Table of contents for August 22, 2016 in Adweek

Last week, Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte came under fire for claiming that he, along with three teammates, was robbed at gunpoint in Rio. Brazilian police disputed Lochte’s claims, saying that the swimmer was not robbed but apprehended after allegedly vandalizing a gas station bathroom while intoxicated. Lochte’s teammates also came forward to say that his account of the events isn’t accurate. The scandal, dubbed by the New York Post as “Watergate,” could be problematic for Lochte’s deals with brands like Ralph Lauren, Speedo and Airweave (none of which had dropped the swimmer as of Friday), according to Landor global marketing director Trevor Wade. “Consumers respect companies that are truthful and authentic, and brands have to be aware that by associating themselves with Lochte, they may lose customers who object to…

 Since history is written by the victor, it needs a top-notch editor. And that’s exactly why best-selling author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell rolled out Revisionist History, a podcast in partnership with Slate’s Panoply Media. The 10-episode series that debuted in June aims to shift the lens on events ranging from stolen art to a car manufacturer’s fiasco to the American educational system in a bid to poke holes in the way we think about the past and present. With Gladwell at the helm, the podcast was an instant success, reaching the top spot on iTunes even before the first episode aired. As Gladwell prepares for the second season of Revisionist History, we caught up with him in his West Village home to talk about the power of audio,…

From comedian Leslie Jones live tweeting for NBC to swimmer (and now national embarrassment) Ryan Lochte using Snapchat to document his antics—though clearly not all of them—social media got fans closer to the action at the Olympics than ever before. Sponsors of the games got their fair share of buzz, too. Pixability, a video ad platform based in Boston, looked at how sponsors’ videos scored across YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Additionally, OMG examined the impact of social media mentions. “The conversation is always on, before, during and after these events,” said OMG’s Darrell Jursa. “It makes sense for marketers and advertisers to understand the existing drumbeat of discussion around an event like the Olympics, even if it has nothing to do with a brand.”…

DESIGN   FCB Brasil: Nivea Brasil, Nivea Doll Nivea is no stranger to the Project Isaac Awards, having won the Gravity Award in 2014 for a magazine ad that let users charge their phones. São Paulo-based FCB Brasil, the agency behind that effort, helped the skin care brand devise a doll built with ultraviolet skin that turned red when exposed to the sun to show kids how easy it is to get sunburned without adequate protection. An application of Nivea sunscreen either prevented the doll from “burning” or returned the doll’s skin to normal. They were distributed across Rio de Janeiro beaches over the course of summer 2015. The idea worked well enough that the brand is considering rolling it out in seven other countries. MARKETING  We Believers: Saltwater Brewery,…

MEDIA BUYING  Cadreon: Dodge Ram, Hyper-targeting Insights Enabler Faced with a limited budget and not a ton of inventory, IPG Media’s Cadreon arm in Mexico City looked to boost sales for the Dodge Ram 700. It started by identifying three male target groups: business owners, men visiting multiple branches and young entrepreneurs. Cadreon then set about geo-fencing supply centers with a mobile campaign that followed the targets wherever they moved, adding on digital out-of-home media screens programmatically linked to Cadreon’s trading desk. TV ads purchased programmatically by postal code optimized reach and frequency. The result? Reach surged 300 percent for all three targets, while purchase consideration rose 10.6 percent versus traditional buys. What’s more, brand recall was up 4.6 percent. Ultimately, Dodge dealers reported a 200 percent sales increase for…

SPORTS MARKETING Momentum Worldwide: Verizon, Game Winner Super Bowl 50 brought out some of the best marketing efforts from numerous advertisers. Verizon suited up for the big game with agency Momentum Worldwide, which worked with production agency Los York to create an immersive on-site experience for fans at San Francisco’s Levi’s Stadium. Standing in front of a 200-degree, 10-foot high, ultra-HD projection screen that virtually placed them on the gridiron, fans got to make the key pass to win the game (using motion-sensing tech). Play-by-play commentary by CBS’ Greg Gumbel was overlaid onto the videos created, while retired football great Marshall Faulk announced a fake NFL Network highlight reel that included their “play.” Each fan received their personal video clip via email within minutes of leaving the experience. PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT…

Jibo $749 Billed as “the world’s first social robot,” Jibo was designed by MIT robotics expert Cynthia Breazeal to be a friendly home assistant that gets to “know” your family members and their personalities—and even develops his own. Similar to Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, he can look up the weather, set appointments, display recipes and more. Thanks to built-in facial, voice and body-language recognition, Jibo always knows who’s talking to him (and what kind of mood they’re in), so he can make sure to give the right messages and reminders to the right people at the right time. He’s also an excellent family photographer—just tell Jibo to follow specific faces around the room, or let him automatically snap pictures whenever he sees a group of people posing—and can even…

