Hasta La Creative!

Big brewers have been lamenting losing drinkers to wine and spirits for years. But it doesn’t get more direct than this pitch for a new MillerCoors brand: “Stop Your Wine-ing.”

That’s the kicker in one of several new ads for the brew, called Two Hats, a fruity light beer MillerCoors is debuting to keep more young adult drinkers in the fold. The spot literally knocks wine out by showing a bowling ball sliding along a bar crushing several bottles of white wine.

The effort is part of a digital-only campaign by Mekanism for the brew, which MillerCoors is touting as “good cheap beer.” The brewer foreshadowed Two Hats last year, saying the brew would be designed to win over 21-to 24-year olds. It’s a key demographic for brewers, but one they have had a harder time hanging onto as wine and spirits brands dial up their marketing and creep into places beer once dominated, like sports stadiums.

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Once upon a time, there was a creative industry with three different disciplines: marketing, advertising, and design. For a long time, these industries were happy. They were able to live in their own little houses, do their own thing, and occasionally talk and work with each other but then go back to their own private spaces and talk their own talk.

Then along came disruptive technologies. There were new platforms, new devices, and new ways of doing things. They huffed and they puffed, and they blew all the houses down. All the houses were destroyed, leaving the separate industries scrambling to build something newer, better, and stronger. The chaos that ensued from that breakdownand the subsequent process of rebuildinghas brought together creatives of all types to truly collaborate as they create a new reality sans boundaries.

Think about the way marketing, advertising, and design have been operating for the last 20 years. There were clear boundaries and clear “swim lanes.” Even within the disciplines, there were “word people” and “visual people.” And while they came together, they weren’t truly living in the same space or breathing the same air.

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Six months after Walt Disney Co. announced plans to introduce a new over-the-top ESPN streaming service, the media conglomerate has settled on a price point and release window.

During a Tuesday afternoon appearance on CNBC’s “Closing Bell,” Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger said the direct-to-consumer offering ESPN Plus would roll out in the spring, in an introduction that will coincide with the reboot of the network’s legacy app. The streaming service will be priced at $4.99 per month, Iger said. The company plans to introduce a Netflix-esque movies-and-entertainment product in late 2019.

In an interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, Iger said ESPN Plus would offer “an array of live [sports] programming that is not available on current channels.” Last August, when Iger first took the wraps off Disney’s plans for the OTT product, the Disney boss indicated that subscribers to the then-unbranded service would have access to some 10,000 live events that could not be seen via ESPN’s linear TV channels.

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The Event Awards will return to the Eventim Hammersmith Apollo on 1 November.

Muji, the Japanese high street retailer, is opening an apartment to launch its spring/summer 2018 travel and home collection.

Holding group Next Fifteen Communications has made its first acquisition of the year and the largest in its recent spree, buying UK digital agency Brandwidth Group.

Too bad for Peloton that cycling is a Summer Olympics sport.

The fitness company this week is starting the largest marketing push in its six-year-history, a campaign that will include TV commercials during the Winter Olympics, live-streamed classes from South Korea and new brand messaging. Rather than focusing on its product, home stationary bikes that live-stream classes to an attached screen, Peloton’s new theme of “Better Is in Us” is meant to elevate the brand and what it can do for customers.

Maybe the summer games would have been a better fit, but Peloton marketers felt that the time was right.

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Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital-related news. You can get an audio version of this briefing on your Alexa device. Search for “Ad Age” under “Skills” in the Alexa app.

What people are talking about today

Elon Musk is on his way to conquering the universe. The Tesla billionaire’s SpaceX blasted the Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, carrying its payload of a red Tesla Roadstar. As it heads into orbit, the car is blasting out David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” with a dummy astronaut at the wheel and a sign on the dashboard reading “Don’t Panic” (a reference to the Douglas Adams sci-fi classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”). As far as marketing goes, it’s a stellar move for Tesla — and even more so for brand Musk. The New York Times writes that it’s “the first time a rocket this powerful has been sent into space by a private company rather than a government space agency.” Musk says he wants to see a new “space race,” according to CNBC. His next plan is to launch a fleet of “BFRs” — which stands (yes really) for Big F***ing Rocket — and fly them en masse to Mars. Over to you, Jeff Bezos.

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Electric car brand Tesla has achieved the most expensive product placement stunt ever, with billionaire owner Elon Musk sending a Tesla Roadster into orbit around the Earth before it heads for Mars.

“Disney has never done this before,” Aliyah says during an interview in between sponsorship gigs and attending the NAACP Image Awards. “Just like ‘Mickey Mouse Club’ was its first-ever TV show, this is its first-ever digital series. Everything is online.”

“Club Mickey” is made for younger generations. Many episodes run under a minute in length, and none has reached five minutes. “Our attention spans are shorter,” Aliyah says. “So you watch it on the go. It travels with you.”

Disney intends to create a lot more like it.

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