Hasta La Creative!

Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. What people are talking about today: “So how’s your week been?” That was CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves’ opening line at the network’s upfront, where he got a standing ovation, as Ad Age’s Jeanine Poggi writes. For Moonves, it’s been quite a week. CBS launched a legal showdown with its controlling shareholder, the Redstone family’s National Amusements, which wants to reunite CBS with Viacom. Then came the upfront. Moonves spoke only briefly to plug CBS’ lineup to media buyers, and he skipped the network’s annual upfront press breakfast entirely, Poggi reported earlier in the busy day.

CBS’s president of entertainment, Kelly Kahl, said at the breakfast that Moonves sent his regards: “But the number of questions he couldn’t answer outnumber the ones he could, so he thought it was a good idea to sit this one out.”

Stephen Colbert sums things up nicely: “CBS has some of the most exciting legal dramas and some great TV shows,” he quipped, as noted in Variety. If you need to get up to speed on the details of the legal action, the Los Angeles Times has a good explainer. The stakes for CBS’ CEO are high: “Should Moonves and other CBS board members lose their case against the Redstones, his illustrious career could be over,” the Times writes.

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Mustard and condiments brands French’s and Frank’s are joining forces to host a Fourth of July celebration featuring food, fun and games, karaoke and a hot sauce fountain.

Gin brand Gin Mare is offering people the chance to have a taste of the Mediterranean at various London locations.

The crowd stands and cheers for the network’s leader, Leslie Moonves, in what may have been his final appearance at the network’s annual event.

Emily James, the chief strategy officer of Y&R London, thinks Robinsons just about gets away with it in this spot from Saatchi & Saatchi.

Paul Davies, head of consumer marketing at Microsoft believes there will be a resurgence of creativity in the face of the pressure of automation.

Organisation issues new manifesto with eight principles for reform.

The deadline for entries for the Media Week 30 Under 30 2018 has been extended to 25 May and the first judges have been announced.

What if, after waking up and gazing bleary-eyed into your mirrored medicine cabinet, you open it to an overly friendly stranger’s face gazing back?

That’s the setup of a series of Right Guard commercials from BBDO that ran from 1969 to 1976. If the happy stranger is played by a comic genius (the recently deceased Chuck McCann) who has a wildly expressive face, dances sink-side and booms, “Hi, guy!” (which became a catch phrase), you have a winning campaign.

Of course, it also helps that the first gentleman (Richard Fiore) is a more reserved, non-morning type, who, confronted with the odd sight of his highly caffeinated neighbor, yells “Mona!” for backup.

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Channel 4 won the Cultural Shift category at Campaign’s 2017 Marketing New Thinking Awards by celebrating diversity with its Rio Paralympics campaign “We’re the superhumans”, which built on its “Meet the superhumans” London 2012 work.