Hasta La Creative!

Papa John’s International Inc. founder John Schnatter is going after NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, saying weak handling of the league’s national-anthem controversy has hammered sales of his pizza.

“The NFL has hurt us by not resolving the current debacle to the players’ and owners’ satisfaction,” Schnatter, who serves as the pizza chain’s chairman and chief executive officer, said on a conference call. “NFL leadership has hurt Papa John’s shareholders.”

The remarks follow a controversy over NFL football players protesting during the national anthem, a movement that started last season. The demonstrations have sparked calls for a boycott and raised concerns among league sponsors. But Schnatter’s comments mark the highest-profile example of an NFL partner publicly blaming the outcry for hurting business.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

A former high-ranking editor at The New York Times is the latest major media figure to face professional consequences over allegations of sexual misbehavior involving women he knew through his work.

Whether it’s seen as a guiding light or a perilous sinkhole, the use of data is a predominant consideration for B2B marketers, especially as they look ahead to 2018. In fact, gathering, dissecting, deploying and protecting data is so top-of-mind that you might think these folks were becoming geeks of the first order, mirroring the passions and predilections of coders and other IT professionals.

The belief that data is the WME (Weapon of Marketing Effectiveness) is so pervasive that words like “purpose,” “brand” or “story” only occasionally enter forward-looking conversations. And while this growing emphasis on data certainly bodes well for the purveyors of marketing technology (many of whom share their thoughts below), it remains to be seen if this approach will increase CMO effectiveness and thus CMO tenure. Here then is a closer look at the “geekification” of B2B CMOs in 2018, along with a couple dissenting voices challenging the prevailing winds.

Using data to understand the customer journey

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Snapchat ads are about to get more targeted, as the app is embracing a marketing technology that until recently its CEO had considered creepy.

Snapchat is giving its advertisers the ability to employ a pixel, a key tool to make ads more trackable and targeted. By putting a pixel, really a bit of digital code, on their websites, brands can then measure when a person saw their ads somewhere else in the digital ecosystem. Pixels are also used to retarget ads, showing people ads they had already seen elsewhere.

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has been wary of such ad technology in the past, fearing the creep factor of following consumers across the internet with ads that won’t leave people alone. However, Snapchat has had to embrace those tactics as it looks to develop as sophisticated advertising model that can compete with the likes of Facebook and Google.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has appointed MullenLowe London to handle a £1m nationwide ad campaign to help drum up support.