Hasta La Creative!

It was just after 9:30 Friday night when a vociferous klaxon and a yellow tire emoji alerted us that our right front tire had experienced a sudden loss of pressure. My Audi Q7 was handling fine, so instead of pulling over, we decided to check the tire pressure at the next gas station (approximately 40 miles away). As I started to fill the tire, an unmistakable hiss sent shivers down my spine.

Hey, Shelly, you got a flat tire on a Friday night. Why all the drama?

Why indeed. This story is a cautionary tale about expectation management and customer service.

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Adam & Eve DDB’s final two founders are leaving the agency. Group CEO James Murphy and Group CSO David Golding will exit in May 2019, after a lengthy British notice period. This follows the departure of the other two founders, Jon Forsyth in 2017 and Ben Priest earlier this year, after the quartet reached the end of their earnout in December 2016. Like Forsyth before them, non-compete agreements will likely keep Murphy and Golding from jumping into a new advertising endeavor for several years.

The agency’s current leadership team of Joint CEOs Tammy Einav and Mat Goff, Chief Strategy Officer Alex Hesz and Chief Creative Officer Rick Brim remain.

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S4 Capital, the new venture helmed by former WPP chief Martin Sorrell, confirms it’s in “advanced discussions” related to a potential acquisition of San Francisco-based digital media and programmatic consultancy MightyHive.

In a statement Monday, the company said the potential transaction “would be in line with the Company’s stated strategy of creating a new era, new media solution embracing data, content and technology in an always-on environment for global, multi-national, regional and local clients and for millennial-driven digital brands.”

S4 noted there was no certainty as to whether the transaction would occur.

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Jessica Ferro recently ordered $200 worth of makeup from Sephora’s online appand then waited a month for it to arrive. Despite conversations with multiple customer-service agents, the shipment had gone to her old address in Joliet, Illinois. She didn’t yell or document her experience on Yelp or Twitter. Ferro, 34, did what came naturally: She took her business elsewhereto Wander Beauty, an online makeup seller that has put a premium on customer service by enlisting chatbots she can talk with whenever and wherever she wants.

“You have to make customers as happy as you can because there are so many options out there,” Ferro says. “What’s going to stop them from going somewhere else?”

During the recent five-day shopping frenzy that runs every year from Thanksgiving through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so-called bounce rates, when a shopper abandons a web storesometimes even after loading up their cart with goodiesincreased each day, according to Monetate, which monitors commerce on desktops and mobile devices. All those bouncers offset some of the gains retailers made in attracting more consumers to their websites. On Thanksgiving, a big mobile shopping day, bounce rates increased 12 percent compared with 2017, according to Monetate.

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Viacom expects to see its advanced marketing solutions business double in 2019, CEO Bob Bakish said during the 46th annual UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York on Monday afternoon.

The unit, which includes Viacom’s ad targeting products and branded content solutions, will bring in $343 million in revenue in 2018, Bakish said.

Bakish said he expects Viacom’s ad revenue to return to growth in the back-half of 2019 thanks to new ad products and solutions coming to market, access to more inventory where ads can be dynamically inserted, or swapped out in order to be targeted to specific households, and improvement from Nickelodeon, whose ratings have been struggling.

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