Table of contents for September 12, 2016 in Adweek

From a water-resistant exterior to stereo speakers, Apple’s latest iPhone unveiling introduced plenty of cool new features for tech consumers to get excited about. But one major change managed to steal the show: As rumored, the iPhone 7 and 7 plus won’t have a traditional headphone jack. Instead, Apple is pushing consumers to switch to wireless headphones—or more precisely, its new $159 AirPods. The move wasn’t well-received by consumers who were following the news on social media. According to Amobee Brand Intelligence, 29 percent of the sentiment around the phrase “headphone jack” on Twitter was negative on Wednesday afternoon, while just 10 percent was positive. The remaining 61 percent was neutral. “I’m really tired of being painted as some sort of failing, sinking ship.”SPORTSCENTER ANCHOR SCOTT VAN PELT ON RUMORS…

Social media influencers have transformed the way brands interact with consumers—and a lot of those influencers aren’t human. Like Super Bowl ads that use cute puppies to sell everything from beer to ketchup, adorable dogs with huge social followings are getting a lot of love from brands these days. Dogs can fetch anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 per sponsored post on Instagram, according to Rob Schutz, vp of growth at Bark & Co., parent company of BarkBox, a service that sends treats and other products to dog owners every month. Bark & Co. works with brands like P&G’s Swiffer, United Airlines, American Express and Anheuser-Busch to promote their products with dog influencers on social media. “All sorts of brands want to tap into dogs,” Schutz said. “Dogs are a common…

Specs Current gig Fashion photographer and founder of creative agency MarioTestino+ Twitter: @mariotestino Age 61 What does winning a Clio lifetime achievement award mean to you? It means a lot to win a lifetime achievement from anyone—but the Clio Awards are particularly interesting, as advertising is such a competitive industry. It’s a business that is constantly searching for the new, so it’s a big challenge to stay in the fight and to stay relevant. Photographers are changed at the drop of a hat. You have to be constantly questioning yourself and renewing yourself. This award makes it feel like the past 30 years of hard work, and insecurities, and redefining who I am, what I do, and how well I can relate to clients, has been recognized. What makes a…

$15+ MILLION Founded in 1932, Revlon is the definition of an all-American beauty brand. Over the past decade, however, the iconic brand has lost some of its luster—especially among younger consumers. Tasked with reviving the Revlon name, the company’s media buying agency, MediaCom, sought to return to the brand’s roots—specifically, an embrace of love and romance—embodied by Revlon’s new global brand positioning, “Love Is On.” But instead of just presenting the idea of “Love Is On” to consumers, MediaCom wanted customers to be able to emotionally connect and engage with the concept. The GroupM shop started off by introducing a hypothesis that a daily series of small behaviors dubbed the “Revlon Ritual”—which included applying fragrance and lipstick, popping a breath mint and smiling into a mirror—could help open women to…

LESS THAN $500K Faced with growing competition in areas outside Bucharest, upscale pastry chain Paul Bakery wanted to reinforce its relationship with its principal target: women. And given that Paul doesn’t typically invest in advertising, UM and McCann found a way to bake a powerful message right into its snacks—by creating the world’s first “social desserts.” Most Romanians, including women, believe men and women are equally represented at work, in politics and in other domains. But Romania actually ranks 114 out of 145 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report. To highlight this unseen imbalance, the agencies transformed Paul’s pies into actual pie charts, featuring disturbing gender gap statistics. The cleverly named “Bittersweet Pies” included a salary gap cake, a political misrepresentation cake, an “extremely rich” cake…

PRESENTING GSD&M; Omnicom Group DIAMOND Adweek; Apple; Bing; Diageo, NA PLATINUM DAS Group of Companies; Edelman; Facebook; Revolt TV GOLD BBDO New York; BET Networks; DDB Worldwide; Google; Hilton Worldwide; Squeaky; Twitter; Wieden+Kennedy; Yahoo! SILVER DigitasLBi; Pandora; Publicis Communications; TBWA\ Worldwide SUPPORTING EY; GTB; Ogilvy & Mather; Omnicom Media Group; Omnicom Health Group; Publicis Groupe TABLE Deutsch Inc.; HBO, Inc.; IPG; Prudential CORPORATE MEMBERS The Advertising Club of New York ; American Advertising Federation; AOL; Diageo, NA; Edelman; Facebook; Omnicom Group; Snake Nation; StickyDocs; Wieden+Kennedy PREFERRED VENDORS Adrianne Lipscomb Graphic Design; Akande Music; Boatman Media; Captivate Marketing Group; Edelman; GSD&M; STAMP Event Management; Squeaky; The STUDIO NYC…

