As many as 60,000 people are expected to flood into Palm Springs over the next two weekends for an upscale dance party called Splash House, where the exclusive cannabis sponsor will be as prominent as the poolside DJ sets and misting fans. The event, taking place across several tony resorts and a cavernous museum, will…
Like all entertainment in 2020, OZY Media’s annual OZY Fest had to pivot to a virtual model as Covid put a major stopper on all in-person productions. This year, the outdoor event–touted as “TED meets Coachella” by festival-goers–returns with a major title partner and a brand new, second location. On October 16 and 17, OZY…
As the pandemic has pushed live entertainment into the virtual realm over the course of the past year, innovation in the space was supercharged to fill the gaps left by the cancellation of in-person events. From gaming and sports to conferences and YouTube streaming, influencers and entertainers found new ways to create immersive and interactive…
Brand management firm Authentic Brands Group is introducing a new ticketing platform called SI Tix, which taps into the media brand Sports Illustrated just as consumers are once again allowed to attend concerts and sporting events across the U.S. “We always believed this was a business that we could be successful in, and we always…
Even cultural moments can come down to a science. At least that’s what audience intelligence platform Pulsar and “global generosity movement” GivingTuesday have discovered in researching how audiences and payment platforms impact donations. The two organizations presented those insights to Adweek editor in chief Stephanie Paterik during The Giving Revolution: How Network Effects Are Rewiring…
After a 15-month hiatus, Pop-Up Magazine has returned to the analog world. The self-styled live magazine launched its Sidewalk Issue, its first in-person event since February 2020, in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Brooklyn last week. Using funding from Google, the publisher collaborated with more than a dozen artists to create a series of art…
For all the talk of lower overheads and limitless audience size, the truth is very few companies have been able to make the same amount of money from virtual events. But as more publishers plan in-person events for the fall, recouping that revenue while holding onto the benefits of virtual events is now in sight….
To tackle online hate, British telecom giant BT is recruiting a diverse team of football players to push out its Hope United campaign ahead of the UEFA European Championship. The multi-million-pound campaign is created by Saatchi & Saatchi. It will bring together 20 players from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, including Marcus Rashford, Gareth…
After over a year of Covid-19 restrictions and closures, cinemas and theatres around London are finally reopening– and they will get a boost from two campaigns rolling out this week. Omnicom agencies TBWALondon and MG OMD are leading the Remember Cinema initiative, which will run from May 17 to the end of June across publishing,…
As the world gradually re-opens from various stages of quarantine, CMOs are facing a much different set of considerations when it comes to attracting talent than they were more than a year ago. At Adweek’s CMO Summit this week, marketing leaders discussed how they are approaching recruiting and retention in a world where companies and…
Whether as a brand protector or growth driver, CMOs were under the spotlight during the pandemic, charged with reaching consumers quarantined in their homes during large swaths of 2020. In conversation with Adweek’s chief content officer Lisa Granatstein at Adweek’s CMO Summit, digitally native luggage brand Away’s CMO Selena Kalvaria and fitness company Exos’ CMO…
During the pandemic, ideas of community have shifted largely online. This has been a boon to internet-based companies, but a serious challenge for ones that relied on in-person gathering in the “before times.” Discord has been one winner of the pandemic economy, surging in user base and valuation. The company has shot up from 100…
The selfie is the new autograph. That’s how Cameo, the platform that connects fans to pop culture icons via personalized video messages, live calls and direct messages, started nearly five years ago. Back then it was mostly athletes connecting with superfans. But it really took off when its CEO Steven Galanis and co-founder Devon Townsend…
After over a year of the pandemic, customers and brands have changed how they use social media. During Adweek’s Social Media Week on Thursday, Vice Media Group’s global CMO Nadja Bellan-White said that 2021 is a year of reimagining what’s possible. “There’s never been a better time to evolve our businesses, and there’s never been…
At one point in her Social Media Week session on in-house social intelligence, GSK’s insights and analytics lead Tina Tonielli displayed a slide with the company’s most-famous household brands–Advil, Flonase, Benefiber, Centrum and Nicorette–and asked viewers to pinpoint the ones that had the most impact on their daily lives. For a portfolio of brands that…
When it comes to customer experience management on social media, Paul Herman, vp of customer engagement and market intelligence at Sprinklr, says brands have a lot of data and more ways than ever to connect with consumers, but they’re not using it efficiently. “We’ve created a bit of chaos,” Herman told the virtual audience at…
“Our approach is always: We don’t know anything,” said CEO Mike Cessario about bottled water company Liquid Death’s TikTok strategy. “We don’t know what’s going to work. The thing we think is going to work doesn’t.” Cessario made those comments during a session at Adweek’s Social Media Week 2021 Wednesday, alongside TikTok global head of…
When viewership patterns shifted during the pandemic, the MTV Entertainment Group pivoted, leaning further into the insights they gained from social listening platforms to better understand where their viewers were congregating, forming fandoms and discussing new material. Top line As part of this shift, MTV redoubled its efforts on TikTok and YouTube, two platforms where…
After the Covid-19 pandemic cratered marketing budgets more significantly than any event in the modern era, there’s an understandable desire to figure out what’s to come. Attempting to predict events beyond three months in advance might seem like outright folly, but ad spend forecasts and reports are emerging in rapid succession–and seem to agree on…
Amnesty International will issue a challenge to the advertising industry at The Drum’s Plan it Day and Do it Day events, calling on advertisers to change perceptions surrounding refugees.
“Everyone knows the challenge in the broad sense,” Amnesty International communications director Osama Saeed Bhutta told the publication. “We have 20 million refugees worldwide and in the last year there have been some attempts by the United Nations (UN) and President Obama to get people to help sort it out because they realize our generation is going to be judged by future decades on how we dealt with this.”
The goal of the challenge will be to shift public opinion at a time when anti-refugee sentiment seems to be growing in certain circles. Such sentiment is often attributed as a contributing factor in the U.K.’s Brexit decision this summer, for example, while xenophobic anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment also seem to at the heart of Donald Trump‘s campaign. Just yesterday, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., generated controversy with a tweet comparing the “Syrian refugee problem” with a bowl of Skittles with three that “would kill you.”
Media surrounding the refugee crisis hasn’t been limited to documenting such xenophobic fearmongering, however. Bhutta points to the inclusion of Team Refugee at the Rio 2016 Olympics, which included ten refugees from around the world brought together by the International Olympic Committee and UNHCR as an initiative that could help “shift the debate towards a more positive and humanitarian direction.”
“It showed the rest of the world that refugees are people with hopes and aspirations and determination as well. That’s no better represented than by [Syrian swimmer] Yusra Mardini, who saved so many lives by swimming and pushing a boat over to Greece and then ended up at the Olympics,” he added. “That’s a movie story right there.”
“For us, this challenge is about changing public opinion – something marketers do every day,” Bhutta said. “We could have framed it in many different ways – it could have been about aid or targeting governments – but we’ve focused on public opinion because these industries (advertising, marketing, digital) are going to be essential in changing the way this is dealt with and coming up with creative solutions.”
Amnesty International’s Do It Day challenge will run simultaneously in the U.S. and the U.K. but Bhutta notes that the problem requires a global outlook. “We’re a global movement and we have real global muscle so what we’re looking for is ideas that can be implemented everywhere,” he said.
“There’s an immediate two-year horizon we’re working towards and have an ambitious target of having two million refugees resettled by then, but that by no means solves things. We’re open minded and looking for possibilities. Short term ideas are great, but what we really want are ideas with longevity that can bring debate to the fore in different ways.”
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