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: A new study looks at gender parity in advertising from a new angle by examining how many brand mascots are male. Just think about it: There’s Mr. Clean and Mr. Peanut, the Michelin Man and the Pillsbury Doughboy. It’s harder to think of the women (besides, say, the pigtailed lass of Wendy’s and the Chiquita banana lady with the basket of fruit on her head.) According to the study by the The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, “male mascots outnumber female mascots two-to-one.” The report also looks at how mascots fuel racial stereotypes, too. As Ad Age staffers write in this week’s Marketer’s Brief, “the study was done in partnership with the The Jel Sert Company, whose Otter Pops brand recently added three new female otter mascots to achieve gender parity.” As Jezebel writes, “Could it be that the calls for diversity in popsicles were finally being heard?”

Walmart vs. Amazon

Walmart, trying to battle Amazon on many fronts, just offered up $16 billion for a majority stake in India’s e-commerce giant, Flipkart. Flipkart is the biggest e-commerce company in India, though Amazon is a strong player there too. Walmart surely sees the untapped potential in a country where only 5 to 10 percent of people have ever bought something online, a figure noted by The Economist. But investors were skeptical about Walmart’s move, especially given the pricetag. India’s e-commerce market hasn’t fulfilled early expectations and “as a whole is worth a puny $15bn or so, compared with nearly $500bn in America and double that in China,” as The Economist writes. Plus, Walmart seems constantly to be making incursions into Amazon territory, such as by buying Jet.com. Scott Mushkin, a retail analyst at Wolfe Research, told The New York Times that Walmart seems “to be somewhat Amazon obsessed.”

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As the industry watches WPP following the exit of chief executive Martin Sorrell, the world’s largest advertising holding company notched a success, retaining the global work for BP’s corporate, fuels and Castrols businesses. It’s a new style of relationship with its longtime client.

“As we enter the third decade of our relationship, we have agreed on a completely new way of working to enable easy access to the best talent and ideas that WPP has to offer,” Geoff Morrell, group head of communications and external affairs at BP said in a release.

“Team Energy” will provide advertising, media investment management, digital media, marketing communications, branding, PR and brand research from WPP agencies including VML, Ogilvy, Mindshare, Grey, Essence and others, WPP said in a statement. Its new “flexible media model,” called “EnergyMedia,” will also combine talent from WPP agencies.

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San Miguel, the Spanish lager brand owned by Carlsberg UK, is helping people find out whether material goods or experiences matter most to them.

(TrendHunter.com) The celebrated Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City artistically exhibits the strong impact the Catholic church has on the stylistic development of haute couture. In a rich line-up of…

Brands and agencies are in agreement that the traditional pitch process is no longer “fit for purpose”. What is less clear is what will replace it as a means of marketers selecting agency partners.

Advertisers are underspending on newsbrands to such an extent that they are losing out on £3bn of potential profit, the latest effectiveness research from Newsworks has found.

The Butlin’s creative account review has moved to chemistry stage, while GSK and Godiva have launched global reviews. Elsewhere, WPP and Dentsu have retained big global accounts.

Secret Cinema is bringing Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet to life for an estimated audience of 5,000.

In 2015, the Twitter platform changed, with tweets no longer appearing in chronological order. This presented a problem for Transport for London (TfL) – its approach of providing real-time, minute-by-minute information no longer worked.

Everyone loves a bank holiday, especially when the sun comes out.