Indice dei contenuti per September 3, 2018 in Adweek

JEFF BROOKS, CMO, CASPER Adweek: Many of the direct-to-consumer brands start with one unique item and then end up adding much more to their offering. How do you do that while staying true to the brand? We started with one universally comfortable mattress, but we knew there was more to achieving a great night’s sleep than the mattress alone. So we view it as intuitive to expand into adjacent categories that enable or promote better sleep. … We constantly challenge ourselves to raise the bar on all things sleep, and the pipeline has some very exciting initiatives underway. … Everything we invent and make must address a real consumer need, be core to our vision of becoming the world’s first end-to-end sleep company and deliver on the brand’s origins of…

For generations, the prevailing view in advertising held that a world outside the major metro hubs of New York, Chicago and later Los Angeles didn’t exist—or at least didn’t matter. But as the industry settles firmly into its digital age, a new generation is flocking to smaller cities like Austin, Texas, Omaha, Neb., and Knoxville, Tenn., offering greater opportunities for career advancement, work-life balance and a lower cost of living. With shrinking advertising budgets and clients questioning whether agencies in large cities can speak to the average American, agencies in smaller cities can often work for less while offering valuable perspective on consumers. “I was previously a New Yorker who felt like New York was the center of the universe,” said Leeann Leahy, CEO of Portland, Maine-based The VIA Agency.…

LATER THIS MONTH, AT&T will cloister 300 media, advertising and entertainment executives in a Santa Barbara, Calif., resort for three days. The telecom’s leaders will present some industry research it conducted, unveil a new brand name for its advertising and analytics business, and network over cocktails. The exclusive gathering is essentially a peace summit. Fresh off the close of deals to absorb AppNexus and Time Warner, AT&T has big plans for the ad industry. It wants to automate the buying and selling of television advertising. It wants to re-calibrate which commercials are seen by which viewers. And it wants to eventually merge sales of premium video with those of digital display and native in the same big marketplace. All of these ambitions are in service of AT&T’s transformation into what…

According to company lore, Sidney Frank had the name Grey Goose before he’d made a drop of the vodka—but where did the moniker come from? While the brand’s own publicist admits that “there is a bit of mystery” surrounding the origins, it’s clear that Frank had owned the trademark since the 1970s. In those days, Frank was importing a Liebfraumilch—a bland and sugary white wine from Germany—called Gray Goose. Frank loved the name and believed it was destined for a finer label. Rumor has it he also liked the metaphor of his new creation taking flight in the market.…

If you really stop to think about it, the relationship between brands and consumers is changing at mind-boggling speed and with myriad complexities. At every turn consumers are adopting technology, software, platforms and even philosophies that inexorably transcend the traditional relationship between seller and buyer. A senior marketing exec in the technology sector who I interviewed last week succinctly summed up this dynamic shift when I asked him what brand marketers—at their own peril—are underestimating about modern consumers. Without missing a beat, his answer was: “Brands still think they are in control. They aren’t. Consumers are in control. Until we really put the consumer first, with the help of responsibly rendered and applied data science, we are throwing time, effort and money out the window.” Kind of a mic-drop moment…

1 BRAND-SAFE PUBLICATIONS CAN’T BE BEAT. Dating apps can be a hard sell for some advertisers, but Into offered Grindr’s brand partners a new opportunity to reach a similar audience. Into has struck a number of ad and content deals with brands like BMW, FX and Halo Top ice cream, and the site in June launched a video series about being HIV positive that Stafford said is sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Gilead, which develops HIV treatments. 2 COMBINE FORCES—AND DATA—TO DELIVER. Into has direct access to Grindr’s network of nearly 4 million daily active users, and Into editors can send messages to Grindr users with relevant news and stories if Grindr users sign up. Into can also leverage Grindr’s troves of user location data to deliver the right content…

A TOP TV AD SALES EXEC TELLS ALL ABOUT THIS YEAR’S SECRETIVE, LUCRATIVE MARKET. UPFRONTS ARE ALWAYS the centerpiece of the TV advertising year. However, between upfronts week in May and the announcements later that summer negotiations are complete, the process has remained secretive, with only a handful of people involved in those high-level talks. Until now: This year, a top TV sales exec agreed to (anonymously) take Adweek behind the scenes, compiling an upfront diary that chronicled each stage of his or her company’s upfront talks. Here’s what this person had to say about how hush-hush early negotiations, Roseanne’s cancellation, “sheer exhaustion” and “a shitload of money” from an unexpected source shaped 2018’s upfront marketplace. ENTRY NO. 1: UPFRONTS WEEK STILL MATTERS It’s a year-round process, but we really…

It may seem obvious to sell to human beings rather than “consumers.” But marketers often ignore this basic tenet, one that Doner chief consumer connections officer Marcus Collins holds above all else. “When we walk into the office as a marketer, we take our human hat off and put on the marketer hat, strategist, creative,” Collins explained. “We come up with these ideas that are like, let’s get people to click that, upload that, tag that and pin this in an effort to get blah, blah, blah. Ask yourself: would you ever feel like doing that? Absolutely not. So why do you think someone else will? … We don’t take on the perspective of people.” In April, Collins was elevated to lead Doner’s new consumer connections practice, where he leverages…

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It has been more than three months since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations came into law, and as similar legislation is being drafted in California and Vermont, many companies from agencies to tech giants like Google are trying to avoid the pain points experienced by European parties. In particular, the industry seeks to learn from the tensions caused by recent policy changes by Google—all of which were ushered in to gain GDPR compliance, but resulted in widespread, unpleasant circumstances. GDPR, which targets Silicon Valley behemoths like Google and Facebook, has partially backfired, according to industry observers who argue that the data protection authorities’ rules lack clarity. “In retrospect, these complications are not surprising, given the rush by all participants in the final months to understand and apply GDPR…

It has always been axiomatic that the teen years are a time of expanding horizons, a period in life when young adults break free of the restrictions and watchful eyes of their parents, assert their personal identity and begin to explore the great wide world outside their front door. For Gen Z, the opposite is true. Their physical universe is shrinking. Over the last 10 years, there has been a 38 percent drop in the frequency with which 10th graders leave their homes without a parent to hang out with friends, a 19 percent decrease in the number of teens who bother to get their driver’s license and a 29 percent decline in the number of teens who start dating. What gives? How could the first generation of digital natives…

THE GOOSE It’s the only clear part of an otherwise frosted bottle, and purportedly symbolizes how the brand opened a new window on the vodka world. THE TRICOLOR Because many people associate vodkas with Eastern Europe, Grey Goose spotlights the fact that it’s distilled in France, a place with its own luxury connotations. THE BOTTLE The Gray Goose bottle took its design cues from the slender profile and sloping shoulders of a wine bottle, which helped it stand out against competitors. Sidney Frank had a great idea for a new vodka, but he was missing a few things: the distillery, the bottle and the actual vodka. But no matter. It was the summer of 1996, and 77-year-old Frank, a titan of the booze business, was a gambling man. For nearly…

When Collins was the thought leader for social at Translation, he said that he used to think of social as “Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat and all the alike.” But then, he had what he calls a “Jerry Maguire moment” when he realized that social means people. “And I remember telling my then fiancé, now wife, ‘Social means people. Oh my god, social’s all about people,’” he said. “And right at that moment, I realized I knew nothing about people. I remember feeling like a fraud [and] thinking I’m going to get found out and fired.”…