Specs Claim to fame Emmy nominated for his portrayal of Christopher Darden on FX’s American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson; star of the new NBC series This Is Us (premieres Sept. 20 at 10 p.m.) Base Los Angeles Twitter @sterlingkb1 What’s the first information you consume in the morning? I wake up around 6 o’clock so I can get my 5-year-old ready for kindergarten, and usually the first thing I check out is my wife’s Twitter or Facebook page. She consumes so much news and has a way of boiling it down so I don’t have to go through it all at the top of the day. She also has very strong commentary that accompanies it, which I always appreciate. MSNBC is probably the station that’s on most…

Airbnb Addresses Discrimination For some time, there have been claims from black Airbnb users that their booking requests get turned down because of their skin color. After a three-month review led by Laura Murphy, the former head of the Washington, D.C., office of the ACLU, the service announced it is revising its nondiscrimination policy to better address the issue of racial profiling within its community. While the company is not doing away with user photos—which some observers have suggested—it said it would reduce the visibility of such photos for the booking process. —Christopher Heine Snapchat Nixes Local Stories Snapchat is cutting its daily Local Stories feature in order to shift its focus to event-driven live content. Despite increasing competition from Instagram, a new report from eMarketer said that the social…

Specs Claim to fame Charlie Fiordalis, chief digital officer at Media Storm, was a juror of the 2016 Media Plan of the Year Awards, the first ever to be judged live. Base New York Twitter @admergency Natural systems have a closed loop. Think about a tree: Its roots gather water and nutrients enabling the tree to grow limbs and leaves that capture sunlight and provide shelter and food for insects and animals. The leaves fall and return nitrogen to the soil, providing nutrients back to the tree’s roots. Take any piece of that out—the water, for example—and the whole system fails. All digital marketing systems want to have a closed loop but can’t always achieve one. They don’t fully come alive until they can optimize based on feedback. This…

PHD INDIA ACTIVE WHEEL $2+ MILLION More and more, men living in India—more than 4.2 million, to be exact—are moving away from their families in search of full-time work. The easiest way to stay in touch is through cellphones, but the cost for a few calls a week stacks up quickly. That means many families have an important choice to make—either spend more money on long-distance calls or stop communicating with loved ones and instead purchase essential household goods including cleaning products. Working with laundry detergent brand Active Wheel, PHD India in Mumbai came up with a mobile service called Lo Kar Lo Baat, which translates to “let’s talk,” to help cut down on phone costs. The idea behind the service was to provide couples with three free minutes of…

$2-4 MILLION Lockheed Martin has spent decades building vessels to fly to places as far away as the moon, Mars and Jupiter. However, newer startups like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have dominated recent press about space exploration. The aerospace firm wanted to reenter the national dialogue while also spurring students in Washington, D.C., to study science, tech, engineering and math (STEM). So how did they do it? With an old-fashioned yellow school bus. Working alongside UM, McCann New York and Framestore, Lockheed Martin gave old wheels a new view by turning an actual bus into a fully functional virtual reality vehicle, replete with VR screens in each window, using a gaming engine that guided the bus and mapping 200 square miles of Martian landscape. (For a…

ADCOLOR Board of Directors ADCOLOR Advisory Board ADCOLOR Diversity Summit Members ADCOLOR Honorees & Nominees ADCOLOR Futures Class of ‘16 ADCOLOR Council of Judges Adweek Adrianne Lipscomb, American Advertising Federation Akash Sen, Saatchi & Saatchi Akintayo Adewole, ADCOLOR Music Director, (‘14 ADCOLOR Unsung Hero), Akande Music Amy Tamayo, Squeaky Ana Leen, The Sibling Agency Andrea Richardson, Hilton Worldwide Andrea Rivera, DigitasLBi, San Francisco Anitra Collins, Twitter Anthony del Monte, Squeaky Ashley McGowan, A’13, BING Ayeshia Toy, ADCOLOR Volunteer Co-Captain, Wieden+Kennedy Bennett Bennett, BBDO New York Beti Gathegi, Pandora Bozoma Saint John, Apple Music Brian Ellner, Edelman Candace Queen, DigitasLBi, Chicago Cavel Khan, ADCOLOR Advisory Board Co-Chair, Twitter Center for Talent Innovation Christena J. Pyle, (’12 ADCOLOR Unsung Hero), ADCOLOR Christopher Henry, Edelman Christopher Vega, BBDO NY Constance Cannon Frazier, (’12…

