Hasta La Creative!

Back in July, we learned that McDonald’s had launched a review and is seeking to consolidate its local U.S. accounts. At the time, AdAge attributed the move at least in part to the fast food chain moving more resources to We Are Unlimited, the dedicated agency Omnicom launched to service the client last November.

It would seem that at least one office is already a casualty of the decision as Cossette appears to be closing up shop in Chicago.

Sources told Chicago Business Journal that the Toronto-based agency will close its Chicago office, which houses around two dozen employees, at the end of September. Alyssa Huggins serves as managing director for the office, which also brought on Adam Friedman as head of strategy at the beginning of the year.

Cossette opened the office in 2014, after winning a review for the McDonald’s Owner/Operators of Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana. The cooperative represented nearly 500 McDonald’s locations in the midwest. At the time, the appointment ended a relationship with Leo Burnett extending back to the eighties.

Chicago Business Journal’s sources claim Cossette’s board of directors made the decision to close the Chicago office after learning of McDonald’s plans to consolidate its local advertising accounts. Cossette Chicago’s remaining accounts will be transferred to the agency’s Toronto headquarters, according to the publication.

Juniper ParkTBWA welcomed Graham Lang as chief creative officer.

Lang will be tasked with leading the agency’s creative output, while partnering with CEO Jill Nykoliation and the agency’s leadership team on growing the business across North America. He will also join TBWA’s Global Creative Core, a creative leadership group spanning the TBWA collective.

“Our clients and employees want and deserve the very best. They want to be inspired every day with breakthrough ideas that will help transform their businesses and their careers. It’s time to disrupt ourselves. Graham brings internationally acclaimed talent, rigor, and incredible leadership,” Nykoliation said in a statement. “He’s raised the bar of every agency he’s led. His work has helped brands find new ways to grow. Whether you’re one of our team members or our client, it’s an exciting time to be at Juniper Park.”

“I am honored for the opportunity to join an already strong office that is hungry to lift itself even further. I love working in and with different cultures, which is why I resonate with the agency’s global mindset. It has a borderless ethos and has the ability to work on business anywhere,” Land added. “I have long admired the work from TBWA so I am excited to learn from and collaborate with some true legends of the game. Most of all I am exited to be working with Jill and her incredibly diverse and talented team in Toronto.”

Lang joins TBWA from Y&R South Africa, where he has served as chief creative officer since late 2011. Before that he spent around three years with RKCR/Y&R in London, leading the Land Rover account. Prior to joining Y&R he spent five years as a creative director with Saatchi & Saatchi London, where he helped bring in the Dewar’s and Sony Eriksson accounts.

Lang’s appointment concludes a global talent search led by Nykoliation and TBWA Worldwide chief creative officer Chris Garbutt.

“Bringing Graham on board is part of our quest to raise the creative standard and disrupt creative conventions across the globe. The world needs creative solutions now more than ever and Graham is the kind of talent who can bring big ideas and iconic work to clients and make them a reality,” Garbutt said in a statement. “Graham, Jill and the team in Toronto are poised to push Juniper ParkTBWA and its clients into a class of its own.”

In the world of digital marketing, the pursuit of complete integration is nearly as old as mainframes. However, as technological capabilities continue to evolve, the concept of complete integration takes on a whole new meaningand a whole new level of importance.

Companies today need to provide customers with a superior digital experience that is differentiated and seamless from end to end. This requires tight integration from the front office to the back office, particularly for the areas of sales, marketing, service and fulfillment, in order to achieve the needed speed to market, improve campaign cycle times and enable faster insights to action. And what’s more, it’s not as hard to do as you might think.

Achieving end-to-end really means closing the loop that includes strategy, insights, creative, technology and efficient delivery across all channels. And although most large companies have already achieved a fairly high level of integration within individual functions, few companies have achieved a high level of integration across silos. The result is a mishmash of isolated systems and disjointed processes that undermines the digital customer experience and leaves countless value-creation opportunities on the table. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

How to revive a stagnant tablet market? Make the gadgets more like those fast-selling, voice controlled speakers. That looks like Amazon’s strategy with the launch of its latest flagship tablet.

The company debuted a new version of its Fire HD 10 tablet on Tuesday that has a high-definition screen for watching video, up to 64 GB of storage, a lower price and a processor that runs 30 percent faster, Amazon said.

The most significant new feature is hands-free voice control, which lets users ask questions and do other things like play music and listen to the news by saying “Alexa” without touching the device. Along with audio-based responses, the tablet will display information, like weather and calendar appointments, on special cards on the screen like the Echo Show speaker introduced earlier this year. This only works when the tablet is hooked up to Wi-Fi. (Last year, Amazon added Alexa to its Fire tablets but the digital assistant had to be summoned with the touch of a button).

Continue reading at AdAge.com

My monthly “new iPhone every year” payment just joined my cable bill, my water bill, and my electric bill as grudge expenses. I hate paying them because the companies charge more and more for the same stuff, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Apple promised me a new iPhone every year and I fell for it. I didn’t read the fine print. Sure, I can get a new iPhone each year, but there’s nothing in the agreement saying that Apple promises to innovate or lead the industry or make something great. To fulfill its side of the contract, all Apple must do is make a new iPhone and offer it to me. And that’s all it has done.

Imitation is not innovation. The iPhone X (pronounced iPhone ten) is basically a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (which is basically a Samsung Galaxy S8 with a pen and an additional camera) which is basically a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (which is its own story). And the Note 7 came out a year ago. Not only is Apple unapologetic about its blatant imitation of Samsung, but the company took the artistic liberty of claiming that the iPhone X’s features were “amazing,” “incredible,” and “new.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from millions of smart TVs. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time yesterday.

A few highlights: The “smartly designed” Honda Pilot helps save a raccoon and a birthday cake from becoming roadkill. Pop music icon Cher and rapper Future team up for an impromptu duet in a Gap ad. And in a Taco Bell spot, a guy sits down in front of his TV with a new Taco Bell Naked Egg Taco, prompting various people on TVa weatherman, NBA star Kevin Love, an infomercial pitchman and moreto break through the fourth wall and react with bewildered exclamations of “What the?”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

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