Sommaire pour October 16, 2017 de Adweek

Amazon Studios became the second entertainment company in the past two weeks to suspend its chief following public accusations of sexual harassment. Last Thursday night, Amazon Studios announced that it had suspended Roy Price just hours after the Hollywood Reporter ran a story in which a producer on Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle alleged that Price sexually harassed her in 2015. Meanwhile, as allegations continued to mount about media mogul Harvey Weinstein—who had been working with Price on two upcoming Amazon series—The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the Weinstein Co. movie and TV studio will be either sold or shut down. Bob Weinstein later refuted the story, saying in a statement, “Business is continuing as usual as the company moves ahead.”…

‘In a few years, you’ll be able to ask most appliances questions and get answers to relevant topics. You could ask your dishwasher, “What dish powder should I use?”’ – JONATHAN PATRIZIO, TECHNICAL ADVISOR, MOBIQUITY ‘In the past, “brand voice” has been metaphorical. Now it has the potential to become real. What does Nike sound like? Tide? Ford? The decision to develop a unique brand voice is a big one .’ – SUSAN ETLINGER, INDUSTRY ANALYST, ALTIMETER GROUP ‘ Voice is going to raise expectations for every brand interaction with consumers. Every other experience, from apps to websites, will need to be just as friction free.’ – ALEX LIRTSMAN, CHIEF STRATEGIST, READY SET ROCKET ‘Voice-enabled devices and assistants will become a key place people go when they have general-interest questions…

When reading about Anna Wintour, one inevitably comes across phrases like “fashion icon” and “legendary editor.” While both are unequivocally true, to celebrate Wintour solely for her role as media’s most famous tastemaker is to sell short her many other accomplishments. The longtime Vogue editor in chief and Condé Nast artistic director has an influence over a global industry that most CEOs could only dream of, a talent for raising awareness (and funds) that’s valued by everyone from museum curators to presidential candidates, and a knack for fostering talent that has launched the careers of power players in the magazine business and beyond. Wintour is also, in the words of Condé Nast CEO Bob Sauerberg, “a true celebrity.” With her trademark bob and Chanel sunglasses, she has become a brand…

‘Subaru is an inclusive brand … so we thought Tosh’s humor for his audience was acceptable.’ When comedian and TV host Daniel Tosh agreed to show his genuine devotion for Subaru with a video, viewers expected it would be funny—and it was. What viewers didn’t expect was the kiss that Tosh planted on the lips of the guy in the passenger’s seat. Even in the era of LGBT advancement, this was edgy stuff for an automotive brand. It was also a dose of the fresh thinking that Subaru’s vp, marketing Alan Bethke has brought to the nameplate. “We weren’t nervous,” says Bethke. “Subaru is an inclusive brand, with equal rights for all, so we thought Tosh’s humor for his audience was acceptable.” In four-and-a-half years at the wheel of the…

‘It was never about increasing prices. It’s really been about making the brand more relevant.’ It’s hard to believe baseball gloves and Coach handbags have anything in common. It’s even harder to believe that commonality could help manifest one of the most impressive brand turnarounds in the last decade. Founded in a Manhattan loft in 1941, Coach started as a family-run leather accessories house whose early handbags were made with glove-tanned cowhide. The specificity is important. The same leather was used in baseball gloves—at least, in terms of “suppleness, durability and quality,” says Victor Luis, CEO of Coach Inc. (to become Tapestry Inc., effective Oct. 31). Here’s why that history matters: it was that rugged but beautiful leather that made Coach the first “it” bag in New York, and it’s…

‘If you want to stay in world where you’re relatable … you have to invest in stuff that is pure generosity to people.’ If you’re among the suffering 60 million Americans who don’t sleep well, maybe you saw the Casper TV spot that aired at 2 a.m. this past March. If you did, you certainly wouldn’t have forgotten: the ad featured a surreal pair of videos (one showing a time-lapse of sprouts growing, another of salmon leaping upstream) below the come-on “Can’t Sleep?” and an invitation to call a toll-free number. That number led to a phone tree with peculiar options including “press 2 to listen to wind chimes” and “press 7 to learn the history of the cocktail wiener.” Then there was this: “press 9 to merge into a…

