Hasta La Creative!

Out of ten nominations for UK entrants, AKQA and Google have secured two apiece.

There are 53 nominations in the Film Craft category for UK agencies at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity.

Food company General Mills has appointed Coca-Cola vice-president, strategic marketing Ivan Pollard as its new global chief marketing officer.

The advertising industry has a long way to go to properly address its lack of social diversity.

Group M has revised its 2017 UK advertising growth forecast down to 4.1% from 7%

“I really believe that marketing won’t help you grow your business,” says Jon Ferrara.

A dangerous lead given the audience of this column. But suspend your disbelief just for a moment. As the founder of Nimble, a relationship management app for those of us with thousands of contacts and no time to nurture them, Ferrara gathered 100,000 Nimble users and converted 15% of them to paid subscribers — with no marketing budget at all.

How? By building value-adding relationships — not with customers, but with the individuals that your customers trust. In other words, a more sophisticated take on influencer marketing. “Relationships drive everything on this planet, and if you can identify people that matter, reach out and build relevant and authentic pay-it-forward relationships, you can change the world,” says Ferrara, who calls this “social selling.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

In the U.S., Budweiser has been plugging its Made-in-America message with U.S.A.-themed ads and labels. In China, obviously, it has a different tactic. Budweiser’s new summer campaign there involves electronic dance music and a sci-fi film set in a dystopian future where a bottle of Bud can set you free.

The four-and-a-half-minute ad, by CAA Marketing, features pop superstar Eason Chan as a bartender who helps actress Fish Liew escape from a gray, monotonous world, finding refuge in a dance club where she can let loose and be herself.

AB InBev’s Budweiser markets itself as a premium beer brand in China, where its market share has grown from 1.4% to 3.6% in the five years leading up to 2016, according to Euromonitor International. (Budweiser is the No. 5 player; the category leader is inexpensive local beer Snow, with over 23% of the market last year.)

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Our team at Cannes this year kept a running diary so they could reconstruct events if, well, they wound up at Gutter Bar. (They mostly didn’t.) Here now, in one place, their adventures:

Cannes Daily Blog Day One: Live from the Riviera

Meet the managers of the Carlton Terrace, a central meeting place during Cannes, and encounter “a force of creative destruction” like no other: cannabis. But really, things are just getting started.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The final month of the 2016-17 broadcast season was something of a disaster from a ratings perspective, although in keeping with the dynamics of the TV marketplace, the exodus of viewers didn’t precipitate a drop in ad spending.

According to new research from Standard Media Index, broadcast ad revenue in May ticked up 1% over the month a year earlier, as the networks booked some $1.36 billion in commercial time. Broadcasters registered the slight increase despite having to gut out a 13% drop in primetime C3 ratings during the month, and a 14% drop in total-day deliveries.

In aggregate, the networks in May averaged a 4.1 C3 rating in primetime, which works out to 5.23 million adults 18 to 49. In the year-ago period, the broadcasters averaged a 4.7 rating in the C3 currency, which translates to a hair under 6 million viewers in the demographic most desirable to advertisers.

Continue reading at AdAge.com