It was the second week of February 1961, and Mel Blanc was in deep trouble. Two weeks earlier, the “man of a thousand voices” who’d given breath to a slew of cartoon characters ranging from Porky Pig to Speedy Gonzalez, had been driving his Aston Martin down Hollywood Boulevard when a college kid in an…
The impact of this year’s class of Young Influentials–leaders in media, marketing and tech who have yet to hit their 40s–can be felt from the way we shop for cool clothes, the shows we binge and the gin we drink to how we think about race. Our cover subjects, teen TikTok superstars and siblings Charli…
Another day, another epic fail from a brand putting on the diversity mantle or shouting about social distancing. Ads keep missing the goalposts on the climate emergency, diversity, ocean plastic–pick a theme. Behind every misstep is bad advice, lack of understanding or someone who didn’t listen. The majority of a company’s value is inevitably tied…
In just over a year, sisters Charli and Dixie D’Amelio have become two of the most talked-about names in social media, thanks to their explosive popularity on TikTok. Beloved by Gen Z, the social media platform boasts 800 million active daily users worldwide, according to DataReportal’s Digital 2020 report. Charli, 16 and a trained dancer,…
While TikTok is establishing itself–it counts 43.7 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S., according to Comscore, and introduced a self-serve ad platform in July–it faces a potential regulatory nightmare. Already booted from its top market in India over concerns of user privacy and data sharing with the Chinese government, TikTok parent company ByteDance has…
On April 7, 2019, drivers at Tennessee’s Bristol Motor Speedway started their engines and ran the Food City 500. The race was as fast and exciting as ever, but fans couldn’t help but notice a problem: a lack of other fans. Not many years ago, it was hard to get a ticket to Bristol. But…
Tamer Hassan was on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan (his fourth overall in the Middle East) in the fall of 2012. He was a pilot in the Air Force running search and rescue missions. He slept in a tent next to the helicopters, ready to fly at a moment’s notice. In his downtime–and…
People tend to drink coffee where they are, which lately hasn’t been on campus, in the office or meeting friends at local cafes. They’ve been home. This shift in location has brought about a change in how consumers get their daily dose of caffeine. Dunkin’s and Starbucks’ physical stores have suffered, but their lines of…
Washington, D.C.-based attorney Khadijah Robinson spent much of 2019 preparing to launch her passion project, an ecommerce marketplace called Nile that puts “Black women and Black-owned businesses” at the forefront. When she launched Nile in March, she never could have predicted that a pandemic would create a surge in the ecommerce sector; she definitely couldn’t…
While brands are spending the least amount of money on targeting esports channels ($1.5 billion compared with $59.4 billion and $15.7 billion dumped into TV and streaming marketing spend, respectively), more consumers are flocking there. And, unsurprisingly, a vast majority of these gaming consumers are Gen Z and millennials. Over a span of 12 months,…
When it comes to assessing who’s delivering the best performances in advertising and marketing technology, who better to ask than the clients who rely on these companies? That was the premise of our Readers’ Choice: Best of Tech Awards, which we launched last year and which you, our readers, enthusiastically embraced. This year, the action…
Some feared Apple would revoke its identifier for advertisers (IDFA) when it announced details of its upcoming iOS 14 rollout last month, which is the primary means for advertisers to target and track the effectiveness of their ads on iOS devices. Such a move would have replicated the rollout of intelligent tracking prevention, which has…
Since lockdown, we’ve been cut off from colleagues and customers alike. While goats have taken over some high streets and dolphins are back in Venice’s canals, brands are dealing with their separation anxiety by focusing on growing online communities. But how far can this take us? Can we actually build a real community online? Well,…
When NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock debuted nationally this month, its most-advertised price point was the tier executives thought would be most appealing to consumers during the pandemic: free. But for users who wanted to lock in a year’s worth of Peacock Premium–which offers additional content beyond the free version–the service offered a 40% discount on…
As civil unrest unfolded across the U.S. in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the outpouring of support came from not only millions of people across the country but also from brands. Agencies of every size lent their voices too, with creative work designed to support the protests and encourage people in the industry to…
Denise Roberson went into 2020 with a plan: She was going to make waves as TBWAChiatDay Los Angeles’ first-ever chief purpose officer. But when the pandemic upended her plans, it was an opportunity to apply everything she’s learned in her career to teach companies the proper way to align their values with what’s going on…
A few years ago, a video game company reached out to Sealed Air Corp. with a strange request: It wanted to license the trademarked name of Bubble Wrap for a stress-relieving app it was working on. A 2012 study by Kelton Research revealed that one minute of Bubble Wrap popping furnished the same stress-relieving effect…
The past month saw an explosion of grassroots organizations formed by Black advertising professionals and allies to develop solutions to reverse systemic racism in the industry. New groups including Allyship & Action, 600 & Rising and Where Are the Black Designers? have gained momentum through support from peers and high-profile talent. Each group wants to…
Have you ever seen a television commercial play for two seconds, and then it suddenly gets cut off for a different ad to run? That’s addressable TV done poorly. Today, there are a handful of consortiums made up of distributors, programmers and ad-tech companies working toward doing addressable TV right. Addressable initiatives are taking off…
In the early 1990s, Gabrielle Union was paying her way through college and studying for the LSATs when an internship at a Los Angeles modeling agency led to the opportunity to make $120 a day to be the “Black girl” in teen magazines. She said yes–after all, it beat her $7-an-hour gig at a local…
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