Mark Penn may be on the cusp of consolidating his advertising empire. Stagwell Group, the holding company founded by Microsoft alum Penn in 2015, has proposed a merger with MDC Partners, where Penn serves as CEO. Stagwell Group executives delivered a letter proposing the merger to the MDC Partners board of directors on Thursday. MDC…
Chris Curtin, Visa’s chief brand and innovation marketing officer, is leaving the company. A representative for Visa confirmed to Adweek that Curtin, who has been with Visa for seven years, will be departing his post in September. The company did not disclose who will replace Curtin or where he will be heading next. “Chris Curtin…
Girl Scouts is launching a new female empowerment for-profit brand intended to uplift women ages 25 to 54. The CircleAround Powered by Girl Scouts website will be created in partnership with Verizon and Shutterstock, among other soon-to-be-announced brands, and will provide content about business, wellness, health, parenting, news, relationships–you name it. The launch of CircleAround…
After brick-and-mortar stores were forced to close beginning in March, retailers such as Walmart and Michaels have spent the last few months driving traffic to their ecommerce sites. TJX, the company behind TJ Maxx, Marshalls and Homegoods, took the opposite approach. The brand shut down sales on its sites during lockdown, didn’t offer curbside pickup…
Julia Berolzheimer, arguably one of the world’s most successful influencers with 1.2 million Instagram followers, started her brand, Gal Meets Glam, as a personal style blog while she was still in college. Within a few years, it transitioned to a full-blown content business. And in early 2018, it expanded with the launch of Gal Meets…
Hermeti Balarin is itching to get back to the office. As partner and executive creative director of Mother London, he revels in the agency’s communal working space, a breeding ground for the jokes, conversations and coffee rounds that inform so much of its famously eccentric culture. (A few years ago, the agency put a massive…
Google has laid out some of its ad-tech fees as it faces increased scrutiny from regulators looking into the company’s dominance in digital advertising. In two separate blog posts published Tuesday, Google outlined the cut it takes from publishers that sell ads using its products. When transacting through Google’s ad-tech stack, publishers keep an average…
Halo Top is encouraging customers to stop “shoulding” themselves and enjoy a pint. The light ice cream brand teamed up with Heat, Deloitte Digital’s agency, for the first time to produce a new campaign titled “Dance,” which takes Halo Top into a new era of body positivity branding. The 30-second spot features a woman dancing…
This month, Samuel Adams launched its “Love Conquers All” campaign with nonprofit GLAAD to share live poetry written and performed by LGBTQ+ performers at New York’s Stonewall Inn, site of the Stonewall riots of 1969. The brand is also selling limited-edition rainbow cans for Pride Month, pledging a $100,000 donation to GLAAD and matching donations…
It’s a pity that comparatively few people were in Times Square on the morning of June 2. Because those who happened to be on hand got to watch a bit of history being made–the technological kind, and the branding kind, too. Flickering across the seven-story LED screen at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street…
A South Korean startup is holding a competition to fill one of the world’s first galleries for machine learning-generated art in a bid to foster a nascent artificial intelligence creativity scene in the country. The company, Pulse9, which makes AI-powered graphics tools, is soliciting art pieces that make use of machine learning tech in some…
In the weeks since the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, books about anti-racism have consistently topped bestseller lists. Many of these books have been purchased from the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble. To try and funnel some of these sales to Black-owned bookstores instead, a group of design and tech…
Welcome to First Things First, Adweek’s daily resource for marketers. We’ll be publishing the content to First Things First on Adweek.com each morning (like this post), but if you prefer that it come straight to your inbox, you can sign up for the email here. Facebook Removes Trump Campaign Ads for Including Symbol Used by…
While it’s not the first agency or brand to comment on the state of the world and especially the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, Wieden + Kennedy isn’t shy about its point of view. Recent ads for clients Nike (out of its Portland headquarters) and McDonald’s (out of the New York office) reflect…
Keith Cartwright left 72andSunny L.A. in December to start his own agency. Months later, the spread of the coronavirus and the ensuing global lockdown hindered those plans–but he’s still forging ahead and creating work. While his namesake agency has been in the works since the start of the year, Cartwright officially debuted it earlier this…
The Moldy Whopper strikes again. After winning 18 gold pencils at the One Show yesterday, Burger King’s stomach-churning campaign has been named Best of Show by the awards program, which puts a premium on creativity of ideas and quality of execution. David Miami, Publicis Bucharest and Stockholm-based Ingo collaborated on the campaign, which also won…
Store closures. Lockdowns. Bankruptcies. Pivots. Surprising success. In the past few months, brands around the world have seen it all. Now that lockdowns are being lifted and reopenings are underway, how will businesses emerge after weeks of unparalleled challenges? That’s been the question on the minds of Meghan Keaney Anderson, vice president of marketing at…
The Star-Spangled Banner proclaims America as the “land of the free.” But the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as well as countless other recent deaths and incidents, have shown that Black Americans often aren’t afforded the same freedoms as white people in the U.S. “Love Has No Labels,” the ongoing movement spearheaded…
A new tool from IBM Watson uses public health data and artificial intelligence to track where Covid-19 is on the rise or decline so that marketers can better customize their advertising to the pandemic situation in a particular area. The feature, called Covid-19 Triggers, is one of many initiatives the tech giant’s advertising tech arm…
Nearly 20 business publishers called on the digital media ecosystem to curtail data leakage in online ad auctions, signing on to an open letter published earlier this week by media auditor BPA Worldwide. The letter, co-signed by publishers including Adweek, experiential company Questex and b-to-b marketing firm Bombora, states that the real-time ad bidding protocol…
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