Hasta La Creative!

The Ultimate Fighting Championship announced a new deal with ESPN Tuesday, and the terms suggest the demand for sports isn’t slowing anytime soon.

The five-year agreement is with ESPN+, the new digital streaming service, and it covers about a third of the promotion’s events. At $150 million a year, according to a person familiar with the deal, this portion alone is already more lucrative than the UFC’s current all-encompassing contract with 21st Century Fox Inc., which expires at the end of 2018.

In sports and media, this sale has been seen as an early indication of how the decline of traditional cable and the arrival of digital streaming services would affect the market for content. As of now, it looks like the shifting landscape will produce more money, not less.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

McKinsey & Co. recently asserted that not much has changed three years after the ad-industry uproar over undisclosed media rebates, as Ad Age reported April 30.

I want to thank Ad Age for its continuing coverage of the media transparency issue. As its article pointed out, despite the ongoing efforts of marketers and the ANA, rebates and related non-transparent business practices by media agencies apparently still exist.

However, I take exception to the notion that “Not much has changed” almost two years after we released our landmark report on media transparency in conjunction with K2 Intelligence. I would respectfully suggest that, in fact, a great deal has changed throughout the advertising, marketing and media industries to address this vexing problem.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Warning: This video contains images of extreme gun violence.

If they haven’t already, someone is soon going to ask you “What do you think of ‘This Is America’?” It’s a song by Childish Gambino, aka Donald Glover, who hosted “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend, performed the song live on the show and then released the music video, above, on YouTube’s Vevo. Though the YouTube post of his “This Is America” performance on the “SNL” YouTube channel has, as of this writing, fewer than 100,000 views, the official music video has racked up more than 17 millionand has become a major media obsession and cultural talking point.

The video features a dancing, singing Glover engaging in hyperviolencehe graphically shoots a man in the back of the head at point-blank range just 50 seconds into the video. (The violence gets even worse later.) This comes right after Glover has sung,

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Facebook has named new leaders for some of its main divisions, including the core social network, WhatsApp and Messenger, in the biggest management reshuffling since the company’s founding.

The Menlo Park, California-based company also unveiled a new initiative to explore the use of blockchain, the decentralized ledger technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin. The team dedicated to blockchain will be run by David Marcus, who formerly headed the Messenger chat app.

Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, has been promoted to oversee all of the company’s apps. Will Cathcart will become head of Facebook’s core application, the company said. The former leader of news feed, Adam Mosseri, was named head of product at photo-sharing app Instagram, replacing Kevin Weil, who will join the blockchain team.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Do you remember a viral craze called “the ice bucket challenge?” It was truly a charity campaign for the viral social media age. Every celebrity, semi-celebrity and wannabe celebrity participated (including one Mark Zuckerberg). Most brands also found a way to join in the generous fun. Yet, while the effort won two highly coveted Gold…