While cars, bikes, planes, scooters, mopeds and our own two feet will still all take us from point A to point B, the concept of time–how it’s spent and how it’s wasted–has evolved as consumers seek to squeeze out more productivity. Even out of their everyday commute. Mobility is no longer a buzzword, necessitating a…
Here’s the best advice gleaned from our yearlong series on digital transformation. Be data led, not data driven Any organization can cherry pick data to justify its strategies, says Forrester principal analyst Brendan Witcher. Smart organizations look at the data first and then decide what to do. “Any organization can find data to support a…
If you watched the Super Bowl in 2016, you might recall the Amazon commercial depicting a party hosted by Alec Baldwin, who wowed guests by ordering a then-obscure cylinder-shaped object to help him create a festive ambiance. “Alexa, turn on the music,” he commanded. With that, voice emerged as an exciting new user interface, rife…
As 2018 draws to a close, Wieden + Kennedy co-president Colleen DeCourcy can finally exhale. This past year saw the fiercely independent shop both courting controversy and reinvigorating core American brands like KFC and Delta–and somehow never losing its way. “We’re a company that’s at its best when we’re in the eye of the cultural…
For automakers like Ford, where cars can take three years to go from concept to completion, the ability to see what’s coming down the road isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. That’s why, for the last two decades, Ford has had a team poring over data and examining trends in the social, economic, environmental, technological…
As much as companies have transformed in the past several years, it’s clear that even more dramatic disruption lies ahead. According to research from Accenture Interactive, human-machine collaboration will require more than half of the workforce to learn new skills in the next five years, and IoT technology will be in 95 percent of new…
In a year of escalating Twitter battles, the #MeToo movement and increasing anxiety spurred by heated political climates worldwide, a digital time-out seems increasingly appealing. As we dug into research supporting our annual Fjord Trends report (launching Dec. 11), this theme was pervasive. Consumers are reclaiming the headspace they’ve lost to the digital din, resetting…
Giant Spoon, Adweek’s Breakthrough Creative Agency of the Year, has been steadily turning out striking work since its founding five years ago, but 2018 was exceptional for the scale and impact of its campaigns. For client HBO, the full-service shop created a meticulous replica of Sweetwater, the town inside hit series Westworld, on a two-acre…
A woman walks home with her hands full of grocery bags, when suddenly something goes terribly wrong. Somehow “The Worst Song in the World” has found its way onto her playlist and she is powerless to stop it. An earworm that actually earns the nightmarish image conjured by that phrase, the song progresses through a…
This is our last Digital Transformation Playbook. For the past 12 months, in a close and unique partnership with Accenture Interactive, we have covered a wide span of topics and themes confronting–often vexing–and inspiring brand marketers stepping into the future. So, it’s apt that this last edition focus on what’s ahead and the futurists who…
When it was a creative powerhouse and fearsome pitch competitor circa 2007 and 2008, TBWAWorldwide was the envy of the agency world. Then all that progress seemed to unravel amid internal disarray and an exodus of talent. But with the arrival of president and CEO Troy Ruhanen in 2014, TBWA has been quietly rebuilding, assembling…
Arianne Walker has a big title at Alexa Automotive: chief evangelist. And she thinks big when it comes to taking the online giant’s vision to the road. Walker liaisons with stakeholders, listening to their perspectives on the automotive industry’s biggest challenges before explaining the role that voice-led technology can play in its development and how…
If the craft beer revolution has taught brands anything, it’s that beer drinkers love a good pint. An increasing array of brands are tapping into craft beer through collaborations with independent breweries, allowing them to reach new audiences and gain media attention with unexpected collaborations. It’s unclear when the trend started, but Pennsylvania Tuxedo, a…
The first thing to know about Stink Studios is that there’s no narrative surrounding its eyebrow-raising name. The founders thought about making up a fake origin story, but it turns out it’s just a combination of the names of two merging production companies: Blink and Stillking. While it started as a digital shop in London…
In pulling together the reimagined Brandweek symposium this past spring and summer we learned a great deal about programming, and hosting, an ambitious thought leadership summit devoted to brand marketers. As part of that journey, we also learned a lot about the evolving brand marketing ecosystem. One of the most interesting and important insights we…
On cable TV, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas–and not just on Freeform’s 25 Days of Christmas and Hallmark Channel’s Countdown to Christmas, which for the past decade have dominated the season by airing round-the-clock holiday content throughout December (Hallmark has been at it since Oct. 27). This year, several of their cable…
Ask any marketer about data and watch how fast they salivate. However marketers collect data–either directly from consumers or purchased through data miners–the advertising industry just can’t get enough of those bits of bytes. Otherwise, how would they sell their wares? The passage of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, though, is proving to…
A few years ago, influencers may have seemed like they’d just be a flash in the pan, but the marketing approach is becoming an established technique that only continues to increase among advertisers, according to new research from IZEA’s 2018 U.S. State of the Creator Economy Study. The report found that influencer marketing is becoming…
Despite its standing as the world’s biggest retailer–more than 11,000 stores and over 100 million unique web visitors per month–Walmart views itself as a scrappy challenger in the ecommerce space dominated by titans like Alibaba and Amazon. In recent years, the company has undergone an ambitious transformation as it expands in the digital realm, tapping…
Welcome to the Adweek 50, our annual celebration of corporate leaders shaking things up, raising the bar and continually redefining the marketplace. They take calculated risks and reap big rewards, leaving little to chance in the process. These executives are all keepers, indispensable players working below the CEO level, and sometimes behind the scenes, to…
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