Epic Games will reward users with prizes including the ‘Tart Tycoon,’ a playable character that portrays the iPhone maker as a villainous executive.
The $700 million-plus review is one of the largest conducted during the coronavirus pandemic.
(TrendHunter.com) The conceptual Lancia Cargo Stratos has been designed by Joaquin Obligado as a new iteration of the Lancia Stratos Zero vehicle from the 1970s to help modernize the retro-futuristic car. The vehicle…
Considering the events of 2020, it’s no surprise that hygiene, health and cleanliness are top of mind for consumers. And chances are, many Americans are cleaning their homes and bodies with products from a Procter & Gamble brand. The Cincinnati-based conglomerate owns a slew of the world’s most recognizable CPG brands, such as Tide, Bounty…
When the nation was forced into lockdown in March, the pet industry continued to serve its communities. As loneliness sparked new companionships and adoption rates rose, retailers like Petco were challenged to safely engage with new customers–both in-store and virtually. From the beginning of the pandemic to the dog days of summer, Petco has been…
A novela entre Apple, Google e a Epic Games continua. Depois de ver a dona do “Fornite” ganhar o apoio dos principais veículos de comunicação no processo que move contra sua App Store no fim da quinta (20), a companhia comandada por Tim Cook respondeu oficialmente nesta sexta (21) a documentação submetida pela Epic à …
O post Em resposta a processo, Apple alega que Epic Games buscou “acordo especial” para pagamentos de “Fortnite” apareceu primeiro em B9.
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“The American consumer is proving more resilient than predicted,” Bloomberg News reports. “Conventional wisdom, which initially assumed many U.S. shoppers would save their paychecks and stimulus funds until the pandemic subsided, has proved unfounded. The largest American retailers all reported sales in the latest quarter that blew away expectations.”
Bloomberg’s report is titled “Americans Surprise Wall Street With Spending Boom During Coronavirus.” Among the highlights:
• Walmart reported sales of $137.7 billion, vs. the $135.6 billion consensus forecast.
• Amazon reported sales of $88.9 billion, vs. the $81.2 billion forecast.
• Home Depot reported sales of $38.0 billion, vs. the $34.5 billion consensus forecast.
• Target reported sales of $23.0 billion, vs. the $19.8 billion consensus forecast.
Reality check: Of course, Bloomberg News is taking a Wall Street-centric view here; it’s great for Bloomberg’s core audience of investors that certain American retail behemoths, which are disproportionately represented in closely watched stock indices and portfolios, are doing so well.
Vox has another spin on the news: “Government shutdowns of ‘nonessential’ retailers were a huge gift for Amazon, Walmart, and Target” (subhead: “Some feared the pandemic would widen the gap between the haves and have-nots of retail. That fear is now reality”).
Losers: Even the generally upbeat Bloomberg report acknowledges that “retailers who haven’t fared as well are the ones closely linked to the American shopping mall, especially department stores and retailers focused on apparel”—including T.J. Maxx and Kohl’s. Keep reading here.
“The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week to more than 1 million,” Fox Business reports, citing the latest data from the U.S. Department of Labor—adding that economists surveyed by Refinitiv, the financial data service, were anticipating 925,000 new claims.
The essential context: “A mind-boggling 57.3 million workers now have filed for unemployment over the past 22 weeks,” per USA Today. “Before the pandemic, the previous all-time high for weekly claims was 695,000 during a recession in 1982.”
“The top 200 U.S. advertisers increased ad and marketing services spending a robust 4.6 percent in 2019 to a record $175 billion, the capstone to a decade of advertising growth,” Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson reports in a recent post that serves up some topline stats from Ad Age’s 65th annual Leading National Advertisers report.
That, of course, was then and this is now—but the LNA sets the essential baseline for marketers and marketing activities pre-COVID-19. And it offers the big-picture view of the brands and marketer categories that entered the coronavirus recession with the most momentum.
It is, quite simply, a must-read. Ad Age Datacenter subscribers, of course, get access to the full LNA report.
We recently kicked off a regular look at marketers that have been increasing their TV ad spend. The previous installment covered JC Penney; the subject of today’s close-up, with TV ad spend (national broadcast and cable) shared exclusively with Datacenter Weekly by iSpot.tv, is PepsiCo’s Gatorade. To wit:
• As soon as live sports telecasts started disappearing from TV in March, Gatorade started pulling its TV advertising and went largely dormant for months.
• With the return of live sports, Gatorade has gotten back in the TV game in a big way. Among all the brands iSpot tracks, Gatorade has jumped into the ranks of the top 40 spenders from July 1 through Aug. 19.
• Live NBA games (which returned to TV on July 30) have accounted for 8.6 percent of Gatorade commercial TV ad impressions over the period measured, followed by MTV’s “Ridiculousness” (8.2%) and ESPN’s “SportsCenter” (7.0%).
• ESPN and TNT, the two national networks on which NBA games have been appearing, have together served up 20 percent of the TV ad impressions for Gatorade over the period measured.
See more: Watch one example of Gatorade’s recent creative in the July 20 edition of Hot Spots.
According to Inscape, the data company owned by smart TV giant Vizio, NBA games have been the top programming on TV since the league’s return to live telecasts on July 30. That’s based on what Inscape calls “percent share duration”—i.e, the aggregate time spent watching across its opt-in panel of millions of smart TVs across all dayparts. From July 30 forward, NBA games that have aired on ESPN and TNT have made up 1.67 percent of total TV watch-time.
