Hasta La Creative!

One way of looking at President Trump’s tweets: He’s a master marketer who takes his agenda directly to the people, constantly using social media to reinforce his outspoken political brand. Another way of looking at President Trump’s tweets: He’s an angry crybaby who whines directly to the people, constantly using social media to reinforce his unhinged political brand.

The Super Deluxe channel on YouTube hews closer to the second theory, judging from “Donald Trump’s Tweets As An Early 2000s Emo Song,” a video it posted Sunday. Per the explanation in the video’s description: “We noticed that Trump’s tweets are basically the lyrics to an early 2000s emo song, so we turned them into one.” After hearing Super Deluxe’s rather amazing song you might accidentally feel a little sympathy for the embattled president … because, you know, he’s just so misunderstood.

Simon Dumenco, aka Media Guy, is an Ad Age editor-at-large. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.

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I started personal computing on an Apple II circa 1977. It was a big step up from the Heathkit and Radio Shack DIY projects I tinkered with in grade school. When IBM introduced the IBM-PC circa 1981, I semi-defected, and in 1984 I became bi-computeral (you know why).

My company functioned in a computer multiverse for some time. Macs were for art, music and publishing; PCs were for business; DEC minicomputers were for science, math and engineering. The minicomputers went away by 2000, and then we were just Mac and PC. In 2006, shortly after Macs became Intel inside and Parallels Desktop (a utility that enabled users to run Windows programs on a Mac) debuted, we became a 100% Apple shop, and we never looked back.

For more than a decade, if Apple manufactured it, we purchased it in bulk. There was no reason to hyper-evaluate the new specifications; we just sent a purchase order to Tekserve (now T2 Computing) for as many of the new Apple devices as we needed (and maybe a few we didn’t need). There are so many Apple devices in our offices, someone once said, “It looks like Steve Jobs threw up in here.”

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Ad Age “Media Guy” columnist Simon Dumenco’s media roundup for the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 14:

The optics re: Mike Flynn turned out to be too toxic. Same deal with YouTube star PewDiePie. Meanwhile, CKE Restaurants (Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.) CEO Andrew Puzder has an emerging optics problem that turns out to be related to an old “Oprah Winfrey Show” episode. Hey, at least it’s not “Access Hollywood” …

1. The big political news of the moment may be the resignation of National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, but the No. 1 story on Politico’s “Most Read” chart this morning is headlined “Oprah gives tape with Puzder abuse allegations to Senate.” Burgess Everett and Marianne LeVine report that “Senators in both parties have viewed an episode of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ in which President Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary nominee Andrew Puzder’s former wife leveled allegations of physical abuse against him, according to sources familiar with the matter. The decades-old video, which is not easily found, has been provided by the Oprah Winfrey Network, those sources said.”

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Ad Age “Media Guy” columnist Simon Dumenco’s media roundup for the morning of Wednesday, Feb. 15:

The Trump administration has a … branding problem, shall we say? Let’s flash back to Jan. 1, when The Washington Post ran an op-ed by conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin titled “Trump gives critics ammunition: Is he Putin’s puppet?” The “puppet” thing was, of course, a recurring theme during the campaign too, most notable during the third presidential debate when Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being Putin’s puppet and Trump famously, furiously fired back (“No puppet, no puppet … You’re the puppet! … No, you’re the puppet”). With Putin’s long shadow newly cast over Trump’s White House (see Nos. 1-3), what’s an embattled president to do? Tweet, of course (see No. 4). Anyway, here’s your media roundup (for a Trump-free experience, skip to No. 7 for the Kate Upton news):

1. The New York Times sent out a Breaking News Alert last night (it arrived in our inbox at 9:23 p.m. ET) titled “Intercepted calls show members of the Trump campaign had repeated contact with Russian intelligence before the election, officials said.” The story, by Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, leads the front page of this morning’s paper under the headline “Trump Campaign Aides Had Contact With Russian Intelligence.” (The web version of the story goes with the slightly longer “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.”)

