Hasta La Creative!

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Rachel Forde is to step down as UK chief executive of Spark Foundry after 20 years at parent company Publicis Groupe.

The greatest innovation in marketing will come “from the edges”, making it a business priority to embrace neurodiversity, according to Direct Line Group marketing director Mark Evans.

Fifth-generation wireless systems, or 5G, is at the tip of everyone’s tongue at Mobile World Congress in Spain this week. As the point person driving Intel’s stated evolution from a PC-centric company to a data-driven powerhouse, it stands to reason that Aicha Evans, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at the company, has 5G on the brain, too.

“There’s a next generation of activity coming because there’s so much data. And this data we cannot transfer without the next generation of technology, which is 5G,” says Evans. “When you’re talking about 3D video, 4Kwhen you’re talking about VR, which is also comingwithout 5G and its bandwidth, we will not be able to transmit that.”

5G, however, will not involve replacing existing 4G infrastructure, as previous systems have required. Rather it will be an iterationa filling in of gapsof 4G as data becomes ever more powerful and, of course, faster.

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A limited edition bottle honors historic and modern women leaders.

The median pay gap at J Walter Thompson London is 44.7% in favour of men, WPP revealed in its Gender Pay Gap report today.

It’s a small world, or a Petite Planet, after all even if you’re a consumer-products business with $13.6 billion in annual sales inside a $76.5 billion global healthcare behemoth. Johnson & Johnson is trying to act more like the digitally enabled local players that collectively have become its biggest competitive threat.

As part of a presentation last week at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference in Boca Raton, Fla., Alison Lewis, chief marketing officer of J&J’s Consumer Cos., talked about how her far-flung business is thinking smaller. It’s accomplishing that, in part, by reorganizing into multidisciplinary “squads” of no more than 10 people even on big brands, starting in North America. J&J is also encouraging its giant agency holding companies to operate similarly, using a single profit-and-loss statement.

A demonstration project here is Petite Planet the tip of the spear in a global relaunch of the venerable Johnson’s Baby franchise. That relaunch is necessitated in part by inroads that small, digitally focused local players have made. So Petite Planet is trying to act more like they do — but on a global scale and with some advice from Amazon.

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Daniel Bonner has joined Wunderman its global chief creative officer.

Ocean Outdoor is to float on the London stock market after its private equity owner, Searchlight, sold to new investors, Ocelot Partners, in a £200m deal.

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Jarrod Dicker was VP of innovation at the Washington Post currently on a hot streak and owned by the richest guy in the world. In the middle of last month, a subset of the media world snapped to attention when he left the Post, where he built out a lot of pioneering proprietary tech for the company, to become the CEO of something called Po.et, which bills itself as “an open, universal, and immutable ledger for managing the ownership and licensing of the world’s creative works.”

It runs on blockchain, the technology that powers Bitcoin.

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