Hasta La Creative!

JWT Atlanta launched a new spot in its “Battles Won” campaign for the U.S. Marine Corps notable for being its first to feature a female Marine in combat.

“Battle Up” spotlights Capt. Erin Demchko, a deputy commander at Camp Courtney in Okinawa, Japan who served a tour in Afghanistan. It tells the story of a young girl who find the courage to take a stand when she sees a classmate victimized by a bully and grows into a leader on the soccer field and, eventually, on the battlefield.

The spot made its debut on social media outlets last Friday and will make its broadcast debut later this month. “Battle Up” follows the arrival of Vann Graves as chief creative officer at JWT Atlanta in December and appears to be the first ad he has worked on for the client.

“We’ve been looking forward to sharing this spot for quite some time,” JWT Atlanta CEO Spence Kramer said in a statement. “This work is emblematic of both agency and client commitment to diversity and equality in everything we do.”

According to a press release, the spot is part of an effort to increase the number of women in the U.S. Marine Corps from around 8.3 to 10 percent.

The maker of Budweiser, facing more competition in America from craft brews and cocktails, is spending billions to fight back.

AB InBev will devote $2 billion in U.S. capital spending to bolstering its flagship beer brands and improve distribution. The money will also help support the company’s forays into “near beer,” alcoholic sparkling water and other products — like tea — that are far afield from its original mission.

The investment, which extends through 2020, is a bet that Anheuser-Busch can push into new categories without neglecting its core business: traditional beer brands. Striking that balance will be key to the company’s future, Anheuser-Busch Chief Executive Officer Joao Castro Neves said in an interview.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Red Brick Road has appointed its first non-executive directors Bobi Carley and David Watson to help accelerate growth.

Three years ago, the top sales chiefs from ABC and ESPN stood on stage together at each other’s upfront presentation, signalling to advertisers that they were willing to do deals across the two networks.

This year, ABC and ESPN parent Walt Disney is extending that partnership by offering some marketers the opportunity to also incorporate its movie studio, consumer products and on-the-ground activations at its theme parks, for example, as part of an all-encompassing ad buy.

Branded as the “Disney Difference,” the idea is to lure marketers with the combined arsenal of Walt Disney assets, intellectual property and data.

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“I want to kill myself,” John Shea tells a conference room of about a dozen NBC Universal staffers inside 30 Rock. It’s exactly a month until the Peacock’s annual upfront hoopla, and Shea, executive creative director of the production, is getting his first look at potential set designs for the stage at the famous Radio City Music Hall. As a half-dozen possibilities flash across a screen, his brow furrows.

They spend the next few minutes debating the colors and lighting of the screen that will appear onstage, and how title cards introducing senior NBCU executives will be displayed. It’s one of the hundreds of seemingly minute elements that need to be precisely coordinated. The stage show will require 10 confetti cannons, six pyrotechnics cannons, more than 50 live performers and over 100 hours of rehearsal.

Ad Age went behind the scenes in the three months leading up to the dog-and-pony show to see firsthand what it takes to pull it all off. While Shea and his team began planning for this years’ presentation just weeks after the 2016 show concluded, it’s during these last few months that scripts must be written, celebrities corralled, video skits edited and the truly difficult decisions made.

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

The leader of the free world is expected to, you know, lead … but according to a new Politico report (see No. 2, below), members of President Trump’s staff have found that they can lead him in one direction or another simply by making him read news, or “news,” they think will help make their case. Meanwhile, other staffers are making it their business to lead the leader away from where he’s been led, which probably has something to do with him being “frustrated” and “angry at everyone” (see No. 1, below) and contemplating the ouster of some of those leading him astray. Got all that? Anyway, let’s get started …

1. Day Trump vs. Night Trump: Per a Sunday Mike Allen scoop at Axios, “At the urging of longtime friends and outside advisers, most of whom he consults after dark, President Trump is considering a ‘huge reboot’ that could take out everyone from Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon, to counsel Don McGahn and press secretary Sean Spicer, White House sources tell me. … ‘He’s frustrated, and angry at everyone,’ said one of the confidants.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com