INTERVIEW What’s the first information you consume in the morning? I hate to say it—I reach for my phone and go on Twitter. And CNN.com, especially because we’re in the middle of this heated political season. You use Periscope quite a bit. When did you get into that? I started doing Periscope maybe a year ago because I thought it was a great way to connect with fans. I like showing them the inner workings of a show, whether it’s my wardrobe person or talking about what different people do. Do you ever worry about accidentally giving away spoilers? [Laughs] No, I’m pretty careful! I usually don’t do [Periscope] on the set itself. I usually do it when we’re having some downtime somewhere, just to give people a little slice…

 At this year’s Rio games, athletes flocked to Tinder to, uh, strengthen international relations. The dating app tracked which sports’ participants got the most “right swipes,” and the results might surprise you. (Go women’s table tennis!) “It’s funny, with me leaving, 50 percent of the black hosts are gone.” LARRY WILMORE ON THE NIGHTLY SHOW’S CANCELLATION MEN 1. TENNIS 2. WEIGHTLIFTING 3. GYMNASTICS 4. SPORT SHOOTING 5. JUDO 6. BOXING WOMEN 1. TABLE TENNIS 2. FIELD HOCKEY 3. ROWING 4. WEIGHTLIFTING 5. RUGBY 6. SWIMMING…

While NBC struggled nightly to reach the TV viewership of the last Summer Olympics, more viewers than ever before streamed the games of the XXXI Olympiad. But that’s because, after paying $1.23 billion for the rights to Rio, NBC opened the streaming spigot, making some 4,500 hours of live events available online. By the first Thursday (Aug. 11), NBC Olympics’ livestreaming hit 1.28 billion minutes, more than the combined total of the London and Sochi Olympics (1.24 billion). And by last Monday (Aug. 15), NBC hit the 2 billion-minute mark. In an on-demand world, it’s what viewers have come to expect. “People aren’t willing to give up that real-time experience just because a TV network decides not to broadcast it until later,” said Publicis Seattle’s Fero. Streaming viewers also gave…

The September issue of Architectural Digest—your first full issue—recently hit newsstands. Tell me about the process of putting that issue together and what changes you introduced. I did it very, very fast, in a matter of weeks, which isn’t normally how you put together any September issue. But I think the issue gives you a sense of the fact that I’m looking for personality, energy, interesting spaces, interesting homes. I want fewer anonymous homes. I think that people are interested to know who’s living a life in this house. And that’s why I used that great Diana Vreeland quote in my editor’s letter: “Few things are more fascinating than a peek into the private hours of how people live.” I don’t want the magazine to look like a real estate…

Winner in: CREATIVE and EVENT/ EXPERIENCE It was at around 2 o’clock in the morning that Josh Grossberg landed on Mars. The group creative director of McCann New York couldn’t sleep one night back in 2014. Lying in bed, he found himself watching a TV show about the latest in space travel. Space was once again a hot topic, thanks to movies like Gravity and Interstellar and private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin sending spacecraft into orbit. Suddenly, Grossberg thought of his client, Lockheed Martin, the company that helped build the Viking 1, which arrived on Mars in 1976 and became the first U.S. spacecraft to land on that planet. Last month, a Lockheed Martin-built craft arrived in Jupiter’s orbit. (One engineer at the firm equated the precision to…

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT  360i: Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation: Adaptoys There’s no denying the impact the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation has had on the advancement of technology to help the one in 50 people who live with paralysis. But one area long overlooked was the ability to interact with children through play. Engineers applied sip-and-puff assistive technology and other cutting-edge tech to a customized headset to let wheelchair-bound people wirelessly drive a remote-control car. Following a demo that involved a celebrity (Eric LeGrand, the paralyzed Rutgers University football player who’s become a face of the advances in this field), agency 360i launched a crowdfunding initiative to bring attention to the development of this toy technology, centered around a social strategy featuring a film made from the demo. Within three days,…

GAMING Wunderman Buenos Aires: Yumit A couple of universal truths about kids: They like to play games (especially the video kind), and they usually do not like food that’s good for them. Enter Yumit, an interactive food plate that senses how much food a kid is eating. Data then links to a video game the kids are playing, lending (or taking away) energy to the characters based on what a kid eats. Furthermore, parents can link to the data feed to track how well their kids are eating (they also have an option to leave messages for their offspring in the game itself). It’s another winning effort from Wunderman Buenos Aires (which won the editorial Isaac Award; see page 30), which is working with an unnamed video game company to…

