Hasta La Creative!

Publishers love to sell a big ad campaign. They don’t like following it closely with an article about how the advertiser behind it is simply the worst.

That’s basically what happened last March to Michael Kuntz, president of advertising sales and brand partnerships at USA Today Network, who talked about the experience at Ad Age’s Survival Summit in Chicago on Wednesday.

A major auto brand had just started a massive ad campaign with USA Today Network, which includes 110 publications such as The Indianapolis Star, The Arizona Republic and The Cincinnati Enquirer, during the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, Kuntz recalled. The very next day, USA Today covered Consumer Reports’ finding that a corporate sibling of the undisclosed brand was high among the worst car brands in America. (Kuntz didn’t name the brands involved, but the article is here.)

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At Ad Age’s Survival Summit on Wednesday, marketing leaders and experts in crisis communications spelled out exactly what brands need to do before problems hitand after.

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Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. is taking a step further to advocate for gun control, part of a rapid transition for the retailer that’s also a major vendor of firearms in the U.S.

The company has retained Glover Park Group to lobby congress on the matter, according to a disclosure form filed in late April. The move is unusual for a firm in the retail sector, where few brands tackle such a politically-charged issue for fear it will turn off customers.

Following a mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida high school in February, Dick’s announced it would stop selling assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines. It also increased the firearms purchase age to 21.

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One of the more striking assertions made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Tuesday’s annual Off the Record conference in Menlo Park, California, is that the social network is gearing up to lose money on political advertising. (Off the Record is actually on the record and was hosted this year by The Information, Quartz and BuzzFeed.) Recode’s Peter Kafka writes that,

Facebook is spending so much money hiring moderators to review political ads that it will cancel out the revenue those ads generate in this year’s election cycle, says CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “We’re essentially going to be losing money on running political ads,” because the company is hiring “thousands” in advance of the 2018 elections, Zuckerberg said. … “That cost is going to be greater than the money that we make.”

Read Kafka’s full (brief) post for details on what Zuckerberg thinks the cost of the ad-vetting will be and how he anticipates that AI will gradually take over for many of those thousands of human ad-vetters.

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The idea behind a new print ad campaign celebrating UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day is that we should all break out of our echo-chamber silos of news consumption. Per the tagline: “Read more. Listen more. Understand more. It all starts with a free press.”

Good advice and good point, but what makes the simple ad so striking it that customized versions of it are running in publications around the world, which means various news organizations are telling their audiences to, you know, go check out the competition. The specific ad you see above, for instance, appears on page A7 of today’s New York Times (the image was shared on Medium by NYT Chief Operating Officer Meredith Levien) and right after the opening line, “Don’t just read The New York Times,” we’re advised to “Read The Wall Street Journal,” with its famously right-leaning op-ed pages that often strike very different positions than those espoused by the NYT’s famously left-leaning op-ed pages. The National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr., also gets a recommendation.

But hey, wouldn’t you know it? No shout-out for Fox News. (Among TV news providers, only CNN, the BBC, NBC News and MSNBC are mentioned in this particular ad.)

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We’re in the midst of a highly anticipated time in the marketing world: the season of Upfronts. But before you get all excited about your ad buys, you may want to reconsider where you spend your money. Those dollars you’re putting toward multi-million dollar sponsorships, paid search campaigns and banner displays–how much are they really…

Conan O’Brien is scaling back his late-night TBS series, Conan, to a nightly half-hour format next year–but that doesn’t mean comedian is on his way out at the network. Instead, he has finalized a new deal with TBS that expands his Team Coco portfolio into more digital and social platforms, as well as live events….

Harrods has appointed Amanda Hill, formerly chief brands officer at BBC Worldwide, to the new role of chief marketing and customer officer.

You’ve heard this story before: our increasingly complex and conflict-ridden world has only heightened the importance of a free press to report on breaking news and interpret international events. This is especially true in light of shifting consumer behaviors and the ever-growing power of distribution platforms like Facebook, Google and YouTube. In order to highlight…