Until a few years ago, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, established in 1877, was a one-day event cherished by an older audience of purebred enthusiasts who admired the parade of perfectly bred canines from the comfort of their own homes. Today, it’s expanded into Westminster Week, held annually at New York’s Madison Square Garden,…
Claims of the demise of the creative agency review may be greatly exaggerated. A total of 134 major U.S. reviews were launched in 2018–30 of those from the country’s top advertising spenders, according to COMvergence’s latest 2018 U.S. “creative new business barometer” report. The report found that one third of the creative accounts placed in…
Sir Martin Sorrell closed out the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Phoenix, Ariz., today with a sprawling conversation that touched on his feelings about retirement, the broken agency model, what Brexit could mean for GDPR and a prediction for Amazon’s growth potential. At the heart of the discussion, though, were his plans for his nascent…
Omnicom reported a decline in fourth-quarter revenue compared with 2017 in an earnings report today. The holding company’s worldwide revenue decreased 2.2 percent to $4.09 billion. Its stock value fell from a close of $73.87 to a low of $72.52 before rebounding to $73.34 at the time of this story for a decrease of approximately…
Ahead of Francis Ford Coppola’s 80th birthday this coming April, The Family Coppola wine brand used the 2019 Sundance Film Festival to give fans the opportunity to send well wishes to the filmmaking giant. The brand, which is now in its third year as the exclusive wine sponsor at Sundance, wanted to celebrate Coppola’s independent,…
Sprint is suing AT&T over a recent rebrand of some of its advanced 4G LTE networks as “5G Evolution (5GE),” claiming that it’s false advertising that harms the reputation of the legitimate next generation of wireless technology. AT&T says that the 5GE label, which began appearing in the upper corner of subscribers’ phones this year,…
Gap Inc. has appointed a new marketing head for its namesake Gap brand: Alegra O’Hare, who will join the company as senior vice president and chief marketing officer on Feb. 25. O’Hare joins Gap from Adidas, where she served as the vice president of global brand communications for Adidas Originals and Style. There, she led…
WPP’s GroupM has consolidated the reporting and analysis of its commercial and business development data with global independent research firm COMvergence in an attempt to be more transparent, something that has been a sore spot for media agencies since the Association of National Advertisers first uncovered nontransparent practices in 2016. The appointment ends GroupM’s relationship…
Global marketing and communications firm Finn Partners has acquired Small Army, a 45-person Boston marketing and creative agency, for an undisclosed sum. Seven-year-old, New York-based Finn specializes in the travel, health, technology and financial services sectors. It started as primarily a public relations firm but has expanded its capabilities through acquisitions including U.K. travel firm…
At the end of 2017, we asked: Will 2018 mark the end of Publicis Groupe’s financial struggles? It does seem that the year held many bright spots for the holding company. Still, it’s difficult to buck every negative trend that plagues the industry. Shares of Publicis in the U.S. fell more than 7 percent on…
Bethenny Frankel has come a long way since her first season of The Real Housewives of New York in 2008–specifically, from reality star to full-blown business mogul with a multimillion-dollar food and beverage empire, Skinnygirl, to her name. On Wednesday at Brandweek Challenger Brands in New York, Frankel opened up about how she grew her…
Spotify is set to buy podcasting companies Gimlet Media and Anchor in a move that will reshape the landscape of the nascent industry. The streaming service announced the two deals in a blog post from CEO Daniel Ek today, in which he called podcasting the “next growth phase in audio.” While Spotify wouldn’t disclose the…
Nike Italy’s new ad from W+K London encourages viewers to “Stop at Nothing.” Directed by Georgia Hudson, the spot features Italian Paralympic fencer Beatrice Vio, who also provides the voiceover. “They said it was crazy. … But if you stop at nothing, even a crazy dream is possible,” she says in the opening. The visually…
Growing up in Hawaii, Lydia Park Luis saw many a brand of sandals and open-toed shoes. But she’s still surprised over the one she didn’t see: Jack Rogers, the tony sandals with the signature whip stitch and rondelle accent. Every Palm Beach doyenne, every Princeton girl, has a pair of Jacks in her closet–but Park…
Two months after confirming its plans to merge Wunderman with J. Walter Thompson, WPP has officially released the new identity for Wunderman Thompson, a company produced by the union of history’s first creative agency and the firm that pioneered direct marketing. The full brand identity, revealed to employees and the public today, includes a new…
It all started with so much promise: eight models on a yacht, Kendall Jenner and 400 other social media influencers, but it ended in a debacle producing nearly endless chatter. Since the Netflix and Hulu documentaries about the 2017 Fyre Festival were released in January, a big debate has surfaced about the merit of influencer…
Conventional wisdom says ad tech has fallen out of favor with investors. After all, last year, Gartner research predicted investment would plummet from $7.2 billion to a measly $1.8 billion this year. Throw in the adverse effects of GDPR and potential American legislation, both direct and indirect, and it looks like a tidal wave is…
Home security provider SimpliSafe is turning the garden-variety suburban paranoia familiar to anyone who’s ever browsed a neighborhood internet forum into the stuff of nightmares in a thriller-style Super Bowl teaser released Thursday. The 30-second video features drone-like suburbanites chanting anxious queries and vague warnings of the kind you might see in Nextdoor posts over…
The CW has made a habit of renewing all or most of its primetime lineup at once–and the network stuck with tradition today by picking up 10 of its shows for the 2019-2020 season. Arrow, Black Lightning, Charmed, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Dynasty, The Flash, Legacies, Riverdale, Supergirl and Supernatural have all been renewed, The…
Atlanta may be Coca-Cola territory, but that’s not stopping PepsiCo from making a Super Bowl splash. The food and beverage giant is running three different ads in the Big Game: one for Doritos; one for its new sparkling water brand, Bubly; and one for its namesake soda. All three ads are packed with familiar faces….
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