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…
When Dan Wieden hired me almost 16 years ago, I was excited and terrified. As a junior copywriter working at a small unknown agency in Salt Lake City, I used to carry around a little piece of paper in my pocket that said, “I am a copywriter at Wieden+Kennedy.” I was terrified that I wouldn’t…
In my entire career, I can’t recall one instance of a client saying, “We’d like you to create average work. That’s all this brand needs.” Nobody wants average work. But creating advertising that transforms brands is not a process for the faint of heart. It takes soul-searching, hard questions, candor, collaboration and daring. No wonder…
It’s been a rough month for the Equinox brand, and it continues to be challenging. Just a few weeks ago, the brand’s owner Steve Ross held a widely-covered fundraiser for President Trump, which did not align with Equinox’s long-standing marketing campaigns supporting the LGBTQ community. The protest by Equinox members on social media and the…
I’m excited about the Out of Home Advertising Association of America’s (OAAA) decision to appoint the IAB’s Anna Bager as its president and CEO. The appointment of a tenured digital executive is a promising sign of the exciting road ahead for the OOH medium as technology and data both fuel channel growth and present entirely…
The landscape is shifting quickly with regards to consumer data privacy. GDPR led to fines being levied against British Airways and Marriott for data breaches. Google has also been hit with penalties under the new regulations. With a maximum penalty of 4% of a company’s global revenue, this could result in multi-billion-dollar penalties for large…
I remember the day clearly. Lee Clow asked me into his office, and we sat down on his two big leather chairs facing each other. “We’re going to make you the ecd of the office,” he said. “I’m tired of dealing with everybody’s crap.” Lee was the spiritual leader and creative force of the agency….
More than a year after GDPR went into effect, digital privacy and security remain high on the list of governmental concerns around the globe. Although the U.S. tends to have a more business-friendly approach than the EU, worries about the market influence, power and reach of Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft are growing. Anyone…
“Can she be included in the fee?” is something I overheard at the Carlton at this year’s Cannes Lions. Words like “inclusivity” and “diversity” are included in every single program of every single ad festival around the globe. At last, it feels like gender is finally part of the agenda. But is this a reality…
IGTV just celebrated its first birthday. When Instagram’s video hub launched in 2018, brands were slower to adopt its long-form vertical format. New updates (in-feed teasers, horizontal support) are prompting marketers to revisit IGTV, and those that already are have reported record high views. As experimentation grows, a key question still remains: What type of…
The media landscape is evolving at breakneck speed, and the changes and challenges are real. We’ve all seen the stats. Primetime TV viewing among 18- to 49-year-olds is down, cord-cutting and cord-nevers aren’t just clever buzzwords, and long-established media companies are looking for the next pivot to sustain profitability. If I had a penny for…
Young. Attractive. Thin. Able-bodied. Straight. White. Cisgender. For decades, almost everyone who appeared in ads conformed to these traits. Marketers believed that ads showcasing “beautiful” people–by traditional standards, anyway–would compel consumers to buy their products. But consumers today don’t want to buy from picture-perfect, homogeneous models. They want ads that reflect the real world, featuring…
It didn’t take long for trouble to begin. Once the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force on May 25, 2018, European NGOs immediately started going after tech companies and social networks. To ensure maximum impact, organizations like None of Your Business filed coordinated complaints with different privacy regulators all over Europe. This…
The advertising industry’s SAG-AFTRA Commercials Contract was renegotiated and is effective retroactively to April 1, 2019, continuing through March 31, 2022. Of prime importance going into those negotiations was whether the JPC, which negotiates on behalf of the advertising industry, would respond to the continuing concerns voiced by signatory agencies and advertisers that they cannot…
Over 2 billion people use Facebook Messenger, Google Assistant and Amazon Echo, enabling brands to communicate directly with them and deliver highly relevant, personalized content. But while chatbots and virtual assistants offer many benefits, they also create business, legal and ethical challenges. Cambridge Analytica and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have added such challenges…
Editor’s note: Industry consultant Shelly Palmer is taking his popular newsletter and turning it into an Adweek article once per week in an ongoing column titled “Think About This.” At a recent dinner party, an accomplished executive told a story about how he and his wife were certain that their devices were listening to their…
Back when GDPR dropped in 2018, some companies simply pulled their advertising business from the EU, others opted to maintain compliance only in GDPR-affected territories and some chose to make their entire global business GDPR-compliant rather than deal with the legal, operational and engineering expense and hassle of maintaining distinct policies for different regions. Global…
Marketing gurus and internet celebrities have prophesized the year of video since 2006, and reality has finally caught up. If you don’t believe me, just look around. Vertical video–shot expressly to translate well to a mobile screen–now has its own film festival. Eighty-two percent of Twitter users watch video content on the platform. More than…
Cannabis poses perhaps the most interesting branding challenge of our time. It’s a product that’s been around forever, used by humans for thousands of years, yet millions of dollars are being invested as though someone just discovered the next big thing. In some respects this is true; a Canadian survey found that the number of…
My head is cluttered with hordes of information. Big Data is in full effect. Every time I attend a meeting, conference or business briefing, everyone seems so hellbent on spewing forth all the data they have ever learned in their entire lives relative to the topic at hand. Each perspective, backed by reams of decks,…
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