HR  MEC: MEC Live Hire Job hunting may be one of the most horrific experiences newbies to the workforce have to endure. GroupM-owned MEC decided to compress the entire process for a lucky 10 hires last fall into a one-day process, from interview to hire (or rejection). On Sept. 28, the first day of Advertising Week in New York, MEC set up outdoor tents along West 41st Street, just outside the Times Center (one of Advertising Week’s nerve centers), where it interviewed candidates for entry-level positions IRL, in millennial parlance (for the rest of us, that’s “in real life”). MEC says it adopted a “behavioral” approach to mimic a speed-dating round, and both global CEO Charles Courtier and North American CEO Marla Kaplowitz took part. In the end, 10 candidates…

Loews Hotels The Loews Hotels group launched a review seeking an agency to handle creative and media duties for its brands, which include Loews Hotels and Resorts, Loews Regency and “lifestyle hotel” extension OE Collection. The account had been with “startup agency” Catch New York for the previous three years. Avidan Strategies is managing the review, which follows the arrival of a new chief commercial officer and senior vice president of brands and marketing. George Fleck, who holds the latter title, said that he seeks a creative agency with “a track record in helping legacy brands reinvent themselves.” The review should last three to six months.…

Uber and Volvo Partner for Self-Driving Cars Uber’s commitment to automated transportation was revved up Thursday when it partnered with Volvo to give Pittsburgh commuters the opportunity to try out self-driving cars for free. The Uber-Volvo agreement entails a $300 million program to develop self-driving vehicles by 2021. During the next couple of weeks, according to Bloomberg, Uber will let patrons in downtown Pittsburgh order from a fleet of self-driving cars—Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles—via their smartphones, representing a new achievement in the automotive sector. There will be no charge to riders. —Christopher Heine Dauman Ousted By Viacom Board The palace intrigue at National Amusements is nearing a conclusion as scion Shari Redstone increases her power at the company controlled by her ailing 93-year-old father Sumner, with the exit of embattled…

Messaging apps more and more are trying to swipe Snapchat’s mojo, rolling out an assortment of updates that reflect the wildly popular app’s panoply of polychromatic filters and face-altering effects, among other features. Facebook, which leads the copycatters, last week added a camera-zooming function to its mobile app that’s been available on Snapchat for some time. Also last week, Facebook-owned Instagram unveiled live stories, mimicking another Snapchat staple. Meanwhile, Google is gearing up this fall to launch the app Allo, which will share obvious similarities with Snapchat. “The Snapchat killers are all nipping at its heels in their own way,” said marketing consultant David Deal. “[They] are challenging Snapchat’s dominance of content scarcity and creative storytelling.” Here, a breakdown of how Facebook, Google and other challengers stack up. —Christopher Heine…

In June, Microsoft bought LinkedIn, one of the largest acquisitions in the history of tech, and it boils down to one thing: data. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said as much in a letter to employees. Nadella wants to marry LinkedIn with its flagship software, Office 365, and crucially its CRM product Dynamics. Since the acquisition, we’ve started seeing how Microsoft will bolster Dynamics against rivals like Oracle. Microsoft—and we learned, a handful of other companies—recognized the potential of LinkedIn’s customer data to improve its own products and sales, and LinkedIn understood that its real value as a company was the trove of data it collects. Microsoft’s acquisition reflects a new reality for software: a beautiful app, user interface or even becoming the leading professional social network no longer guarantees long-term…

DESIGN   VCU Brandcenter/Dasani, Cap the Tap With California suffering its worst water shortage in perhaps 1,000 years, VCU Brandcenter students devised a novel plan to curtail waste from standard kitchen and bathroom taps and spread the word about conservation. “With ‘Cap the Tap,’ we’re proposing a solution that makes it accessible, actionable and achievable to conserve,” says Yelena Sophia, who served as an art director on the project and now works at TBWA\Media Arts Lab. “PSAs are inspiring and helpful in keeping conservation top of mind, but offering a solution that allows everyone to participate in water conservation and see the impact of their actions” makes a stronger statement and has an immediate impact on people’s lives. Sophia and her team proposed a specially designed cap for Dasani water…

No one was surprised when Walmart snatched up burgeoning online retailer Jet.com for a cool $3.3 billion in early August. The two-year-old ecommerce site headquartered in Hoboken, N.J., had been making waves as a viable competitor to behemoth Amazon since its inception with investors like Goldman Sachs, Alibaba, Google Ventures and Bain Capital lining up to fund early venture rounds. But courting investors without impressive digs can be hard, so it helped that the company’s north New Jersey outpost was designed with style and packages—literally—in mind. “The whole floor is laid out like a shipping box that was cut open to lay flat,” explained Jet’s talent experience senior director Kristin Reilly. “Upon entering the office, the box is sliced open to lay flat—opening you up to the light—and view. All…