That’s the market cap of Apple as of Wednesday, when it became the first U.S. company to cross that mark, ICYMI.
To put that in perspective: On Aug. 2, 2018, Apple’s market cap hit $1 trillion. So Wall Street thinks the tech giant is now somehow twice as valuable as it was two years ago.
That’s all it’ll cost you to attend Ad Age’s 2020 Women to Watch Conference & Awards if you take advantage of our early-bird pricing offer (which ends Sunday; tickets are $79 thereafter). The Sept. 15 virtual event is set to feature panels with Dara Treseder, head of global marketing and communications at Peloton; Kat Gordon, 3% Movement founder and CEO; Ann Mukherjee, chairman and CEO, North America at Pernod Ricard; and many more. Get tickets for yourself and your team here.
• “Former Uber Executive Charged With Paying ‘Hush Money’ To Conceal Massive [Data] Breach,” per NPR.
• “235M Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube profiles exposed in database breach,” The New Web reports.
• “Covid-19 Data Will Once Again Be Collected by CDC, in Policy Reversal,” per The Wall Street Journal.
• “Nvidia could become the Apple of the data center, analyst contends,” via MarketWatch.
The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.
Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Catherine Wolf.
This week’s newsletter was compiled and written by Simon Dumenco.
“We want to have a more diverse workforce, but we don’t know where to find diverse candidates.” We’ve all heard some variation of this sentence. And in the past, there might have been some truth to it. Like it or not, hiring is often done through extended personal networks and hiring through personal networks often…
In mid-July, the CDC published a study that found that the percentage of Black Americans who report wearing a mask at all times in public and social spaces is 16% higher than the percentage of all Americans wearing a face mask outside of their homes (79% compared to 63%). However, the CDC also found that…
It’s safe to say that no business plan could prepare a company for 2020. But in spite of a pandemic that turned much of the prevailing wisdom on its head, spirits startup YaVe Tequila and seltzer brand Ugly Drinks have found ways to change on the fly and meet consumers where they are now–at home,…
In an era in which facial recognition has made it easy for law enforcement and other organizations to search someone’s identity based on their face alone, the question of when it’s appropriate to share identifiable photos of protesters and activists publicly has become a flashpoint on social media. A German startup called Brighter AI is…
Facebook is helping soccer fans get ready for this weekend’s UEFA Champions League Final, pitting Paris Saint-Germain against Bayern Munich. Fans who search for or click on the #UCLFinal hashtag on Facebook will be taken to the UEFA Champions League hub, featuring a feed of some of the most popular related content on the platform,…
A partir de agora, os pedidos on-line para milhares de restaurantes parceiros da Rappi em todo o país também podem ser feitos por meio do Google, seja diretamente na Busca da página de pesquisas ou no Google Maps. Com o propósito de auxiliar os restaurantes parceiros a reforçarem sua divulgação e vendas durante a pandemia …
O post Com integração ao Google, Rappi quer facilitar pedidos de comida on-line apareceu primeiro em B9.
Facebook’s chief marketing officer, Antonio Lucio, is leaving after two years with the social media platform. Lucio joined the company in 2018 from HP Inc., just a few months after Facebook’s relationship to the Cambridge Analytica scandal was exposed. He leaves as Facebook faces scrutiny for hate speech on its platform and anti-competitive behavior. In…
Key Insights: Salespeople should view themselves as partners rather than sellers of a product. Trust was ranked by 35% of decision-makers as the most important factor in closing a deal, LinkedIn found. Industries throughout the world shifted to virtual selling due to the coronavirus pandemic in their second quarters. Now, as stay-at-home orders persist, those…
A Amstel apresenta uma campanha com personagens ligados a comportamentos que surgiram nos últimos meses, mediante o período de quarentena. A ideia parte do princípio de que, para viver uma rotina dentro de casa, as pessoas tiveram que seguir o instinto animal e se adaptar. Preocupadas em se sentirem o mais à vontade possível com …
O post Amstel brinca com “espécies da quarentena” em nova campanha apareceu primeiro em B9.
Uma nova atualização do Lightroom, app da Adobe para edição de fotos, veio com defeito que causou sério problema para os usuários de plataformas iOS: IPhones e iPads estão tendo suas fotos deletadas automaticamente e permanentemente do aplicativo. A Adobe já se manifestou pedindo desculpas pelo ocorrido e promete que o problema foi resolvido. O …
O post Atualização do Adobe Lightroom leva usuários a perder fotos no iOS apareceu primeiro em B9.
After a rocky year, marketing head is stepping away, possibly opening spot for Black leadership.
Key Insight: Back-to-school advertisers are relying on TV more heavily this year with ad share up to 33%. The back-to-school season is typically predictable in terms of both timing and product assortment. Not so in 2020. According to Brendan Witcher, vp and principal analyst at research firm Forrester, this environment brought on by the pandemic…
As the Covid-19 pandemic shows no signs of abating in the U.S., it is already upending several fall TV mainstays, including college football games (many of which have been postponed until 2021) and the traditional start of the new season (which will be delayed, with most shows still unable to resume production). But at least…
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