Though more than half of Americans were not even alive when it debuted, 1985’s Back to the Future remains one of the most popular movies ever made. Part of the appeal is the time-travel plot (Marty McFly and Doc Brown going back to the 1950s in a scientifically modified DeLorean) and part of it is…
Say you need a new stick of deodorant. You walk into your local drugstore and find the product you want. Except you can’t grab it. It’s sitting right there on the shelf among an assortment of brands and varieties, but it’s locked inside a plastic case. You press a button to alert a store employee…
In the realm of irreverent brands, Wendy’s stands apart from its fast-food peers. The brand’s marketing has real bite, taking its tweets viral so often that when it coined National Roast Day in 2018, other brands lined up for the QSR brand to crack jokes at their expense. Meanwhile, fans of Adult Swim’s Rick and…
The industry has long moved past the idea that advertising only exists in a handful of silos, like TV, print and radio. Savvy marketers can use anything as a canvas for an ad, such as the ice of a hockey rink, footprints or eggs. It takes innovative strategists to develop unique media plans that can…
Marketers are obsessed with acquisition. So much so that they synonymously refer to it as performance, indicating that to add more is to perform better. We know acquisition is an expensive business, with a cost that’s multiple times higher than retaining existing customers. So if acquisition is more costly than retention, why do we glorify…
The Definitive Guide to Public Relations Coups–if there were such a book–would surely record a groundbreaking event in 1966. That spring, a publicist from Milton Bradley placed a call to NBC and got a new game called Twister onto The Tonight Show. The episode aired the evening of May 3. With Ed McMahon and fashion…
Americans will be feeling more like Scrooge than Santa this holiday season as ongoing economic problems put a damper on gift giving. In a YouGov survey, 69% of shoppers said they plan to buy fewer items this year, while 9% of Americans don’t plan to do any holiday shopping at all, citing inflation as a…
With nearly 50 million Americans changing jobs this year, the Great Resignation is quickly becoming the Great Migration. People aren’t simply starting new roles; they’re choosing new ways of working. For marketers, changing jobs should be like launching an exciting new campaign. Instead, it feels like leaping from a ledge. Half of all new hires…
In the space of three days in late 2021, the cannabis industry in the U.S. brought in north of $290 million, setting records for Thanksgiving Eve–better known in weed circles as Green Wednesday–Black Friday and the Thursday before Christmas, per researcher Akerna. Last year was not an anomaly. Fourth quarter has traditionally been a boon…
Type in a prompt like “email,” and several entirely original stock images of computers and messaging will be created instantaneously. A few more clicks and inputs will generate a host of text snippets suggested for ad copy. That’s how a new tool from a startup called Omneky lets brands–usually growth-hungry apps and ecommerce sites–pair artificial…
Tony the Tiger and his fellow cereal mascots–from Toucan Sam to Cap’n Crunch–once ruled the breakfast table. Through decades of savvy marketing, the brands represented by these characters cemented themselves in kitchens, pop culture and childhood memories. More recently, however, some of those breakfast mainstays have lost their sheen as health advocates warn of the…
Mick McConnell’s marketing career began with a stack of rejection letters from some of the top architectural firms in New York. The now-North America CEO of agency Superunion had the misfortune of graduating from architecture school into an early 1990s recession and found that few firms were hiring. So he was willing to do the…
As we settle into the New Normal phase of the pandemic, we’re more dependent than ever on TV, media and digital & tech brands to keep us connected to each other and the wildly changing world. Adweek’s annual Hot List, which highlights the standouts in these categories, is packed with the people, platforms and companies…
Though summer is typically for socializing and taking scenic vacations, creator, writer and star Quinta Brunson spent the months in preproduction for the highly anticipated second season of her ABC runaway hit, workplace comedy Abbott Elementary. Things are much different for the in-demand showrunner this time around. Between her ensemble’s collective popularity and an expanded…
When Conan O’Brien, Adweek’s Media Visionary, moved from NBC to TBS in 2010, his team knew it wanted to handle the social media and YouTube distribution of his show clips itself. The digital strategy wasn’t yet a priority for media companies, but “we needed to control how this stuff got out,” said Jeff Ross, O’Brien’s…
Conan O’Brien considers himself a lucky guy. And not only because he was fortunate enough to spend 28 years reinventing late-night, first when he was NBC’s surprise pick to replace David Letterman as Late Night host in 1993, then followed by an innovative 11-year run on TBS’ Conan, which ended in June 2021. O’Brien is…
When Grid launched in January under the editorial vision of Laura McGann, the publisher sought to solve one of the most fundamental questions of modern journalism–how to best tell a story–by approaching it from a different perspective. For McGann, who had wrestled with complex narratives for years while running newsrooms at Vox and Politico, the…
As television audience viewing patterns have been upended during the past few years, Hollywood has adapted some new conventional wisdom when it comes to the state of TV: Linear hits don’t exist anymore, especially on basic cable. Series don’t grow their audiences several seasons in. It’s no longer possible to make shows that appeal to…
The onward march of tech development has led to some mixed results this year. The continued heralding of Web3 has only some nascent use cases, with Meta’s Quest 2 (our Hottest Gadget) serving as the gateway to more mainstream adoption of the metaverse, and Roblox (Hottest Platform) making more concerted moves to make it marketer-friendly….
After another year where streaming dominated the industry conversation, especially as both Netflix and Disney+ finally created their own ad-supported tiers, it’s hardly surprising that those platforms are well represented on this year’s TV Hot List. But here’s more of an unexpected twist: Linear networks proved there’s still plenty of fight in them yet. After…
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