VARIETY SHOW In addition to the original mint, Mentos flavors available in the U.S. include mixed fruit, spearmint, strawberry, cinnamon, green apple and rainbow. ON A ROLL Mentos have been sold in their famous foil- and paper-wrapped packaging since 1960. Each one holds exactly 14 chewy dragées. BLOWUP The world record for most Mentos and soda simultaneous eruptions was set in 2014 at the Festival Internacional del Globo in Mexico. Attendees wore ponchos to protect them from the 4,334 streams of soda. Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz spent six months practicing for the wacky piece of performance art they dubbed “Experiment #137,” planning their choreography and testing various explosive combinations of Diet Coke and Mentos candy. Inspired by the fountains at the Bellagio hotel, the science buffs hoped to create…

If your beloved anthropomorphic plush panda bear ever goes missing, don’t sweat it. Tile’s got you covered. In “Lost Panda,” a moody two-minute tearjerker by Deutsch and Smuggler director Mark Molloy, the titular toy, named Ernie, treks far and wide in search of his owner, a little girl who’s bereft without her fuzzy friend. Can Tile, the Bluetooth-enabled tracking system, help reunite the pair? (Spoiler alert: it can.) As it turns out, the spot actually took its cues from a real-life tale of “a young girl who lost her stuffed animal in a busy city, only to be reunited later with the help of the Tile community,” said Tile CMO Simon Fleming-Wood.…

‘I try to learn from the best brands in the world—fortunately I’ve worked on a few of them.’ If you’re under the age of 30, chances are that the Instagram brand is synonymous with social media. The company’s name is even thrown around as a verb to describe the act of taking mobile photos and videos—millions per day, collectively—and posting them. Gen Z-ers might even consider Instagram old news compared to apps like Musical.ly and Snapchat. Instagram is only 7 years old, but that’s an eternity in the tech world—and also a challenge for the Facebook-owned app. After all, word-of-mouth marketing can only go so far. To truly stand the test of time, companies eventually have to invest in traditional marketing. It calls for a deft mix of industry experience…

‘Every time we’re putting … a piece of content into the world, it’s an opportunity to remind everyone that we invent.’ If you’re old enough to remember General Electric’s classic “We Bring Good Things to Life” TV spots, you can probably conjure images of the multiple products that wore the GE badge: aircraft engines, refrigerators, even Christmas lights. But that was your father’s GE, and the task of showing the world the cutting-edge, digital leader that the company has become is the job of Linda Boff, who in just two years as CMO has revitalized the industrial company’s profile into something that feels more like a nimble, freethinking startup than one of America’s oldest corporations. “Invention is our whole game,” says Boff. “Every time we’re putting a campaign or a…

‘We know who the competition is—we watch them—but we don’t benchmark them.’ Three years ago, when Alegra O’Hare took the reins of Adidas Originals, the seminal German brand’s line of casual sportswear, she did what most senior-level marketers would: she decided to change everything. At least, that was her plan. Early on, she was in a focus group and, on a whim, asked the moderator to ask a participant, “What pisses you off about brands?” The man responded, “I hate it when they get stuck in their own paradigm.” “I listened to him,” O’Hare remembers, “and I was thinking, ‘I’m frickin’ stuck in my own paradigm.’” It was then that the vp of global brand communications realized that changing everything just to leave your mark—instead of truly considering what was…

The goal is putting ‘the right ingredients together for members to have an amazing time.’ Hundreds of fans rocked out to Imagine Dragons on a Friday night in September at the new Marriott Marquis in Bangkok, with a livestream capturing the mix of power pop from the stage and band worship from the crowd. At a much more intimate, less decibel-heavy event in New York last month, a group of foodies cooked alongside French chef Daniel Boulud at his Michelin-starred eponymous eatery on the Upper East Side. Those experiences, meant to make the kind of impression a consumer never forgets, come from Marriott International and the marketing machine led by global CMO Karin Timpone, where the goal is putting “the right ingredients together for members to have an amazing time,”…

