Three months into Amazon’s latest experiment, the cashier-less Amazon Go store, the company is working on learning who its customers are and adjusting to their feedback. At a keynote held at Shoptalk, a retail conference in Las Vegas, Gianna Puerini, vp, Amazon Go and Dilip Kumar, vp of technology, Amazon Go and Amazon Books, revealed…
Have you ever wanted to ask one of your connections on LinkedIn for a referral as part of your job-seeking process? The professional network introduced a button Monday enabling users to easily do just that. LinkedIn said in a blog post introducing the new feature that 95 percent of “talent-acquisition leaders” cited referrals as an…
On Monday, Facebook reinforced its focus on retail brands at Shoptalk in Las Vegas with its introduction of three new advertising tools. Last September, the social network added the ability for retailers to build custom audiences of Facebook users who have previously made offline purchases from retailers, as well as to create lookalike audiences to…
Media businesses must stop making sweeping generalisations about “millennials”, and prioritise social engagement over the use of technology, according to panel of industry leaders.
Laurent-Perrier, the Champagne brand, is marking 50 years of its Cuvée Rosé with a party featuring “unconventional Champagne food pairings”.
Key takeaways from Campaign’s first sports marketing conference included the need for brands to transcending the two-dimensional ‘guys in ties’ of traditional sporting media and reappraising the influence model sports.
Interpublic Group chairman and chief executive told Advertising Week Europe how he managed to turn an “all white, all male” company into one with 54% female leadership.
Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. What people are talking about today: Facebook faces a deluge of new criticism and scrutiny over its handling of user data. Lawmakers in the U.S. and the U.K. want answers about how exactly Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that worked on President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, was reportedly able to obtain and use data on tens of millions of Facebook users. Two former federal officials told The Washington Post that they expected the FTC to investigate. And Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota tweeted that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg should testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
What Facebook says: Facebook says an academic researcher obtained the user data legitimately (via an app that offered innocuous-seeming “personality tests”) but misused it when he passed it to the data firm. Facebook also insists that the episode cannot be called a “data breach.”
Confused yet? Read the major investigations from The New York Times and the U.K’.s The Observer that sparked the uproar. Read Facebook’s statement saying it had suspended Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories. (Cambridge Analytica, which had investment money from Robert Mercer, the Republican donor, insists that it deleted all the data and didn’t use it in the Trump campaign.)
Retailers will soon find a wider selection of ads available to them on Pinterest. The visual search company is expanding its “Shopping Ads” feature, which was tested with a handful of retailers last year. The ads, which consumers see in their Pinterest search feeds, will now be available to hundreds of other brands after a successful pilot, Pinterest executives say.
“It goes back to the core mission of helping people find and discover new products that they would love to buy,” says Jon Alferness, who joined San Francisco-based Pinterest as senior VP of ads and commerce last year from Google. He says that as an automated advertising product, Pinterest’s “shopping ads” take away a lot of the legwork for brands used to managing their own campaigns and advertising based on performance. Retailers can upload their product catalogs and showcase products in contexta couch in a decorated living room, for example, which consumers can click through and purchase on the brand’s site.
Virgin Atlantic has split with Adam & Eve/DDB after Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO was chosen to run a consolidated advertising account for both Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Holidays.
Nike has pulled its “Nothing beats a Londoner” ads from YouTube as the sports brand is understood to be facing a legal challenge over the use of “LDNR”.
With legislator out for blood, gambling brands must learn to embrace creative innovation or see their businesses suffer, writes Above & Beyond’s executive creative director
Marketers face a real struggle to recruit in-house buyers as they seek to take greater control of their media, according to a new report from IDComms.
Global online bookmaker Betway has appointed OMD UK to run its £30m UK media account after a competitive pitch.
Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica because of how they used the platform, not for what they did, explains the chief product officer at Wavemaker UK.
Britain’s Total Media and Germany’s Mediaplus have launched a joint venture, called Total Mediaplus, with hubs in London and Munich.
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 eight million smart TVs. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time yesterday.
A few highlights: Mastercard surprises a young aspiring pro golfer named Chloe by introducing her to golf star Annika Srenstam in a spot that ends with the tagline “Start Something Priceless.” Dos Equis serves up two ads that kick off a big pretty big strategy shift (Ad Age’s E.J. Schultz has the backstory: “Dos Equis Sidelines The Most Interesting Man in the World”). And Old Navy introduces its new Tiered Cami Dress in a high-energy commercial that mixes fashion with dirt-bike racing.
USA Today Network, a group of more than 100 Gannett-owned publications including USA Today, is set to roll out its first augmented reality app, focused on the 30 rocket launches slated for Cape Canaveral, Florida, this year.
The app, dubbed 321Launch, will use AR tech to show launches from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rockets. Users in New York, for example, will see a rocket against their own sky on their phones’ screens, complemented by information such as predicted flight patterns. The app can also present live video of launches in a more traditional way.
There are no ads yet in the app, which comes out March 29, but the company intends to offer sponsorships in the future.
Brooke and Buddy Baum had good jobs, a house near Denver and enough money to pay the bills. It sounds like the American dream. Except they were miserable. He was working up to 80 hours a week as an information technology analyst, with barely time to take a vacation. She was an editorial assistant at a business journal but wanted more time to write. “We felt really stuck where we were,” Brooke Baum says. “We just wanted the freedom to figure out what we wanted our life to look like.”
They found their answer in a Winnebago. The young couple bought the $109,000, 25-foot RV about a year ago after selling most of their possessions to embrace a permanent life on the road. Their nomadic, minimalist, you-only-live-once attitudeexpressed in popular Instagram hashtags like #rvlife and #homeiswhereyouparkexemplifies a new youthful vibe energizing the RV market, which is enjoying record sales.
Wholesale RV shipments surged 17.2 percent to 504,599 units last year, with forecasters predicting a ninth consecutive year of expansion in 2018, according to the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association. RV manufacturing revenue reached $19.7 billion last year after annualized growth of 7.8 percent over the five-year period ending in 2017, according to market research group IBISWorld.
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