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Look, agencies, I get it. Data rules. It rules your clients’ decisions and strategies. Though you stack so much stock in data, however, you only have access to 1/5 of the good stuff. As much as 80% of the data out there is unstructured, which means it’s meaningless to you. Even if you have the most sophisticated AI or learning system, its effectiveness — and your agency’s success and competitive advantage — relies on you capturing as much good data as you can.

In this next computing era, you must snag a top artificial intelligence (AI)/cognitive developer and pair her with a data scientist so that they can layer cognitive computing on top of your learning system and mine more good data.

Here’s why.

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Miami-based The Community is opening an office in London, taking an agency that has always had a Latin flavor outside the Americas for the first time.

Argentine brothers Jose and Joaquin Molla opened their agency, then called La Comunidad, in both Miami and Buenos Aires in 2001. Over the years, it grew into a shop that was equally adept at reaching U.S. Hispanic and general market consumers, and doing Latin American and other international campaigns.

After selling in 2014 to SapientNitro, which was bought in turn by Publicis Groupe, The Community continued its double-digit annual growth. (Among other things, increasing revenue by 58% in 2016 after winning clients like Verizon and General Mills and laying the groundwork for global growth for its culturally-savvy brand helped land the shop on Ad Age’s Agency A-List of the 10 best agencies last month).

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Snap Inc. is seeking to raise as much as $3.2 billion in its initial public offering in what could be the third-biggest technology listing of the past decade.

The maker of disappearing-photo application Snapchat is offering 200 million Class A shares for $14 to $16 apiece, according to a filing Thursday. At the high end of the range, that would give it a market value of about $18.5 billion, based on the total shares to be outstanding after the offering.

Of the technology and communications IPOs since 2007, Snap’s offering is poised to trail only Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s $25 billion share sale and Facebook Inc.’s $16 billion raise. It’s also set to be the first U.S. listing from that industry this year, according to Bloomberg data.

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An association of well-known publishers has responded to the recent call by Procter & Gamble to clean up digital advertising or lose access to P&G’s massive budgets, arguing that advertising with high-quality websites is one way out of the digital mess.

P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard last month told the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Hollywood, Fla., that the marketer would stop paying for any digital media, ad tech services, agencies or others that don’t adhere to industry standards for fraud protection, viewability and third-party verification.

“The days of giving digital a pass are over,” Mr. Pritchard said, asking other marketers to take the same line. “It’s time to grow up. It’s time for action.”

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CNN CEO Jeff Zucker isn’t concerned about how President Donald Trump’s criticism is impacting the cable news behemoth — in fact, it seems like his attacks are only helping to fuel ratings.

CNN commissioned, what Mr. Zucker called its largest-ever brand study to assess if the White House was in fact tarnishing the CNN brand. “We are still incredibly trusted,” Mr. Zucker told press on Thursday during a lunch hosted by CNN parent Turner.

It also hasn’t spooked advertisers, with Turner President David Levy noting that CNN is having a record quarter of ad sales.

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Clorox Co. may not be the biggest packaged-goods player, but with $5.8 billion in annual sales, it could easily scrape up a five-figure cash investment anytime it wants. So why did its Soy Vay brand turn to Kickstarter recently to help fund a new venture with startup Three Jerks Jerky?

“It really starts with the strategy of our Emerging Brands Group,” said Adam Simons, who heads the unit at Clorox, including Soy Vay. “One of the pillars of the strategy was trying to align our emerging brand with others in the marketplace. There’s so much going on in food and beverage today, but all the interesting stuff is happening at the under-$25 million companies all the trends, all the interesting flavors, all the interesting business models.”

Mr. Simons and his cross-functional group wanted to partner with a jerky brand on a Teriyaki flavor. Three Jerks, an emerging brand based not far away in Southern California, “was the only company at the top of our list that made sense,” Mr. Simons said. “The Kickstarter thing just kind of naturally evolved, where we said it made sense as an awareness driver, as a way to build one-to-one connections with consumers in a way that’s very important to us and, frankly, as a way to cut against the grain of typical product launches in CPG.”

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