Table of contents for Aug-31-15 in Adweek

In a stunning turn of events, two rival factions in one of our nation’s longest-lasting and most devastating conflicts came close to calling a historic cease-fire last week. We’re referring, of course, to the so-called “burger wars” between McDonald’s and Burger King, the latter of which ran a full-page newspaper ad last Wednesday asking its rival to bury the hatchet in honor of World Peace Day. In its proposal, Burger King asked McDonald’s to join forces in creating the “McWhopper,” with proceeds from sales of the super-burger going to charity. Sadly, McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook turned down the proposal, writing in a Facebook post, “We love the intention but think our two brands could do something bigger to make a difference.” In a postscript, he added, “A simple phone call…

BuzzFeed and WPP’s media-buying arm GroupM announced a one-year partnership that will marry the former’s analytics capabilities with the latter’s global roster of brands. As part of the deal, GroupM will become the first agency with access to Pound, BuzzFeed’s new data technology that provides insight into how content spreads from BuzzFeed’s website to other platforms. BuzzFeed will also create a group within its motion pictures division dedicated to producing content exclusively for WPP clients.…

Roots of Fight actually started off as a seven-person brand strategy agency named Copasetic Creative in Vancouver, Canada. Founded in 1999, the small shop worked mostly on beer and sports accounts. But when the economic recession of 2008 nearly turned out the lights, co-founders Jesse Katz and creative partner Richard Lawley had a brainstorm. The duo were big boxing and mixed martial arts fans. But they disdained the design and marketing of combat sports apparel, which typically featured skulls and crossbones, snarling pit bulls and gothic design/fonts. Using their sports Rolodex, they approached friends such as Sharon Lee, daughter of the late, great martial artist Bruce Lee. “I was a 30-year-old who had been a lifelong boxing fan and lifelong martial arts fan—but I couldn’t stand the marketing around it,”…

We live in an increasingly virtual world. But some recent campaigns are getting almost uncomfortably corporeal. Earlier this year, BBDO Proximity Thailand broke a stop-smoking campaign for the Thai Health Promotion Foundation that included giving people ink made from deceased smokers’ diseased lungs and asking them to draw anti-smoking messages with it. Then, Vangardist, a lushly produced men’s style magazine based in Vienna, working with Saatchi & Saatchi Switzerland, printed an issue with ink infused with blood donated by HIV-positive volunteers, timed to the Life Ball annual HIV/ AIDS charity event held there. Meanwhile, Glorix, a bug repellent, working with BBDO Russia, kicked off a campaign in June for the blood donation network DonorSearch with an exhibition of miniature portraits painted in human blood drawn from dead mosquitos. Call it…

You’re Bloomberg’s first global commercial creative director. What does that mean? My job is to build our creative team. So the idea that we create these awesome brand experiences across our multitude of platforms, whether it’s digital video, sponsored events, infographics—native content is sort of a big buzzword right now. We’ve got the luxury of having the Bloomberg Media empire across all these platforms and verticals. We really want to take advantage of that real estate. What makes you right for this gig? The thing I do, I build teams. Even dating back to my agency days, that’s the thing I really enjoy doing. I love building creative teams. I love influencing the culture, the process. Really it’s the team that does all the work. They’re the ones that make…

JWT CREATIVE CHIEF MATT EASTWOOD CONCEIVES A LIVING SPACE WITH A MODERN BUT COMFORTABLE VIBE. MATT EASTWOOD HAS spent all his advertising career as a copywriter—but his first love was design, which he studied at university in his native Australia. Design has always been a profound influence on his work and in his lifestyle choices. “That design aesthetic runs through everything I do,” says Eastwood, the worldwide chief creative officer of JWT who has held ranking creative posts at DDB and Young & Rubicam and was a founding partner of M&C Saatchi in Australia. Entering the ad business with a design degree, Eastwood couldn’t find a job as an art director, he relates. So he switched to writing, a career track that has led to some of the highest profile…

THE CASH There’s $20,580 in a standard Monopoly set. To celebrate the game’s 80th anniversary, Hasbro fitted out a handful of sets in France with real euros. THE PROPERTY Names of the game’s 22 colored, purchasable streets come from Atlantic City, which was a speculator’s paradise before the Great Depression. THE BUILDINGS Monopoly’s original houses and hotels (which let owners jack up the rent on unlucky players) were made out of pieces of scrap lumber. Dec. 17, 2010 was a nail-biter for the staff at the National Museum of Play. Its curator made the 250-mile trip from Rochester, N.Y., to New York where he sat in Sotheby’s wood-paneled auction room. “It was our curator and a phone bidder—just the two of them,” recalled collections vp Christopher Bensch, “and it was…

What’s the first information you consume in the morning? The first information I consume in the morning is no information. I think it’s really important to reset the brain in the morning. We get bombarded so much in our daily lives, so the first thing I do when I wake up is meditate. I like to have a nice, blank slate to start the day with. Do you use a meditation app? No, I don’t. But strangely enough, that’s how I was introduced to it. When I decided I wanted to start meditating, somebody gave me an app. It was really helpful, actually. But now I just use silence. Tell us about your social media habits. I’m on Twitter and Instagram. I basically have two Instagram lives. I have one…

