigerator, washer and air purifier, is priced between 10% and 40% higher than the brand’s mass products.
Ad Age’s annual broadcast TV ad pricing chart is out, rounding up figures based on data from as many as six media buying agencies, but before you dive in over there, let’s see what you know already.
Now go check out the source, our interactive, sortable, comprehensive roundup of pricing for the new broadcast season.
It’s been a brutal few weeks for Samsung. First, there were reports of Galaxy Note 7 fires, and now comes a warning from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission that its washing machines may explode.
Amid the chaos, the marketer has gone dark on the campaign for its washing machines featuring Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard. That’s the second ad shutdown in a month for the electronics giant since Sept. 2, the day it launched a massive Note 7 recall over fires sparked by faulty batteries. And with two major brand lines affected, Samsung’s reputation for overall quality is taking a huge hit.
“When there is a lot of negative press around a crisis, turning off advertising campaigns is commonplace,” said Russ Napolitano, senior partner at branding and marketing consultancy Tenet Partners. “What you usually find is that brands will replace it with other messaging about the recall, how they’re going about rectifying it, and what they’re doing for their consumers. They shift from a selling mode to more of a reassuring mode.”
Optimizing by total mobile weight increased campaign performance — either sales or other branding and conversion metrics — by 4% to 12% (not counting a puzzling outlier from Coca-Cola in Brazil where sales rose a whopping 60%). But optimizing around creative type, location or other factors such as weather increased campaign impact 7% to 25%.
The impact in one unpublished study from Subway was even higher, Mr. Stuart said. Mobile ads that the fast-feeder ran between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. had a whopping 14 times more sales impact than those run the rest of the day, he said.
For Mr. Di Como, the key takeaway from the SMoX study of Unilever’s Magnum ice cream brand was that “context boosts content,” he said.
Anyone who’s opened a new app lately has seen a location- tracking pop-up that reads something like, “Allow app to access this device’s location?” Most people tap “Allow” on the assumption that it’s necessary for the app to do its thingto hail a ride, find nearby restaurants or forecast the weather. And then they forget about it.
In reality, the app might not need location data in order to work. But its business partners do, and so do its partners’ partners. In fact, making money off otherwise unnecessary location tracking may be the main reason that the app was developed in the first place. And many companies treat consumers’ initial “Allow” as a blanket opt-in for a range of later data uses.
“That’s the question: How many degrees does your opt-in extend?” asked Cree Lawson, CEO and founder of Arrivalist, a firm that relies on location data.
Website-building platform Squarespace has tackled a variety of marketing stages. It’s appeared before masses during the Super Bowl for the last three years, including in one bizarre but entertaining campaign starring Jeff Bridges as a hippie sleep guru, via Wieden & Kennedy New York, and another from Anomaly that cast comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as wannabe sportscasters who actually went on to comment on the game on a Squarespace-built site.
But the company is also appealing to more targeted consumers. Recently, it provided the home to an online art exhibit of sorts for filmmaker David Lynch, created with Preacher and director Sandro Miller. And this week, it has teamed with Google and a few of its patrons for a small-business campaign highlighting entrepreneurs whose missions extend beyond their bottom lines.
The Girlboss film looks back on a younger Ms. Amoruso, recreating the tale of how she started her retail brand from practically nothing. Ultimately, it follows her onto a stage, where she presumably will be presenting on her latest venture, which provides grants to female entrepreneurs.
Last month, David Lynch fans were scratching their heads over teasers that the director had released through social media, including a cinemagraph of what appears to be Lynch himself, slowing sipping in a cigarette (what he once called his “worst vice”). “Dear Friends,” he wrote on the Twitter post. “It’ll just be like in the movies. Pretending to be someone else.”
Turns out, Lynch wasn’t playing himself. Rather, John Malkovich was embodying the director in a clue building up to today’s debut PlayingLynch.com, an online experience hosted by Squarespace to promote Lynch’s tribute album, “The Music of David Lynch,” featuring tunes from his work covered by artists including Sky Ferreira, Duran Duran, Lykke Li and more, as well as a new series of films paying homage to the director.
In those vignettes, Malkovich goes on to play some of Lynch’s iconic characters including “Twin Peaks” leading man Dale Cooper, who appears in a vignette on the site today, the series’ The Log Lady, Frank Booth from “Blue Velvet,” the Lady in the Radiator and Henry Spencer from “Eraserhead,” Mystery Man from “Lost Highway” and Joseph Merrick, aka the Elephant Man.
Hubert Boehle, who has served as CEO of Bauer Media Group USA since 2005, will leave the magazine publisher and be succeeded by Steven Kotok, the company will announce Monday.
Mr. Boehle, a Bauer employee since 1986, is departing “to try new things,” he said in a company statement. He will stay with the company until the end of December to help facilitate the transition. Mr. Kotok’s tenure as president and CEO begins Monday.
Bauer Media Group USA, part of the Hamburg, Germany-based Bauer Media, publishes 17 titles, including In Touch and Woman’s World magazines. The company has 305 employees and is headquartered in Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? In the case of the overwhelming amount of data available to today’s marketers, the answer may be yes.
The volume of Big Data is expanding at a dizzying pace. By 2020, 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every person on the planet, according to IDC research. Meanwhile, companies are struggling to bridge the ever-widening data talent gap. The 2015 MIT Sloan Management Review, for example, found that 40% of all companies were unable to find and retain the talent they need to manage their tremendous stockpiles of data.
Marketers are increasingly dependent on data from a growing number of sources. These include first-party customer data that a company owns either through its internal databases, a proprietary distribution channel or that it purchases from a source like a Nielsen or IRI. It also includes digital device/usage profile data; performance data such as online advertising engagement and conversion rates across media channels; third-party data spanning household demographics and purchases; and a host of social listening data, including conversation volumes, sentiment, themes and influencers.
In the midst of a heated and sometimes volitile debate over the policing of America, A&E Network will take viewers inside police departments as they patrol cities across the country.
“Live PD” will give viewers the opportunity to ride along with six different police departments, both rural and urban, in real-time. The episodes will air on a delay “due to the potential of capturing intense and possibly disturbing content,” the network said in a statement.
The goal is to provide transparency of law enforcement, Rob Sharenow, exec VP and general manager of A&E and Lifetime said in a statement.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
