Hasta La Creative!

YouTube stars Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, who have made a name for themselves with their popular morning show “Good Mythical Morning,” have signed their first endorsement deal.

The pair, who also appear in the YouTube Red show “Rhett & Link’s Buddy System” and just released a new book inspired by the show, worked with Wix.com on a series of digital videos promoting the web development company.

“When you think of spokesmen you think of traditional celebrities or sports peopleI think they’re called athletes,” McLaughlin jokes. “We are not sports people and we are not traditional TV people, but we are encouraged to have this opportunity.”

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Diversity advocate Cindy Gallop, who issued a call to action on Facebook earlier this week for advertising professionals to speak up about sexual harrassers in the industry, says she has been inundated with emails “telling truly appalling stories from women, and a few men who want to see justice done, from our industry all around the world.”

The Facebook post, she says, came in response to the outpouring of sexual harrassment stories allegedly committed by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein over the decades.

Virtually everyone who reached out to her is requesting anonymity due to fear of retaliation from their companies, says Gallop, a consultant and founder of IfWeRanTheWorld. The complaints, she says, are about much more than white male ad industry executives “abusing their power.” They also include stories about HR departments and agency management firing sexual harassers without publicizing why; male leaders who stood by, were complicit in or laughed when harassment took place; and women who were “culturally brainwashed” to be complicit, she says.

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What do chief marketing officers at leading brands share? Optimism and ideas. That’s what Erin Andrews, sportscaster and “Dancing with the Stars” host, discovered when she met one-on-one with visionary marketing leaders at WHOSAY’s ANA Masters of Marketing pop-up studio.

For Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble, empowering women in advertising is not just a matter of good corporate citizenship, “It’s actually good for growth.” Pritchard explained how P&G’s Always “Like a Girl” campaign changed the sentiment towards the expression. “Seventy five percent of people now view “like a girl” as a positive expression, versus 19% before.”

Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing officer at Mastercard, echoed Pritchard’s point. “If you look at the purchases decisions that happen around the world, more than 74% of all purchase decisions are taken by women,” he told Andrews.

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E! is beginning its third Snapchat Show on Saturday, a makeover series sponsored by Abercrombie & Fitch.

“Face Forward” is E!’s take on the standard makeover tutorial. In each of the eight episodes, its beauty and hair experts will give one girl a complete style overhaul culminating in a celebrity-inspired photo shoot.

E! has been at the forefront of creating content for Snapchat. The pop culture news show, “The Rundown,” is averaging 13 million viewers per week, according to a company spokeswoman, and recently expanded to airing three days per week.

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 more than seven million smart TVs. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time yesterday.

A few highlights: Hulu serves up another in a series of commercials starring Anna Kendrick, who marvels at all the shows she can choose from on the streaming service. TGI Fridays says “We’ve changed the whole conversation about ribs.” And Google says you should “Ask more of your phone” in a spot for its Pixel 2 smartphone set to the ridiculously catchy Danger Twins song “Make It Look Easy.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

With research showing that pregnant and new mothers face more discrimination at work than they did a decade ago, should business do more to embrace new ways of working?

We were on location with Direct Line and Saatchi & Saatchi discussing their latest campaign to reduce traffic and pedestrian accidents through innovative technology.

Women in positions of power face regular and persistent slurs against their intellect and gender, along with threats of sexual harassment or violence from social media, according to a study by Havas Helia.

Google’s parent company Alphabet has led a $1bn (£763m) funding round in ride-hailing platform Lyft, valuing the company at $11bn.

Volvo has said it now will not participate in Channel 4’s Diversity in Advertising Award, after its agency Grey London successfully won £1m of free airtime from for a campaign focused on non-visible disability.