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IKEA

How do you get a young audience on Youtube to stay with your ad longer than the unavoidable 5 sec? When most brands try hard to seduce people Ikea did the exact opposite. We begged them NOT to watch the up to 8 minutes long films since there’s nothing to see except for boring, everyday life. With this reversed psychology we made the target group “18-35 year olds in metro areas” want to keep watching, spending time with the brand and the offerings on Ikea products. The average viewing rate was 3:15 minutes, far above industry standard. 39% even watched the whole ads.

Advertising Agency:Åkestam Holst, Sweden
Production Company:Bacon STH
Executive Creative Director:Magnus Jakobsson
Art Director:Jesper Holst
Copywriter:Mark Ardelius
Account Executives:Jerker Winther, Mimmi Grafström
Production Manager:Agneta Oppenheim
Producers:Leila Widgren, Ida Person

“Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.” With that nine-word tweet, sent on a quiet Sunday afternoon in September, Nike and Colin Kaepernick kicked off a campaign that would go on to win fans, create enemies and refuel a conversation about the role brands shouldor should notplay in tackling societal issues.

Depending on who you asked, Nike was either a crusader for social justice or an unpatriotic agitator making a hero out of the man who started the movement of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem as a means to bring attention to racial inequities. Kaepernick was not the only athlete in the campaign celebrating the 30th anniversary of the “Just Do It” slogan, but he narrated one spot, which quickly became a lightening rod. Spike Lee praised Nike for being “on the right side of history.” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz bashed the brand for being “on the wrong side of the American people.”

Either way, Nike ended up right where it needs to be: in the middle of a debate that drew attention, admiration andmost importantlysales from the urban millennials it needs to keep the swoosh strong. Along the way, the company proved it pays to take a stand, and it put to shame mealy-mouthed brands that claim to plug into culture but fall short with marketing that fails to portray a point of view on anything at all.

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As part of Campaign’s 50th anniversary, we asked the industry to look back on the best ads of the past 50 years. We are revealing one a day for your viewing pleasure…

Three top ad forecastersGroupM, Magna Global and Zenithare tempering expectations for ad spending next year and one predicts that digital spend might finally be slowing down.

GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, is downgrading its initial 2018 growth expectations from 4.5 percent to 4.3 percent in a report to be released this week. It’s also reducing its 2019 growth projections from 3.9 percent to 3.6 percent. The media agency company says this is due, in part, to stress in the auto category and continuing softness in the consumer packaged-goods category.

Magna is forecasting that global advertising in 2019 will grow for the 10th consecutive year but says the growth rate will slow to 4.7 percent due to the absence of major cyclical events. It says global advertising revenues grew by 7.2 percent this year to reach a total of $552 billion in the 70 countries analyzed by Magna. That was buoyed, it says, by the FIFA World Cup in Russia, midterm elections in the U.S. and the Winter Olympics in South Korea, which together generated $6 billion in incremental ad spending.

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Maria Ressa, a veteran journalist, was charged with five counts of tax fraud in what her news organization, Rappler, has called “intimidation and harassment.”

competitive:

Leaf Group:
Leaf Group is a diversified consumer internet company that builds enduring, creator-driven brands that reach passionate audiences in large and grow…
New York City, New York (US)

The huge success of “Crazy Rich Asian” was anything but assured in the months before the movie opened in August. “It was a leap of faith,” recalls Blair Rich, president of worldwide marketing at Warner Bros., who says the project represented a lot more than a film both to her and the studio. “I’ve been at the company for 21 years and worked on a lot of movies, but this one has a lot of personal pride.”

The marketing department, she says, “took it very seriously to show the world that diversity and inclusion can be entertaining and reach a broad audience.”

The Warner team had to leap a lot of hurdles: “Crazy Rich Asians” was the first major Hollywood film with an all-Asian cast in 25 years; its actors were not megastars; and the movie was a romantic comedy, a genre drawing lackluster box office in recent years.

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Plenty of automakers have tried appealing to commitment-averse buyers who no longer want to own cars. But Volvo has left the competition in the dust.

The luxury brand is enjoying robust demand for its Care by Volvo subscription program that is simpler than the normally paperwork-laden car-buying process: One flat fee covers insurance, taxes and “digital concierge services” like fueling, cleaning and valet pick-up and drop-off for vehicle maintenance.

Launched in the U.S. late last year, the initiative is still going strong even as rival vehicle subscription services suffer setbacks. Volvo hit its yearly subscription goal within the program’s first four months, says Bob Jacobs, Volvo Car USA’s VP for product, marketing and communication, who declined to specify the goal. “There’s definitely demand for this program,” he says.

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While there’s no such thing as a perfect NBA gameperhaps as close as any player has ever come was when Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points against the Knicks way back in 1962, and even then the Philadelphia Warriors’ center still managed to miss 27 shots and four free throwsthe league as a whole is now on conversational terms with flawlessness.

According to Nielsen, the 2017-18 NBA regular season averaged 1.89 million viewers across ESPN, ABC and TNT, which marked an 8 percent increase versus the previous season. And while other major American sports leagues (and pretty much everything else that depends on TV as its primary distribution) continue to struggle to retain the increasingly elusive younger demos, NBA ratings last season actually improved 14 percent among the 18-to-34 set and jumped 15 percent with adults 18-to-49.

The ratings momentum is a function of the NBA’s virtual monopoly on the imagination of young America. With a relatively apple-cheeked median age of 42, the league’s fan base has only aged two years since 2000. By comparison, the median age of MLB viewers is now 57, while the NFL audience is an even 50. And the NBA’s winning streak isn’t limited to the fans watching at home or in the bar. Attendance for regular-season games last season increased for the fourth straight year to 22.1 million, and NBA venues combined for a record 741 sellouts.

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