Table of contents for May 10, 2021 in Adweek

Jonathan Hyla, more commonly known simply by his last name, wants to empower creative professionals who think a bit differently than many of their colleagues—especially those who have ADHD. After working in radio, film and television for more than a decade, including doing high-profile celebrity interviews at E! Entertainment, Hyla shifted to his most recent work directing commercials, documentaries and music videos for the likes of Samsung, Clif Bar and Zillow. He still does the occasional high-profile interview, though, collaborating with Cannes Lions the past two years and sharing the screen with top creatives from around the world. In 2020, he began working on a book and documentary called All Day Dreaming, both of which address living and working with ADHD. However, they were put on hold due to the pandemic.…

At first, Walter Geer, like many, didn’t understand Clubhouse. It was early July 2020, and Geer, now the executive creative director at agency VMLY&R, spent a few days listening to live audio conversations on the app before shelving it for a few weeks. While Clubhouse is now known for its LinkedIn-esque user base, the breakthrough session for Geer wasn’t really about business or marketing. “The first conversation I spoke in on was actually about dog food,” he said. The conversation was interesting, but the intimacy is what did it for him. Geer estimates there might have been 1,500 people on the app at the time, and average rooms involved five people. “Conversations were super candid, and you could really establish incredible relationships. It felt very, very exclusive.” In the months…

Snapchat has 125 million people using Spotlight, its TikTok-like feature that pays out $1 million to top creators. And at NewFronts on Wednesday, it announced a new creator marketplace where brands can connect with creators on the platform. It’s still very new territory for Snap, a company that prizes private, one-to-one communications. The key to success is keeping that ethos while building a sustainable marketplace so brands can better reach users and creators can get paid.…

How did you get to where you are today? Any noteworthy “aha” moments along the way? I come from the tiniest village in the north of France. I studied literature and philosophy but joined a business school because I considered advertising an underestimated form of art and, ultimately, became a marketing intern for the agency that designed France’s Happy Meal toys. What’s the most innovative thing you’re currently working on? An innovation in mindset. We’re working to understand the range of discussions and topics brands should be engaging in. Consumers ask where their favorite brands stand on important social issues, and we’re seeing brands openly communicate about their core values. Covid-19 and recent events around racial equity have made this the new norm. And that’s good! ‘Using the power of…

Few who were in Milan for Fashion Week in 2015 will forget the buzz surrounding the Gucci ready-to-wear fall collection. The famous house’s creative director Frida Giannini had been axed a few weeks before, so all eyes were on 42-year-old Alessandro Michele to see what he’d created. He’d been given all of a week to do it. That Monday, the eyebrow-raising clothes on display represented “a different Gucci,” an impressed Robert Rabensteiner, editor of L’Uomo Vogue, later said. Gucci’s regular models had been nixed in favor of himbos with tattoos. Sporting berets and dorky glasses, they slinked down the runway in lace shirts and billowy cravats, silk sweaters and fur-lined loafers. It was an outré hodgepodge of thrift shop chic. Yet a single familiar item tied the ensembles together: the…

Even in the annals of visionary chief executives, few can match the record of the late Lee Iacocca, the ex-Ford heavyweight who saved Chrysler from extinction. In 1980, after two decades of churning out dubious gunboats, the moribund company had nothing to compete with quality compacts from Japan. Iacocca’s solution was the K-car, a boxy line of family cars that offered solid performance at a low price. But what really saved Chrysler wasn’t just the K-cars—it was Iacocca selling the K-cars. In an unprecedented move, a Big Three president became his company’s own on-camera pitchman, a smiling grandfather in big glasses whose voice exuded trustworthiness. “If you can find a better car, buy it,” Iacocca told Americans. And they did.…

Apollo Global Management is set to buy Verizon Media for $5 billion, almost half of what telecommunications giant Verizon originally paid for the media and ad-tech assets. But what’s next for the business once it’s under the thumb of private equity? Signs point to a focus on growing out the already sizable Yahoo Sports and Finance verticals, but Verizon Media’s demand-side platform could very well find another home.…

81% of survey respondents included littering and pollution in their list of concerns. 55% said they’d be willing to consider a reusable or returnable container program to address packaging waste at QSRs, and millennials and Gen Z were most willing (77%). 50% of respondents also said they visit a QSR at least once a week, but parents (65%) and Gen Z (67%) turned out to be the most regular customers. ADWEEK-HARRIS POLL…

When research group OpenAI first introduced what is arguably the most powerful text generator in the world last year, it immediately wowed the AI community with its ability to produce realistic copy. Trained on nearly 1 trillion words pulled from across the internet, the generator, known as GPT-3, is able to mimic the style of a piece of writing based on something as short as a single passage. But granting that much creative license to a machine also breeds a certain level of unpredictability in output. That element of randomness is partially why GPT-3—or its less powerful predecessor, GPT-2—is taking time to gain widespread commercial traction as a tool to power chatbots or auto-generate ads. After nearly a year of experimentation, however, how such a technology might be tamed for marketing…

STEP UP AND LEARN MORE If there was a big pitch going on, I would ask around and say, “What can I do to help?” Even if I was the person who went to get coffee or the person who would take notes, these were menial jobs, but I got seen by senior management as an up-and-comer who wanted to learn more. Otherwise, you don’t get that exposure and you can easily get lost, especially in a big agency. Take on more than you do, and don’t ask. Offer to take on something that gives you exposure in a new and different way. NEVER STOP INVESTING IN YOURSELF I did take a different route than others did and went back to school at one point in my career. Always put…