Sometimes, it’s the overlooked and carefree moments in life that become unforgettable memories, even though, they might be at times – messy. We’re looking forward to a tomorrow someday soon when we can completely lose ourselves in these moments. Here’s to all the messes we never thought we’d miss and to finding our way back to a better tomorrow.
The midpoint of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month may be approaching, but Facebook isn’t slowing down its efforts to celebrate the community’s diversity and impact while spotlighting the issues it has faced for decades. The social network pointed to a recent study, which found that API-owed businesses have been negatively impacted more than…
Digital tokens give fans rights to play checkers, bowl and more with their favorite entrepreneur.
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Christian Slater is back, reprising his role as HP’s The Wolf in an update of the tech thriller campaign written for the realities of the work-from-home world. The point is a simple one: Without the protection of expensive corporate security networks, data and hardware in home offices are vulnerable to hackers.
“The new push will include a nearly five-minute video starring Slater as a hacker infiltrating a mother’s work computer at home while her oblivious son plays video games on the same device,” writes Ad Age’s Adrianne Pasquarelli. “The initial hack spirals to include printers, colleagues and even the woman’s office IT department.”
It’s good timing for HP. In the early days of the pandemic, when pajama bottoms in work meetings were still a novelty and doomscrolling hadn’t yet set in, the scenario in this spot may have felt overblown. But with ransomware attacks shutting down hospital computers systems and a week after hackers shut down the Colonial Pipeline and sent gas prices spiking, the dangers feel clear and present.
NBC drama “This Is Us” will end after its upcoming sixth season, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Creator Dan Fogelman has long been adamant that the storyline he’s planned has a distinct endpoint, so the news comes as no surprise. But the loss of the show could leave some advertisers with money burning holes in their pockets.
With a 30-second commercial going for $476,352, the show is the third-most expensive show for advertisers, only trailing two nights of football. That’s nearly twice as expensive as the next show on the list, “The Voice,” and more than twice as much as the next scripted series, “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Forget the fight for a $15 minimum wage. Some retail workers are so fed up with low pay and poor treatment from customers that they’re leaving the sector altogether, opting for warehouse jobs or sales, Insider reports.
It’s important to note that while workers express concern about the coronavirus and the exposure they risk in customer-facing jobs like baristas and restaurant servers, that doesn’t seem to be why they’re leaving. Many are going to other jobs that still involve in-person interaction, but ones that pay more or don’t require them to take abuse from random strangers. Retailers, take heed. It’s such a low bar to keep these people, but the industry is facing a hiring squeeze because there are plenty of better options out there.
A harried morning with no time for a shower, and just a bowl of cold cereal scarfed down in front of Zoom for breakfast, actually looks pretty good if you’re the one selling the cereal. “Early on during the pandemic, people started eating more often and eating more items per occasion, and Kellogg could track who was eating together, and how its brands fit into various moments, Monica McGurk, Kellogg’s chief growth officer tells Ad Age’s Jessica Wohl on the latest episode of the “Marketer’s Brief” podcast.
This month, the company raised its expectations for the year, with sales looking to match 2020’s impressive numbers. But even with a surge in at-home eating, the company has invested in sophisticated audience targeting, and leaned hard into data to understand and predict how the changing landscape of the pandemic would affect individual markets before it happened.
A byte of the apple: The FCC rolled out a subsidy program on Wednesday for low-income families that provides $50 off monthly high-speed internet service. It’s a baby step toward recognizing the internet as a utility and a nod to the realities of pandemic parenting, when students need access to streaming video to attend classes. The Emergency Broadband Benefit also applies to hardware. Eligible families can get $100 off the purchase of a laptop or tablet.
Reach for the stars: Quicken Loans is officially rebranding as Rocket Mortgage, the popular lending offering it introduced in 2015. While internally this just means a change of letterhead and email signatures, there are still issues of the signs on its Detroit headquarters, not to mention the naming rights to the city’s QLine streetcar.
Pull up a chair: Dax Shepard is taking his “Armchair Expert” podcast exclusively to Spotify this summer, following in the footsteps of Joe Rogan, Variety reports. The deal is unlikely to be as controversial as Rogan’s, since Shepard’s content is far more family friendly. And expertise, channeled through educated authority figures, is the raison d’etre of the show, as opposed to Rogan’s more speculative (sometimes conspiratorial) inclinations. We’ll see how the audience stacks up head-to-head.
That does it for today’s Wake-Up Call. Thanks for reading and we hope you are all staying safe and well. For more industry news and insight, follow us on Twitter: @adage.
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In Beldent’s Fresh Voices campaign we did the most co-written song ever. ‘Boca en Boca’ is a single made by an entire generation and their music idol, Ecko, one of the most famous rappers of LATAM.
When you have a new car, you want to take good care of it, but then life happens!
Especially if you have kids, pets, hobbies… or all of them.
The new Crossland offers the perfect combination of style and utility. The outstanding versatility of our crossover is ready for your everyday activities. It features sportier looks that excites every member of the family.
“Welcome to Obecity, USA” is a multi-channel public health advocacy campaign designed to tackle the nation’s growing obesity epidemic head-on. The public service campaign – spanning emotion-packed PSAs, radio, digital media and OOH — informs and engages the public to help Pennington in its mission to eradicate the obesity epidemic in America by 2040.
Obesity, despite being the #2 leading preventable cause of death in the US behind smoking, lacks any urgency around it. Contributing to the problem is public perception that obesity is the result of poor decision-making.