FACT Peller took home the 1984 Clio Award for best female performance in a commercial. After 15 years of playing third fiddle to McDonald’s and Burger King, square hamburger chain Wendy’s had enough and was ready to go after its rivals where it hurt—right in the burger. In 1984, the brand launched what would become one of the most memorable campaigns of all time. “Where’s the Beef?,” conceived by the now-defunct Madison Avenue giant Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, starred Clara Peller (l.), an 81-year-old stand-in for everybody’s inquisitive grandmother, lamenting the lack of beef between the buns of Wendy’s competitors, collectively represented as “Big Bun.” After the campaign aired, Wendy’s saw a 31 percent spike in sales worldwide after years of declines. Peller’s status as a cult celebrity was solidified and…

The longest-running show on American television is having a moment, once again. NBC’s Meet the Press is beginning its new season with a formula that hasn’t changed much since it debuted on Nov. 6, 1947: A moderator interviews a newsmaker, usually a politician or candidate, followed by a discussion of the top political and policy issues of the day. These days the moderator is Chuck Todd, a political wonk who got his start in politics briefly working for the 1992 presidential campaign of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). ”Basically, I was the runner to go to the bank to deposit checks,” he explained. After 15 years at National Journal’s The Hotline, including six as editor in chief, the late Tim Russert recruited Todd to NBC as political director. In 2014, Todd…

Take advantage of the medium. Use the interactivity of all 360 degrees. Think about distribution early on. Don’t expect to get big pickup just from placing it on a YouTube or Facebook page. Make it personal. Create locally generated content for brands so people can see what’s happening in their environment. Set the stage. Remember: The consumers are in control. Make every direction interesting. Consider voiceovers. If you have a specific focus, then guide them. Consider the format. A 360-degree surfing video might work on a Facebook timeline but might make consumers sick in a headset.…

Millennials make up about one-quarter of the U.S. population, and women comprise about half of the demo. Research from CafeMedia, a women-focused digital media shop, takes a deeper look at what the segment values most when it comes to work, money and experiences. And the results could help marketers better meet their needs. “Brands need to first recognize that not all millennials are the same, and there isn’t a one size fits all solution,” said CafeMedia svp, strategy and insights Rachel Parkin. “Millennials are living life according to their own terms. Individuality is paramount, and they absolutely don’t want to be told what to do. The best thing a brand can do is to speak to the diversity within the generation and empower millennials to make their own choices.” Millennials…

$5-10 MILLION The 18 million viewers who tuned into CNN’s Republican presidential debate on Dec. 15—the third-most-watched primary debate ever—saw the proceedings hijacked by a volatile, unconventional contender who plays by his own rules. No, not Donald Trump. During a commercial break in the debate’s first hour, audiences watched a presidential campaign ad with the usual tropes: patriotic music, children waving flags in slow motion and amber waves of grain. But in a twist worthy of the show it was promoting, the candidate turned out to be Frank Underwood, the devious House of Cards star (played by Kevin Spacey), who had schemed his way to the presidency, and announced his reelection bid, along with the drama’s Season 4 premiere date on Netflix. The ad kicked off Netflix and MEC’s “FU2016”…

$500K-1 MIL $500K-1 MIL BEST USE OF MOBILE Timing is everything, the saying goes, and Campari America and Mindshare proved that to be true with a program called “Moments That Matter” that doled out Lyft discounts when partiers were most likely to need a ride home. (The effort earned Mindshare and the client an Adweek Project Isaac nod as well.) The goal: put a dent in the grim statistic that 28 Americans die every day from drunk driving, and urge millennials to make smart decisions after a night out. “It’s not enough to promote responsible drinking; we wanted to reward it,” says Summer Slater, Mindshare’s director of strategy. The agency did so by finding the target “closer to the point of consumption.” Wherever that happened to be, young consumers were…