As vp of emerging experiences at digital shop Rain, Greg Hedges’ job is to stay abreast of up-and-coming technologies like AR, VR and voice and vet them for brands like Campbell’s, Starbucks and Walmart. As Rain’s eighth hire in 2011—the agency now has 70 employees in New York, Utah and Nicaragua—Hedges has seen lots of tech come through the agency’s doors. After determining what’s viable for marketers to invest in, he helps build experiences that both brands and consumers love. “We certainly want to explore and play, but at the same time we should be doing that in a way where we’re always thinking about how it can be applied in a practical sense,” Hedges explained. Most recently, the explosion in voice technology has led to a big boom in…

‘This is not a “if you build it they will come” world.’ Greg Hedges, vp of emerging experiences, Rain It’s one thing to build a useful voice skill or app, but quite another for consumers to actually find it. That’s because people need to know a particular skill or app exists before they can use it, and today’s voice discovery tools are about as basic as a Yahoo search circa 1995. Amazon publishes a directory of its 25,000 voice skills, as well as a bare-bones Skill Finder app, but consumers using those databases still need to know what they’re looking for. Brands looking to rise above the noise will need to figure out how to market and promote their voice skills if they hope to attract more than a handful…

The data-obsessed advertising industry loves to study itself, but this year’s crop of papers provided conflicting narratives. A YouGov survey released in March surprised many by revealing that 61 percent of Americans actually like the advertising they see. But don’t break out the champagne yet, because six months later, a Morning Consult survey found that 75 percent of Americans grumble that those same ads are intrusive. Where does that leave the average marketing executive? Maybe to follow a rule that stays true no matter what the surveys say: The work had better be honest, interesting and engaging, or nobody will pay attention. | So what does that kind of work look like? You’ll find 10 superlative examples in this section. Each year (and for the last 28 years), Adweek’s Brand…

‘You want to tell your story and drive business results, but you need to elevate the brand to an emotional place.’ It’s called housework for a reason: those never-ending chores—the Sisyphean tasks of cooking, cleaning, sorting and washing—probably aren’t most people’s idea of a good time. But what if the notion of domestic drudgery could be flipped on its head? What if a brand message could focus not on the heavy lifting involved in running a household but on the gratifying fruits of that labor? Bill Beck, general manager of Whirlpool’s kitchen division, wanted to do just that, going against the grain of conventional appliance marketing that had for decades centered solely on the gadgets’ price points and newest features. “There was richer emotional territory to mine,” explains Beck, a…

‘We absolutely showed some conviction that in the future, data [will] be your greatest competitive advantage.’ Though many of today’s consumers are too young to remember it, IBM was the company that started the home computing revolution. IBM gave us the term “PC.” And it was IBM that had a laptop on the market as early as 1986. But with its sale of its personal computing division to Lenovo in 2005, Big Blue has spent the last decade as a business services giant. Well, mostly. The coming of IBM’s artificial intelligence division has given the company not just an opportunity for growth and trend setting—it has again put Big Blue in the consumer spotlight, returning it to the intersection of technology and culture, and showing how the dawn of AI…

‘We integrate things that are fun, but we also comment on serious issues … in a way that feels approachable.’ Back in August, The Spotted Cheetah roared into town and briefly reigned as one of New York’s hottest bistros. The place was booked solid just six hours after it began taking reservations, shunting a thousand disappointed diners onto the waiting list. Celebrity chef Anne Burrell created the menu, which boasted 11 items priced from $8 to $22, and included Chicken Milanese, fried green tomatoes and apple crepe desserts. Oh, did we mention that everything was made with Cheetos? The three-day pop-up restaurant—which drew glitterati like Mariah Carey and wound up generating 4 billion media impressions globally—was proof that the old days of snack-food marketing were truly over. It was also…