Target In terms of fandom, Star Wars is one of the most powerful franchises, and with the impending release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we’re about to be inundated with the film’s merchandising push. But such rampant consumerism doesn’t always have to be part of the Dark Side. There’s a heartwarming joy and gleeful nostalgia to unwrapping Star Wars toys, and Target’s latest campaign from Deutsch L.A. is a two-minute celebration of just that. “Just come on up here. You have to do an inspection … Real quick—we don’t want to mess it up too much, ’cause I do use hair spray.”Donald Trump at a campaign event in South Carolina, where he invited a woman onstage to confirm that he does not, in fact, wear a toupee.…

Maker Studios chief content officer Erin McPherson and svp of marketing Jeremy Welt depart amidst a leadership shake-up. Condé Nast hires former Galeries Lafayette exec Olivier Breton as CMO, global e-commerce for the soon-to-relaunch Style.com. R/GA promotes veteran staffer Barry Wacksman to global chief strategy officer. Comedy Central taps Baratunde Thurston to oversee digital content for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. American Media Inc. names David Jackson group publisher of Men’s Fitness. Rebekah Brooks returns to News Corp. as U.K. CEO.…

The issue of viewability, online ads people can actually see, is the cause of much Sturm und Drang among publishers and advertisers these days, but a new wave of media upstarts are hoping to sidestep the issue by designing ad-friendly sites early on. One such publisher is LittleThings, a year-old viral news and lifestyle site targeting women, which has seen its traffic rocket to 36.3 million unique visitors from 8.5 million this year, per comScore. The website plans to reveal a new ad-friendly design during the fourth quarter of this year. “Because we’re only a year old, we have the benefit of seeing the challenges and the mistakes that others have made,” explained Gretchen Tibbits, LittleThings COO. “We were able to fill in some [holes] from day one.” The goal…

The advertising and marketing community is home to some of the most imaginative minds in business. We use creativity to solve problems every day. So we decided that it was time to use that brainpower to solve an important issue facing every Californian. In June, our agency’s invention team, in partnership with USC, Hack for L.A., Global Shapers, and the City of Los Angeles, put on the city’s first Futurethon—Saving Water—a 48-hour hackathon aimed at inventing solutions to hack the California drought. Saving Water was one of four tracks in L.A.’s National Civic Hacking Weekend event. The turnout was impressive. The 500-person venue was standing room only and included everyone from students, teachers and farmers to advertising and technology professionals. Ages ranged from 13 to 73 and the buzz was…

ON A FEW WEEKENDS each year, an arts and crafts fair sets up shop along University Place, a narrow, leafy street in New York’s Greenwich Village that borders the apartment building where designer Jonathan Adler and his husband, the designer and author Simon Doonan, live. Whenever Adler passes by all those struggling artists, he recalls a time when he was certain he’d be one of them. “I started out as a potter, as an outsider who never expected to make a living at all,” he says. “I thought I was going to be hawking my wares at rain-soaked craft fairs. That’s what I expected my life to be.” Things, of course, worked out better than that. While he started out as a potter (and, in fact, remains one), Adler is…

Yama Cold Brew Tower $255 While it looks like something you’d find in the laboratory of a mad scientist, Yama’s elaborate glass and wood tower is actually made for brewing cold coffee. The slow-drip method is time consuming—it takes between three and eight hours to produce 32 ounces of concentrated coffee—but surprisingly easy: Just add ice and cold water to the top chamber, set the valve to drip and add dampened coffee grounds. Slow-drip devotees claim that the process is more than worth it, yielding a beverage that’s infinitely smoother than your typical cup of joe. Buy it: prima-coffee.com Be a Master Builder The Lego Architect $18 Get a crash course in architecture using everybody’s favorite building blocks. The Lego Architect book explores the history of seven architectural styles, from…

Match is IAC’s flagship dating site and leading brand of the company’s Personals division, which also includes OkCupid and dating app du jour Tinder. And with over 6 million monthly visitors, Match is the largest dating site in the world. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the 20-year-old venue’s real-life space would be headquartered in Texas where, as the saying goes, everything is bigger. When guests enter the Dallas office they are met with high ceilings, a grand staircase and are immediately inundated with romance that in any other setting would be saccharine. “We try to honor all things love in our lobby,” said vp of human resources Lisa Nelson. “You’ll hear some of our favorite love ballads when you walk in the doors. We show classic black-and-white…

We all experienced a sick and twisted new take on human depravity last Wednesday when a onetime TV news reporter shot and killed two former colleagues as they reported live for their Roanoke, Va., morning show. As home viewers watched in confusion, the killer recorded his own video of the cold-blooded murders, which he then uploaded to social media. Facebook and Twitter quickly removed the clips, but not before they autoplayed in some shocked users’ feeds. TV stations and news sites weighed how much of the madman’s video to air—CBS News ran the most, a full 25 seconds on the Evening News—while the Daily News was slammed for its crass cover showing stunned reporter Alison Parker in the final moments of her life. Episodes of two prime-time TV shows—USA’s Mr.…

You may have noticed celebrities such as Jay Z, Beyoncé, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and UFC champ Ronda Rousey wearing apparel emblazoned with the names of iconic fighters such as Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson and Bruce Lee. The brand they’re wearing is called Roots of Fight. With no advertising, no marketing and no ad agency, the upstart sports lifestyle brand has exploded into one of the hottest new lines in years. The story behind Roots of Fight provides a lesson for agencies and clients looking to reinvent themselves through fashion and design.…