$500K-1 MIL Computer programmers are a notoriously advertising-averse audience. But thanks to a 2014 campaign that hid messages in the source codes of tech websites (which developers often peruse), bicoastal independent media agency Noble People knew that mobile payments service Braintree, owned by Paypal, could reach the members of its target by speaking to them in their own language. The team took that insight in 2015 and expanded it, focusing on local markets with high concentrations of developers—like San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood—then putting up billboards painted in black-and-white code. Chalkboard signs in cafés frequented by developers, meanwhile, featured ads written in bash, the Linux language, and javascript, offering passwords for free coffee and sandwiches. A Twitter extension increased the campaign’s reach, targeting other nearby developers with similarly coded…

$4+ MILLION When Procter & Gamble’s Always continued its award-winning #LikeAGirl campaign in 2016, it wanted to tackle the same issues it had previously, but from a different angle. The brand was concerned about statistics showing that 56 percent of girls experience a severe drop in confidence at puberty, and 72 percent feel society limits them. The brand zeroed in on emojis and how they reflect societal biases against girls. Michele Baeten, Always global associate brand director, recalls the “stomach punch” she felt when looking through her phone to discover that emojis expressly designed for girls were mostly focused on beauty: hair, nails and makeup. “We were amazed to learn that girls actually send over 1 billion emojis every day, and outraged that this language they use often depicts them…

LESS THAN $500K Reese’s Trees is a holiday product, but its 2015 season was shaping up to be less than merry. Twitter users took to remarking last holiday season that the tree-shaped chocolate delights looked, well, a lot like turds. The media picked up on the story, leading to a potential brand crisis for Reese’s. It was clear that what was needed was to spin the conversation away from the candy’s looks and back onto their yummy taste, with an assist from Reese’s loyal fan base. Enter #AllTreesAreBeautiful, which slid into the conversation by highlighting an even greater injustice: tree shaming. This gave fans a funny but powerful topic to rally around—the notion that judging others on the basis of their looks is wrong. Anyway, who cares what a tree…

 Dieting among humans is common, but pet nutrition often takes a backseat. As some pet food companies have capitalized on the trend, Iams saw a decline in positive perception and purchase intent. Reversing the trend was complex, given that Iams has some 40 different formulas of dog food. ‘Our inspiration came from ... the dogs themselves.’Karla Knecht, evp, Starcom With its campaign, “we wanted to personalize our message, but we had to do it at scale,” says Jenn Cox, senior media and digital acceleration manager at parent company Mars. With the help of media agency Starcom, the brand met the challenge by creating 25 customized messages. Dynamic digital ads targeted specific pet owner types. If audience data indicated that a person owned a golden retriever that seemed listless, then the…

Create what you want to be a part of. That simple premise launched ADCOLOR and our focus on honoring the accomplishments of people of color and diversity champions within the creative industries has been basis of the ADCOLOR Awards. It’s hard to believe this is our 10th celebration. Over this time, we’ve started an awards show, launched a conference and nurtured the next generation of leaders through the Futures program. Since 2007, over 5,000 people have experienced The ADCOLOR Conference & Awards and thousands have joined us on social media. We have honored 281 diverse professionals and companies and have chosen 149 young professionals to be Futures. We expect to welcome over 600 diversity champions to The 10th ADCOLOR Conference & Awards this year. Still, in 2016, it seems we…

Fast Facts 1963 Louboutin born in Paris. 1991 Opens first boutique. $3,095 Price of the Sexy Strass heel from the 2013 collection. 3.2m Current fans on Facebook. THE COLOR True to its nail-polish origins, the soles of Christian Louboutin heels are a glossy red—Pantone 18-1663, reportedly, otherwise known as Chinese red. THE HEEL Known to hit a stratospheric 7 inches, Louboutin’s heels turn walking into a balancing act. “I don’t hate the idea of comfort,” he has said. “I just don’t think it’s important.” THE STAMPS Genuine Louboutins come in half sizes, are marked “Made in Italy,” and feature a tightly scripted name. Irregularities in any of these often signify a counterfeit shoe. THE TOE Louboutin deliberately keeps the tips of his shoes short and open to create “toe cleavage,”…