Hasta La Creative!

It shouldn’t be news that a TV network will be touting its shows during the upfronts. But as sales executives’ pitches have turned toward data-driven audience buying, new ad products and non-traditional commercial formats, AMC Networks’ plan to focus on its programming in advertiser meetings this week stands apart.

“The content is more important than ever and that’s what I think an upfront should be about — what stories are you going to be telling us, what are the results of my investment, what do my clients see for next year that they want to be part of?” said Scott Collins, president-advertising sales, AMC Networks.

TV sellers are also eager to take advantage of a marketer uprising over ads on questionable YouTube videos. The content message has become especially relevant as marketers are “pulling their messages from elsewhere and putting them where they can rely on the content,” said Charlie Collier, president-AMC, SundanceTV and AMC Studios.

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Mr. Blum said the company, Blumhouse Television, would focus on “things that scare us.” Its first project will be a Showtime mini-series about Roger Ailes.

(TrendHunter.com) Projection technology is becoming an important aspect of many different product developments in the industry, so this Canon Projector concept comes as a decidedly different yet highly plausible…

Cadbury says accusations that Easter does not feature in its marketing communications or on its products are ‘simply untrue’.

Independent oversight is coming to help police YouTube videos for brands, but there will be limits to what these outside parties can deliver.

The ad tech watchdogs won’t be able to vet every YouTube video for terrorist tutorials, hate speech and sexual content in time to stop them from ever carrying ads, according to ad tech experts.

“A lot of brand safety vendors are jumping all over this opportunity,” said Augustine Fou, an ad tech researcher. “But they’re either over-representing what they can do or just not being truthful about the technology.”

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Warren Buffett, investment maven and soda can star? Coca-Cola in China has taken the unusual step of putting the face of its top investor on cans of Cherry Coke in China to promote the drink’s launch in the country.

Coke announced the move on its corporate blog on March 31, leaving us to wonder if this was some kind of April Fool’s joke. But a Coke spokeswoman confirmed that it’s the real thing. Putting the face of an investor on a soda can would seem to be an unusual move in the U.S., where such marketing real estate is typically reserved for sports and music stars. Considering Mr. Buffett’s rock-star status in China, however, Coke’s move in China makes some sense.

“Warren Buffett is the financial god in China,” Linda Steele, a founder of the Nebraska Chinese Association in Omaha, told the Omaha World-Herald in a 2016 story about how Mr. Buffett’s annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting was expected to draw up to 3,000 Chinese visitors that year. “He is being praised in China as the one who can never be beaten in the stock market,” she told the paper. “Many Chinese investors are crazy about him.”

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Somethin’ Else’s managing director explains how the world’s biggest brands will eventually get it right in the battle for eyes and ears.