A highland cow speeds down a country road on a motorcycle, its fur billowing in the wind. Two puppets made from oat milk cartons engage in a philosophical debate. A spider falls in love with a smartphone. A bull interrupts an idyllic scene by defecating in a field. Watching these off-the-wall ads, a viewer would…
Nov. 8 is just around the corner, and brands are weighing how they will participate. Despite increasing political polarization, civic engagement efforts continue to deliver a net positive benefit for brands. While election messaging can be crowded, companies that lean into their unique identity and read the moment can create real impact. Here are five…
Publishers of all stripes have been investing in first-party data strategies since Google sounded the death knell for the third-party cookie. But to get advertisers on board and capture those budgets, they need to do more than share intel on their audience. Dow Jones chief revenue officer Josh Stinchcomb joined Adweek’s media editor Lucinda Southern…
Uber is the latest brand make the most of its first-party data by riding the rising wave of retail media. The ride-hailing and delivery app is expanding from its previous out-of-home ad business into a new product called Journey Ads, which is launching with 100 staffers in the U.S. The company plans to ramp up…
Quick stops at convenience stores often mean buying gas, lottery tickets, beer, cigarettes and snacks, which are consistently among the best-selling items. But a major cannabis player wants to add weed to that shopping list via a newly inked deal with Circle K in Florida. Green Thumb Industries, a Chicago-based multistate operator, plans to open…
Terms like “net zero” and “carbon neutral” are becoming more commonplace in advertising as companies seek to promote their climate credentials. So much so that a recent pop song adopted 120 “green” slogans as lyrics to prove the point. Unfortunately–as evidenced by the growing number of greenwashing accusations leveled at businesses–brands can’t always back up…
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Ad Age’s Jade Yan is on the ground at AWNY and has a few thoughts about … keeping it real:
You’d be forgiven for thinking there was some kind of contest around who can mention “authenticity” the most during Advertising Week.
It was certainly thrown around enough during a Wednesday afternoon panel titled “Empowering the Next Generation Through Sport Culture”—although, thankfully, panelists did offer some specifics about what they consider to be “authentic” in sports marketing.
The panel’s consensus was that brands can work with athletes not just through the lens of sports but via other athlete-specific activities such as gaming or personal style. The challenge, said Gatorade Chief Marketing Officer Kalen Thornton, is “how do you stay in front of” trends in those spaces, “rather than just following trends.” He added that “if you don’t have an authentic place to enter that discussion,” it’s probably not the right fit.
The NBA Tunnel Walk is an example of the intersection between sports and fashion, said David Creech, co-founder of marketing and branding company Adopt. Athletes show off what they’re wearing before walking into an arena’s changing room, often turning up in publications such as GQ.
(Flashback: “The NBA Tunnel Walk Reaches Its Fashion Event Horizon,” from, yes, GQ.)
Spotted at AWNY: “Seymour Roas,” chief performance officer, MNTN. Apparently, we are all Seymour Roas—or can be, if we don a badge-shaped Advertising Week ad from ad tech company MNTN.
(ROAS is, of course, return on ad spend—and who wouldn’t want to, uh, seymour of that?)
Asa Hiken, Ad Age’s resident expert on all things Web3, reports on an AWNY session on the intersection of NFTs and marketing:
The CEO of OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, wants marketers to know that NFTs are more than digital art.
Speaking in a session titled “NFTs and the Future of Brand IP” with Doodles CEO Julian Holguin, OpenSea’s Devin Finzer reminded the audience that although digital art has been getting most of the attention in the NFT space, NFTs with utility baked inside are more useful. From video game NFTs that offer real value in the context of gameplay, to event tickets that function more seamlessly than physical ones, these tokens bring more to owners than merely their value in crypto.
“There’s this whole spectrum of NFTs that I think, personally, are very underappreciated by the mainstream press,” Finzer said.
(Of course, we at Ad Age pride ourselves on covering the full range of NFT use cases, from first-party data collection to TV fandom to real-world credentials in the form of soulbound tokens. Finzer obviously just forgot to mention us as an exception.)
Ad Age’s Jade Yan reports on what happens when an alcoholic beverage giant finds purpose:
In a panel titled “How Sustainability Efforts are Taking on Greater Importance for Beverage Alcohol,” Diageo North America Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer Ed Pilkington spoke about how the company tries to keep sustainability and other social initiatives uniform across its brands.
