Indice dei contenuti per September 30, 2019 in Adweek

NOV. 3-6 • PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. • TICKETS AVAILABLE AT BRANDWEEK.COM Adweek: How do you navigate marketing and advertising in the age of rapid consumer feedback? Yeh: I don’t love the reactive “insta-judgment” that sometimes happens on social, but getting consumer feedback quickly is more good than bad. In the past, the fastest commentators on any new marketing work were “industry people.” A marketer would release a new TV spot and wait to see if it got listed in the weekly roundup of great ads. Today, reviewing the social sentiment within minutes of posting a video is the most immediate focus group we can get. How does Sephora use data? As a retailer, Sephora is fortunate to have lots of data. We have a loyalty program that lets us recognize…

French luxury brands have historically turned up their noses at business reporters. Opening up about strategy, admitting to flops or—quelle horreur!—discussing money? All rather gauche, mes amis. But a generation ago, Adweek succeeded in slipping into the hushed and storied sanctum of Chanel for a talk with vice president of creative services Lyle Saunders. As expected, Saunders declined to discuss money (“We don’t give out sales figures at Chanel,” he pronounced) but he did give us a few spritzes of insight about the legendary fragrance created by Coco herself in 1921. For one thing, Chanel corporate was above farming out its work to agencies, preferring to produce its advertising in-house. What’s more, some of it—hailing from Paris—was too racy for American eyeballs, such as the spot shot in a museum…

Analytics, a discipline that’s particularly relevant to advertising companies, is especially vulnerable as immigration policies shift. An outdated standard requires that an employee be degreed in a single area of college study for each specialty in which they intend to work. Because modern-day data experts come from different academic backgrounds at the intersection of IT, statistics and marketing, their applications can be denied if their major and proposed job description don’t match up.…

If you had lived in New York City three decades ago and spent some time in Central Park, you might have chanced upon a slender, bookish-looking man named Naoto Ohshima. And if you had perchance run into him, you’d have influenced the course of video-game history. It was 1990. Ohshima, an artist for Sega, had flown to New York with his sketchbook. Inside were several prototypes for a character that his employer planned to build a video game around. One afternoon, Ohshima wandered into the park where he randomly approached passersby and, while displaying three characters he’d drawn—a dog, a hedgehog and a man with a mustache—asked them which one they liked best. Hands down, it was the hedgehog. “People pointed to it and liked it,” Ohshima recalled at last…

When retail pioneer Marshall Field opened his palatial flagship in Chicago’s Loop in 1893, he discovered that shoppers were using his store as a meeting place, going so far as to tuck notes into the caulking of the display windows. Seeing an obvious marketing opportunity, Field commissioned a huge clock anchored to the building at the corner of State and Washington. As expected, “Meet me under the Marshall Field’s clock” soon joined the Windy City’s patois. Field was not alone in recognizing that encouraging the public to use your store as a meeting place would only draw more foot traffic into that location. Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh, Kern’s in Detroit, The Crescent in Spokane, Wash., and, across the pond, London’s famous Selfridges department store all boasted ornate outdoor clocks in their…

The measurement and analytics firm Comscore shelled out $5 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges that the company and its former CEO defrauded investors. The charges allege Comscore and then-chief executive Serge Matta improperly inflated revenue figures from February 2014 through February 2016, in part by trading data with third parties and inflating the value of those data exchanges. Comscore and Matta also made false and misleading disclosures about Comscore’s product and customer base, ultimately overstating company revenue by about $50 million, the SEC said. Matta, who was removed as chief executive in August 2016, paid $700,000 to the SEC and agreed to reimburse Comscore $2.1 million to settle the charges. Comscore did not have to admit or deny the commission’s findings. The settlement comes…

Treated Differently as a White Foreign-Born Creative In late 2016, a creative recruiter called on French-born Geoff Desreumaux, now partner, head of strategy at SuperHeroes New York, determined to whisk him half a world away from his job running U.K. social media strategy for Diet Coke, Pizza Hut and other clients at London-based Lexis Agency to sunny Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he became social director at “retail powerhouse” Zimmerman Advertising. In a demonstration of the value placed on international talent, the Omnicom agency paid to move him and his wife to Florida and “sponsor” him via an L-1 transfer visa that allows both spouses to work in the United States. Desreumaux now estimates the overall cost was in the high five figures. The real immigration drama didn’t begin, however, until…

‘If you don’t contribute your perspective or your thought to your question, you’re robbing people of the opportunity to learn and be better.’ Kai Lawson never anticipated a career in advertising. After working as a college rep for record labels, Lawson—now associate operations director at Essence—assumed her next step would be in the music industry. Instead, a recruiter from Wunderman reached out about a junior project management position, which she started in June 2011. “I was a complete fish out of water,” Lawson said, adding that she faced unfair assumptions that she was apathetic when really, she just needed mentorship to learn “how this business worked and what the expectations were.” While she continued to gain industry knowledge and experience, she found that this attitude persisted. Over time, she made…

Erich & Kallman An independent creative agency launched in San Francisco in 2016 by CP+B vet Steve Erich and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Wieden + Kennedy and Barton F. Graf vet Eric Kallman, it is most like a traditional agency of the shops profiled here. The agency utilized a small, nimble team to deliver distinctive, often humorous work for clients. MediaMonks MediaMonks bills itself as a creative digital production company that injects production early into the creative process. Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital acquired MediaMonks for $350 million, reportedly outbidding WPP in the process. Last month, MediaMonks merged with influencer marketing agency IMA to extend its approach even further. Falkon Los York co-founder Dex Deboree launched Falkon earlier this year after releasing a documentary on the Air Jordan brand, further blurring…

The efforts made by some retailers to woo younger consumers into physical stores comes at a time when 39% of millennials are interested in doing all of their shopping digitally, up nearly 10% since 2017, according to CouponFollow’s 2019 Millennial Shopping Report. However, the Oracle NetSuite, Wakefield and Retail Doctor survey showed that 57% of millennials and Gen Z have a more positive view of the retail environment than the older cohorts and feel that it’s “more inviting.” Additionally, online is clearly crucial with more Gen Z consumers (38%) engaging with retailers on social media compared to millennials (25%) and boomers (21%). Millennial shoppers spend $600 billion in the U.S. annually, according to Accenture. And members of Gen Z spend about $143 billion a year, according to a report from…

For ad agencies, bringing in foreign talent is not just a matter of securing the most skilled workers. It’s also about adding outside perspectives that help them shape work designed to resonate with an increasingly global audience. “At one point in my career, I was the only foreigner,” notes Anselmo Ramos, the Brazilian-born co-founder of David Miami and Gut. But that changed in recent years as agencies like his looked abroad for talent who would help them strike “the right cultural balance.” “For a moment it was the Swedes, then it became the Brazilians and Argentines,” he adds. “From an optimistic perspective, there have never been so many foreigners working abroad.”…

IF RECENT HIGH-PROFILE acquisitions are any indication, the ad industry is in the midst of a veritable data gold rush, and first-party data assets are the means for staking your claim. In April, Publicis bought Epsilon for $3.95 billion, less than a year after IPG agreed to purchase Acxiom for $2.3 billion. And in 2016, IPG rival Dentsu Aegis Network spent $1 billion on a majority stake in Merkle, a performance marketing outfit with expertise in digital, search and customer-relationship-management data services. But all data is not created equal, and marketers need to do their homework before aligning themselves with one company over another. “It’s really not a one-size-fits-all,” notes Ana Milicevic, co-founder of the programmatic consultancy Sparrow Advisers. “What can be a strength for a particular type of client…