Hasta La Creative!

EDITOR’S NOTE: For 2019, we’ve expanded our annual publishing-industry honors program. It’s now known as the Ad Age Publishers A-List and it includes the Magazine A-List, below, plus a new set of Digital Publishers A-List honorees. Read the introduction and find links to the other portions of the package here.

The California Sunday Magazine

Founded in late 2014 by Douglas McGray and Chas Edwards, The California Sunday Magazine is a six-times-a-year glossy that’s distributed to 350,000 subscribers of the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. Under Editor-in-Chief McGray, the title is gloriously, well, magazineyserving as a forum for longform reporting (e.g., Mark Arax’s epic 20,000-word feature “A Kingdom From Dust,” about Big Agriculture, water and immigrant labor). It’s won scores of honors in its short life, including three National Magazine Awards, and its photojournalism is so stellar that the current photo-essay issue, “At Home: In the American West,” became a gallery exhibition at New York’s prestigious Aperture Foundation. Publisher Edwards has lured in big brands such as Coach and Google Pixel (which sponsored “At Home”), and together with McGray helped secure the most impressive validation yet: their magazine’s late-November acquisition, along with sibling events division Pop-Up Magazine (see our Event Publisher A-List), by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For 2019, we’ve expanded our annual publishing-industry honors program. It’s now known as the Ad Age Publishers A-List and it includes the traditional Magazine A-List, a new Digital Publishers A-List and three shortlists of honorees in growth areas for publishing: video (below), events and audio/podcasting. Read the introduction and find links to the other portions of the package here.

The New York Times (The New York Times Co.)

The New York Times, which appears twice on our Digital Publishers A-List, also gets honored here on our Video Publishers A-List for its extraordinarily innovative use of the medium for both hard-hitting journalism (see, for example, episodes of the “Visual Investigations” series such as “A Black Driver, a Marijuana Bust and a Body Camera That Turned Off” and “Killing Khashoggi: How a Brutal Saudi Hit Job Unfolded”) and simply delightful culture coverage, particularly in the brisk shorts produced by the staff of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

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Every weekday we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from more than eight million smart TVs. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time over the weekend.

A few highlights: A couple of ’70s-style crooners sing the praises of Dunkin’ Go2s (e.g., two bacon, egg & cheese breakfast sandwiches for $5). Mercedes-Benz serves up a bunch of advice, including “be fast” and “be on time,” in an ad for its new 4-door GT coupe. And William H. Macy stars in an “Arrival”-themed Pepsi ad that debuted during the Golden Globes telecast.

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Recent rap albums round out the Top 5 and Christmas albums plummet in an uneventful week on the music charts.

While CES officially kicks off Tuesday, with some 200,000 people from across the globe descending on Sin City to see the latest in gadgets, gizmos and tech innovations, companies large and small are already holding closed door events to share news about their latest products.

On Sunday, tucked away in a small room on the second floor of the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, Marc Pritchard, CMO at Procter and Gamble Co., pitched some 200 people about the company’s latest bets on smart home care. There’s a Gillette razor blade that heats up in one secondso “it can give you the feeling of a hot towel shave without the barber,” Pritchard saidand a smart toothbrush that connects to a consumer’s phone. There are also products like the Opt Precision Skincare system, which uses a digital camera to help cover up unwanted marks or “age spots” using a fraction of the makeup women would normally apply to conceal such areas on their face.

The company’s investment armP&G Ventureshas placed roughly 130 bets on startups with hopes that one, or a few, will create the same sort of disruption that smaller direct-to-consumer brands have achieved.

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Spotify is testing a new way for brands to be discovered weekly. Today, the company announced a beta test of a new ad format for its weekly personalized playlist (aptly titled Discover Weekly), inserting audio and video ads during ad breaks between songs on the free version of the service. “Personalization has quickly gone from…

Following the pattern that emerged during the holiday season, brands have been turning their attention toward Instagram and away from parent company Facebook when crafting their social strategies for the Super Bowl, according to social marketing firm Unmetric. Unmetric CEO Lux Narayan said, “While Facebook remains the most preferred social network for posting, its popularity…

EDITOR’S NOTE: For 2019, we’ve expanded our annual publishing-industry honors program. It’s now known as the Ad Age Publishers A-List and it includes the traditional Magazine A-List, a new Digital Publishers A-List and three shortlists of honorees in growth areas for publishing: audio/podcasting (below), video and events. Read the introduction and find links to the other portions of the package here.

Crooked Media (Crooked Media Inc.)

A podcast company founded by Obama administration veterans Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor, Crooked Media is best known for its massive hit “Pod Save America,” which has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times. Hosted by the company founders along with another Obama alum, Dan Pfeiffer, it spawned a series of HBO specials that launched in October just in time for the midterm elections. Los Angeles-based Crooked is an Audio/Podcast Publisher A-List honoree not only for its flagship podcast and its spin-offs (“Pod Save the World,” “Pod Save the People”) but for building out a stellar line-up of shows, including Ana Marie Cox’s “With Friends Like These,” Erin Ryan’s “Hysteria” and Favreau’s “The Wilderness,” in record time (Crooked only launched in January 2017).

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