Hasta La Creative!

I know you’re all itching to hit the beach. And a lot of of you will be Sunday kicks off the 4A’s “Accelerate” conference in Miami. You’ll find me there at opening cocktails sipping on the tears of my coworkers left in still-frozen New York.

But before you enjoy the 85-degree weather from the comfort of a darkened conference room, it’s time to catch up on agency news. This week, we have updates from Jack Link’s, SharkNinja (whoever named that medal for you) and even a condiment communique, which we midwesterners take very seriously.

First order of business, though: Agency Brief is in new hands, at least for the time being. Meg Graham, who some of you know as Ad Age’s media agency reporter, will be taking over the Brief reins. Tips, suggestions, or ways of sneaking out of conferences so winter-weary reporters can get a tan? Send to mgraham@adage.com.

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Aboard the International Space Station, an astronaut’s life is typically work, exercise, rest, repeat. But what if your chance of having the right stuff for NASA’s astronaut corps is, to say the least, minimal?

Aurora Station, billed as the “first luxury hotel in space,” may be for you. Houston-based Orion Span Inc. hopes to launch the modular station in late 2021 and welcome its first guests the following year, with two crew members accompanying each excursion. The platform would orbit 200 miles above Earth, offering six guests 384 sunrises and sunsets as they race around the planet for 12 days at incredibly high speeds.

Once, such a thing would have clearly been the stuff of fiction. Now, in the age of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, the idea that a private company would launch an orbiting hotel seems almost pedestrian.

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Facebook will soon require political- and issues-based ads to receive verification before they’re served to users on the platform. Today, the company said it will require advertisers to confirm the identity and location of the media buy before an ad runs. Additional changes will include requiring verification of people who manage large pages to make…

Sponsorships, discounts and donations. What has historically been a safe ground to build goodwill for your brand has suddenly turned into a reputational minefield. The social, political, environmental and economic events of the last year have shattered the rules of the game for how brands connect with the world around them. Gone are the days…

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: Jon “Mad Men” Hamm dramatically narrates a commercial for Mercedes-Benz that hypes the brand’s upcoming AMG Project One plug-in car. IBM Watson serves up two ads that explain how AI is transforming everything from cybersecurity to farming. And Kendall Motor Oil uses a hockey player’s intense post-season practice sessions to make a point about how in life “you get out what you put in” (and “the same goes for your engine”).

Continue reading at AdAge.com