As tropical storm Dorian bore down on Puerto Rico last month, its whirling winds threatening to reach hurricane force, a team of Walmart employees watched closely from an array of screens at the retailer’s Arkansas headquarters 2,000 miles away. Had the severity grown to crisis levels, Lucas McDonald, a former TV weatherman who leads the…
When R/GA first rolled out its dedicated artificial intelligence practice, Brand AI, last July, the global agency touted the internal unit’s potential to produce branded chatbots, voice apps and other projects that put new AI-related technologies front and center. A little over a year later, the division’s role has changed considerably, according to R/GA chief…
Tara Razavi, the founder of the full-service creative production company Happy Place Inc. in Encino, Calif., didn’t always know she wanted to break into the music and entertainment industry. Instead, she was planning on becoming a lawyer before an ad about a record label program at UCLA caught her eye and rerouted her career. “I…
Most people would be thrilled to live in a city as hip and sophisticated as San Francisco. But Natalie Kueneman, web developer by trade, remembers how tough things were for her there. The problem wasn’t that there was no arts or tech scene; it was that Kueneman couldn’t find Tab cola for sale anywhere in…
At Nuggs, a direct-to-consumer brand that creates pea protein-based nuggets, customers are technically eating a prototype. Thanks to the direct line DTC brands have to customer feedback, a company like Nuggs works on new versions of its nuggets, making it an ever-evolving product where the next box of Nuggs is better than the last. Nuggs…
The art of copywriting is as old as advertising itself, made great by industry legends like David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach. But as marketers begin turning toward tools that automate copy, is the craft in danger? Over the past few years, brands have been toying with different ways AI can double as a wordsmith. While…
A trip to the spa is many things–relaxing and rejuvenating, but also expensive and time-consuming. A number of new skincare concepts want to remedy this. Over the past half-decade, disruptors like Glowbar, Heyday and Skin Laundry have all opened their doors, first in New York and later expanding to cities like Los Angeles, Miami and…
In 1960, Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt launched the age of modern marketing with a Harvard Business Review article where he wove a powerful argument, saying that companies should stop defining themselves by what they produced and instead reorient themselves toward customer needs. Using the decline of the U.S. railroad industry as an example,…
Brick-and-mortar shoppers are pretty evenly distributed across generations, but there are some key demographics that stand out, according to new research from consumer intelligence company Resonate. Families with a combined income of $25,000 to $50,000 a year account for 25% of brick-and-mortar shoppers, making them the largest group, followed by those earning $50,000 to $75,000…
After his company, the former Discovery Communications, bought Scripps Networks Interactive in March 2018, David Zaslav immediately began looking for ways to make a big splash and “supersize” the audience for HGTV and the other networks in his expanded portfolio. During an early meeting with his new management team, the Discovery Inc. chairman and CEO…
According to the latest Gartner CMO Spend Survey, companies are spending nearly one-third (29%) of their marketing budgets on mar tech–up from 22% in 2017–with 9% of participating CMOs claiming that “marketing innovation” will be a key part of their practice in 2019. If the numbers suggest a shift toward a more data-led practice, Ewan…
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, magazines are being reborn for the newsstands. As more magazines go dark and become digital-only, publishers are finding ways to keep those outlets alive in their original medium as special interest publications. The big magazine publishing houses have been turning their shuttered print magazines into special interest publications….
Laura Visco started off her career “failing terribly” after she moved from Argentina to London and dealt with all the challenges that came with it: from learning English to starting over without connections. But that didn’t stop her from excelling, becoming deputy ecd at 72andSunny Amsterdam–as well as a voice for younger creatives and those…
For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the phrase (and it can’t be many), “Sorry, Charlie” roughly translates to: Tough luck, bro. Urban Dictionary defines it as: “A lack of sympathy. A form of ‘get over it.'” Today’s kids might not trot out “Sorry, Charlie” as much as the youth of the 1960s did, but…
While some brand mascots feel timeless, many can’t weather the unstoppable force of time and innovation, according to new research commissioned by promotional products company Crestline. Crestline analyzed brand recognition by generation among 82 mascots and found that brand symbols like Vlasic Pickles’ stork, Travelocity’s gnome and Snuggle’s teddy bear are far less recognizable among…
Virtually every brand has a website, but many fall short when it comes to disability inclusion and accessibility. While a handful of agencies and advertisers are leading the charge for online accessibility, there’s still confusion, misunderstanding and sometimes ambivalence that could easily shift with disability insights and best practices for developers, content creators and clients…
The camera loves Eva Longoria, and vice versa, with the Texas-born actor, producer, director and activist filling her social media feeds with a steady stream of snaps that document her life as a Hollywood mom and mogul. But a closer look at those Twitter and Instagram posts, and the pop-culture media coverage that invariably follows…
The upfronts are one of TV’s great mysteries: They’re always the focus of the advertising year, but the negotiation process remains hush-hush, with only a handful of people on both sides engaged in those high-level talks. That changed last year, when a major TV ad sales exec agreed to (anonymously) take Adweek behind the scenes,…
The marketing industry has a big problem–a $1.3 billion problem, to be exact. That’s the amount marketers are expected to waste on fraudulent influencer marketing this year, according to a July 2019 global study from cybersecurity company Cheq and the University of Baltimore. This means that nearly 18% of the overall amount marketers are spending…
To say that Subway’s marketing department has been a hot mess in recent years is an understatement. Since 2015, the same year the chain’s former spokesperson Jared Fogle landed himself in prison for child pornography and sex with minors, Subway has dealt with a revolving door of both creative agencies and marketers. Like many established…
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