Hasta La Creative!

Good morning. Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing and digital-related news. What people are talking about today: Google CEO Sundar Pichai canceled a highly awaited all-staff meeting to talk about that infamous memo: a 3,300-word treatise from an engineer who claimed women in tech can’t tolerate stress like men do, Recode says. The engineer, James Damore, was fired and has become a cause celebre for the alt-right. Recode says employees were worried that participating in the talk would make them a target of online harassment. “Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall,” Pichai wrote to staff, according to Recode. Plus, Quartz says alt-right Damore supporters are planning protests on Google’s U.S. campuses.

Double cheese

Looks like Facebook’s new video hub is “taking the safe road,” as Ad Age’s Garett Sloane points out. There’s no shows about politics or hard-hitting news. But there’s a presumably inoffensive show about cheese, because “people go nuts for this stuff.”

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OK, so, think of this as a rant of the week about … THE rant of the week.

President Donald J. Trump took a break on Tuesday from swinging his golf clubs at his New Jersey resort to rattle his saber.

Fire AND fury!

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As cannabis brands around the country grapple with legal woes in advertising their products, one company has found a way to reach millionswhile they’re already high.

Wikileaf, a price-comparison app for the legal cannabis market, is running an in-flight ad on Virgin America’s domestic routes with the app’s commerical playing on every seatback with a screen. The campaign, which began in mid-June, runs through mid-September. Wikileaf CEO Dan Nelson says it’s expected to reach nearly 8 million passengers.

“We wanted to get somewhere more mainstream,” Nelson says. “We had ads in various magazines and online places where it’s cannabis-focused, but we wanted some out-of-the-box ideas.”

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Fewer TV commercials don’t necessarily have to mean less ad revenue.

Fox Networks Group is lowering the national ad load in Sunday’s broadcast of the Teen Choice Awards by 20%, but the awards show is on track to book 30% more ad revenue than last year, according to Suzanne Sullivan, exec VP of entertainment ad sales.

The Teen Choice Awards are the latest front in a growing experiment in TV, where ratings are on a long-term decline. The awards show itself drew just 1.8 million viewers last year, a 30% drop from the year prior. Networks hope reducing commercial interruptions can help keep viewers tuned in and increase the impact of the ads that remain.

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For Dana Dwyer, an Oracle employee and mom, a full tank of gasoline at the end of her workday is something she describes with just two words: “It’s happiness.”

Dwyer spends an hour each morning fighting through 20 miles of Bay Area traffic to get her child to school and herself to work. At night, “making one more stop to the gas station is the last thing I want to do,” she said in a telephone interview.

That’s music to the ears of Frank Mycroft, the CEO of Booster, and competitor Michael Buhr, the CEO of Filld, startups created to deliver gasoline to customers’ cars at work or home. They face obstacles in the form of gas station mini-marts, community safety concerns and the rise of electric cars. But with time-constrained consumers paying $255 billion a year for auto fuel, the two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs say they have room to grow, and they’re getting the financial backing to prove it.

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(TrendHunter.com) Brazilian tattoo artist Helena Fernandes is popularizing a style of artistry: ugly tattoos.

Her work consists of simplistic, child-like and off-color drawings. Some of her pieces include stylized…

Is ESPN’s “Ocho” a harbinger of the future of sports media, asks the head of Mindshare’s Invention Studio.