Hasta La Creative!

The Lowdown is Ad Age’s weekly look at news nuggets from across the world of marketing, including trends, campaign tidbits, executive comings and goings and more.

YouTube’s brand-safety crisis has scared off many advertisers, but some seem relatively unconcerned. Hello’s new “An Inconvenient Tooth” video from 72andSunny played Monday just after a YouTube post of Steve Stephens’ Facebook Live rant about plans to kill people in Cleveland. (Stephens also posted a video of a live murder on Easter, and was found dead Tuesday, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot, in Pennsylvania.) A spokeswoman for Hello said the brand knew going in such placements were possible, but added: “Google has been a great partner in helping address it.” Then there’s a Cincinnati-based household name, not Procter & Gamble Co., but Roto-Rooter, whose ad from Curiosity Advertising showing a home drain-cleaning remedy has appeared in recent weeks with several questionable videos cited by brand-safety watchdog Eric Feinberg of Gipec (including the aforementioned Stephens video). A Roto-Rooter spokesman didn’t respond to email or phone requests for comment, but its ads kept running on YouTube after Ad Age started inquiring. Overall, Feinberg has fewer examples of questionable placements to share lately, which suggests either Google’s safeguards are working or the advertiser exodus creates fewer opportunities.

We are already more than four months into the new year, but it’s never too late to get a report card on 2016 brand performance. The latest one comes in the beverage industry where new data shows Coca-Cola outperforming PepsiCo last year. Soda’s woes continued last year with both companies losing carbonated soft drink volume, according to a new report from industry tracker Beverage-Digest. But Coca-Cola showed modest improvement with soda volume across its brands falling by 0.7%, compared with 0.8% in 2015. PepsiCo’s decline was 3.1%, matching 2015’s loss, according to Beverage-Digest. Brand Coke actually eked out a 0.1 point share gain and now has 17.8% share of the soda category. Brand Pepsi lost 0.2 share points and now has 8.4% share.

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Almost three-quarters (72 percent) of Brazilians have never been inside a museum, according to a 2010 study from the Brazilian Institute of Economic Research. There are probably many reasons for this, but among them is the feeling that art can seem inaccessible unless you’ve studied it. So, how do you get art to speak to…

The Spanish chain is embroiled in yet another social media crossfire.

(TrendHunter.com) With summer just around the bend and music festivals like Coachella already taking place, makeup artists and fashionistas on the Internet have been sharing ways for people to celebrate the season&#…

In between waiting in line at Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall to see glitzy presentations from major media conglomerates, ad buyers attending TV’s annual upfronts must also slog through more intimate pitches from smaller channels, many of which most consumers have never even watched. Like their bigger brethren, these smaller channels will also show off original programming and tout audiences who they say fill a certain niche or demographic not reached elsewhere on the dial. When buyers leave the room, they usually roll their eyes.

But as audience buying becomes the soup du jour in TV, these smaller channels are angling to serve a new purpose for marketers: finding additional consumers that meet very specific criteria, well beyond traditional targets like age and gender. And a troupe of independent channels is working together to compete for audience-based TV budgets by trying to create some scale and streamline the buying process.

They may face as much skepticism from buyers as before. It’s no secret that so-called long-tail cable channels are a harder sell than their much larger peers. That’s only been amplified as digital video identifies targetable audiences who are perhaps not heavy TV users, a trend that’s not going away, and as skinny bundles threaten niche networks’ very existence.

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In college, we were charged with digging through magazines to find ads that depicted either minorities or women in a non-stereotypical (read: not sexy or homemaking) way. It was hard. For every 20 ads with an impossibly contorted white woman, we found maybe one with a minority–never mind a woman looking empowered, or even doing…