His advice: “Pick your area”—a specific social issue—for each brand. For example, Diageo’s vodka brand Smirnoff has focused on LGBTQIA+ issues, while whiskey brand Crown Royal’s “Water Break” campaign urges consumers to moderate their drinking.
These efforts require everyone to be on the same page, said Pilkington. At Diageo, the marketing team helps foster the understanding that although some efforts—such as building a carbon-neutral facility—might hurt margins at first, there are long-term financial benefits as well.
“You have to hold hands—metaphorically—together with your CFO” and leaders across divisions, Pilkington said.
Ad Age’s Gillian Follett reports on how marketers are overlooking AAPI women:
Nearly three in four Asian American and Pacific Islander women are dissatisfied with media portrayals of the AAPI community. That statistic comes from a survey of 1,600 AAPI women conducted by SeeHer, an initiative from the Association of National Advertisers focusing on improving women’s representation in marketing and media, in partnership with the AAPI leadership network Gold House.
During an AWNY panel discussion titled “The Importance of Accurate Asian and Pacific Islander Female Representation,” SeeHer president Jeannine Shao Collins previewed the upcoming release of a new #WriteHerRight guide from the organization—this one focused on how to authentically and accurately portray AAPI women from a broad spectrum of Asian cultures and ethnicities, rather than treating them as a monolith.
Panelists also included author and TV host Padma Lakshmi; Eva Chen, director of fashion partnerships at Instagram; and model and transgender rights activist Geena Rocero. The panel consensus was that, despite the collective $1.3 trillion of spending power held by the AAPI community in the U.S., marketers tend to fall short in specifically targeting AAPI consumers even when launching “multicultural” marketing initiatives.
Marketers need to be producing more content aimed directly at AAPI consumers, the panelists agreed. “And it should not just be around Lunar New Year,” Chen emphasized.
A few panels to look forward to Thursday—the last day of Advertising Week New York:
• “State of the Industry: The Continued Rise and Impact of Streaming,” sponsored by Paramount.
• “Marketing in the Metaverse,” moderated by Ad Age’s Asa Hiken.
• “Supply Path Optimization: Solving the Programmatic Supply Chain of the Future,” presented by Ad Age.
Using the concept of “positioning,” he guided companies to market their products by creating hard-to-forget messages.
Soaring energy bills, squeezed interest rates, a cost of living crisis and global geopolitical uncertainty are having a significant impact on the money chief marketing officers have at their disposal. According to the U.K’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) quarterly Bellwether ad spend report, marketing budgets grew at their slowest rate since 2021 in…
The “He Gets Us” campaign plans to air 30-second and 60-second spots during the Super Bowl.
Deaths from drug overdoses topped an unprecedented 100,000 annually in the U.S. as of April 2021. With an increase in counterfeit prescription pills laced with fentanyl playing an increasingly large role in these statistics, many experts hope that education might prove to be a vital component in the fight to end the opioid crisis. But…
Smart publishers have to come to grips with a number of different targeting and measurement solutions and standardizing in order to capture more ad budgets. Figuring out who to partner with is no small feat. Stephanie Mazzamaro, vp of data strategy and operations at The Arena Group, Jeremy Gan, svp of revenue operations and data…
From cohorts to probabilistic IDs, the exploding landscape around identity tech solutions shows no signs of slowing down, despite further extensions to Chrome’s deprecation of cookies. Ad buyers who might be digging in their heels are looking to their partners for guidance. Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at Caf? Media, joined Adweek’s general manager of…
The act of grabbing public attention has been a centerpiece of Kanye West’s art for two decades. Will audiences still tune in if his only outlets are on the fringes?
The digital privacy landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years, forcing publishers to exist in a constant state of experimentation. Cond? Nast (CN) has navigated these new contours of digital advertising while simultaneously reinventing itself for the modern era. Pamela Drucker Mann, global chief revenue officer at Cond? Nast, joined Adweek’s senior media reporter Mark…
Shift to digital and in-house buying fuels efficiency as P&G CEO Jon Moeller tells executives to focus on reach.
Walk into a McDonald’s in Poland, and you can enjoy a concert with your meal. The fast food chain has teamed up with outlandish musical artist Ralph Kaminski to front its latest ad campaign in Poland, including appearing for a virtual concert through the brand’s app. The campaign, devised by DDB Warsaw, will reward customers…
CTV is a pretty new channel, but any doubts about its creative, targeting and metrics are easily addressed, providing more-effective ads with less hassle.
As pop fandoms go to battle on social media wielding data about their favorite stars, Metascores averaging critical opinions have become ammunition, much to the site’s chagrin.
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