The strategic insight was that people are largely being set up to be obese and was conveyed through the idea of “Obecity, USA” which brings it to life like a real place. Obecity, USA became the metaphor to drive home the scale of the problem and environment people are surrounded by and to dramatize the idea of ‘it’s not what you’re eating, it’s what you’re being fed.’
Animated videos convey deeper, more emotional stories of the characters living in Obesity, USA and capture their struggles. Outdoor billboards & posters present like roadside welcome signs to the imaginary place and surface eye-opening statistics about the gravity of the very real problem. VisitObecity.org is a website experience designed to feel like your typical state tourism site. Radio PSAs are designed to feel like familiar tourism ads and underscore the public health message and reinforce the call-to-action (donation).
Now, introducing zero waste toothpaste. Over one billion plastic toothpaste tubes are thrown away every year. Bite wants to solve that problem with their zero waste toothpaste bits. We used attention grabbing statistics to show the dire need for this product. We highlighted the problem and how Bite is the solution.
Unbound by rules or convention – this is the ethos behind 14 Hands Winery, Washington state’s second largest winery. A brand inspired by the untamed spirit of the wild horses that once freely roamed eastern Washington. The winery reflected on those very roots to inspire its biggest marketing effort ever: a complete relaunch of its iconic brand with a new strategic direction and fresh campaign, executed with the help of agency of record, Team One.
“Find Your Wild” is the new brand platform that speaks to the 14 Hands brand spirit, the unconventional approach to winemaking, and the target consumers who are spontaneous participants in life. “Find Your Wild” celebrates how we all have a bold side. Something that exists in parallel to our “buttoned-up side” that reminds us to play and what it means to be truly alive. This idea comes to life in this new campaign that introduces 14 Hands’ full brand refresh, the bold new look and feel of both the bottles and cans, and stands out amongst a clutter of cliche wine advertising.
It’s 2021, and society is done with the male gaze. In fact, it’s high-time we do more to champion the female one, especially when it comes to sexual wellness. While stigma keeps the topic taboo in the mainstream, the only visibility masturbation gets in pop culture is through “bro” comedy. Until now.
For Masturbation Month, K-Y is celebrating loud and proud how real women comically refer to masturbation in an outdoor campaign, created by IPG’s Elephant, across New York City’s most sex-forward neighborhoods: East Village, Bushwick and Williamsburg.
Designed for all to stop, think and smirk, the brightly-colored, hand-painted type-only campaign features headlines like “Let’s give ourselves a hand” and “Hand up if you masturbate,” along with a longer manifesto honoring “all who polish the pearl.”
Historically overlooked by buyers, diverse audiences—and the networks they watch—are no longer an optional, “nice to have” ad strategy component.
The food maker’s marketing now runs more like it’s in the cloud versus a mainframe, says Pollard.
The senators are on opposite sides of the aisle, but both speak out on the dangers of big tech in their new books. It’s weird, really, how alike they sound.
A Times food journalist who revealed accusations of misconduct at the restaurant in Washington State discusses how employees came to tell their story.
An initiative by ACLU, I created the world’s first citizen BodyCam to help ensure evidence is always recorded in any dangerous or unexpected situation.
The Cams are attached to a pin/button and can directly be accessed and controlled on the app to record the evidence and live stream it as well.
The campaign is supported by a website where users can purchase the pins and learn more about the cause. It also has OOH ads in the form of prints and social media.
Greek extra virgin olive oil is incredibly healthy. It is the basis of the Mediterranean diet, a notoriously balanced diet for our body.
Export Development Canada (EDC) helps businesses take on the world, playing a critical role in Canadian economic development. From the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, EDC has been working alongside federal partners, including BDC and other Canadian financial institutions, to provide support to both exporting and non-exporting companies. Many of the companies EDC helped had to pivot hard and transform their businesses in response to COVID-19. Now, these businesses are using that experience to grow. A new campaign from EDC and McCann Montreal showcases their success.
“If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that despite challenges, Canadians businesses are resilient.” said Daniel Boisvert, Vice President, Marketing and Digital Channels at Export Development Canada. “This campaign shows us how the shift in the way we do business has not only been why these businesses have survived, but how they’ve been able to grow moving forward.”
In July 2020, Export Development Canada and McCann Montreal launched ‘Business as Unusual,’ a campaign born in the face of the pandemic, to celebrate and support the Canadian businesses forced to pivot to keep themselves afloat. Now, a year later, what became a pivot out of necessity has evolved in to how we move business forward. In light of this, EDC set out to inspire Canadian businesses to leave survival mode behind and adjust to our next normal through new market discovery with the launch of ‘The Unusual Way Forward’.
The campaign features three stories from EDC customers — Poseidon Ocean Systems, ThinkOn Inc., and Kinova Robotics — showcasing the success they had by embracing new opportunities this last year. Knowing that many Canadian CEOs are confident in company growth in the coming years, ‘The Unusual Way Forward’ aims to motivate and inspire companies to get back to growth and build back better.
“We’re proud to partner once again with Export Development Canada to spotlight how Canadians, and Canadian businesses, have built back better.” said Michelle Aboud, SVP Managing Director, McCann Montreal. “We hope these stories help to inspire and reenergize the Canadian entrepreneurial spirit.”
The relationship between parents and children faced a huge challenge in 2020: connect again with each other. Oreo helped them by creating a voice-driven technology game that adapted an old classic to teens’ language.
Everyone’s talking about e-mobility and the future of driving. But Jürgen Klopp knows: It’s fun talking about it, it’s even more fun driving it.
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