Table of contents for September 2, 2019 in Adweek

Congratulations and condolences to creative marketers. The good news: You can stop brainstorming about, “What is our Whopper Detour?” The bad news: Now you must answer, “What is our Popeyes chicken sandwich?” The product launch that set a new bar for buzz, Popeyes’ new sandwich exploded onto the scene this month and quickly transcended from menu addition to cultural phenomenon. Thanks to the brand’s social savvy (via agency GSD&M) and being embraced by the massively influential force known collectively as Black Twitter, the launch led to unprecedented lines at every Popeyes location nationwide. Then it happened: The chain sold out. While running out of a test product—as KFC did this past week with its plant-based Beyond Fried Chicken—is a good problem to have, running empty on your hottest, permanent menu…

With its 2018 revenue at $55 billion, Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla of online advertising—but it wasn’t always this way. Fourteen years ago, Adweek (which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year) stood aghast at the soaring growth of a social network called MySpace. You remember MySpace, don’t you? Well, you should. In 2005, as we reported, the platform signed up a gang of heavy-hitting brands including McDonald’s, P&G, Sony Pictures and Boost Mobile—no small part of why News Corp decided it was worth plunking down $580 million for the site. “For advertising dressed up as in-demand content,” we observed, “MySpace members eagerly interact.” Or, at least, they did interact. MySpace’s reign was a brief one, its audience siphoned off by another platform you might have heard of: Facebook.…

Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a bold prediction for the not-so-distant future: Thanks to technological advancements and the resulting productivity gains, we’d all be working 15 hours a week. Almost 90 years later, the average American is working more than double those hours. Does that sound familiar to any marketers? For years now, the message has been that marketing automation technologies like programmatic will unlock efficiencies, freeing people up to focus on more creative work. That vision has also yet to materialize. So, a short while back, my colleagues and I at the Google Media Lab—the team that manages the media strategy for Google’s advertising campaigns—laid out and started enacting a plan that we think will make that vision a reality. These are the four steps…

The value in accurately resolving customer identity across platforms is beginning to get the recognition it deserves. But to leverage identity, marketers know they must first face an enormous obstacle—getting the data right. That can be extremely difficult to do from within a large company that still employs legacy approaches, with everything stored in multiple data siloes. Encouragingly, “Bridging The Gap: Advanced Identity Solutions for People-Based Marketers,” a Forrester report commissioned by Neustar, indicated that brands are beginning to understand just how necessary it is to be data-driven in today’s landscape. The report found that three-quarters of marketers surveyed anticipate their spending on ad tech, mar tech and programmatic tools to increase in 2020, with 24% expecting to spend significantly more. While the investments are a welcome sign, they also…

HERE’S WHAT IT TOOK TO MAKE A VERY BRADY RENOVATION HAPPEN: $3.5 million to buy the property 9,000 work hours 130 days of shooting 8 HGTV stars 6 Brady Bunch siblings 150 person construction and production crew 1,200 square feet of stone and brick work 30 handmade pieces of furniture 16 custom paint and stain colors 2,000 square feet of custom redesigned wallpaper and fabric…

At Nuggs, a direct-to-consumer brand that creates pea protein-based nuggets, customers are technically eating a prototype. Thanks to the direct line DTC brands have to customer feedback, a company like Nuggs works on new versions of its nuggets, making it an ever-evolving product where the next box of Nuggs is better than the last. Nuggs is part of the growing market of companies challenging CPG in a variety of categories, from the bathroom to the kitchen. Companies like Brightland, a digitally native brand selling California-grown olive oil, and Magic Spoon, a DTC cereal made for adults, are attracting venture capital and an organic following based on how these firms are challenging the CPG world and what they see in the market that others like General Mills and Tyson don’t—or just…

With a million Glossier customers acquired just last year, how do you build meaningful relationships at that scale? Scaling our connection with each of our customers is what will allow us to build a successful and enduring business. Digital experiences enable us to do that across a number of channels, from Glossier.com to Instagram to Inside the Gloss to our customer experience team (which we call the gTEAM). Most customer experience teams are trained to minimize contact with customers or direct them to an alternative channel to be as efficient as possible—that is the opposite of how we think about CX. How have you been able to differentiate the brand through marketing? We center our marketing efforts around the experiences we create for our customers and community: physical (product) experiences,…

Product integrations are a staple of HGTV shows, but they weren’t possible on A Very Brady Renovation. “We needed the house to match identically, so we couldn’t really have the hindrances of needing to work any specific products in, because it wasn’t that type of project,” says HGTV svp Loren Ruch. But Discovery Inc. ad sales chief Jon Steinlauf still found a way for eager brands to partner with the show, lining up three major sponsors, including Wayfair and Constant Contact, which will be spotlighted in ads, in-show billboards and custom content that will air in and around A Very Brady Renovation. Wayfair’s “robust” sponsorship package, says Steinlauf, revolves around the online retailer’s efforts to “bring home a ’70s look in a 2019 way that’s fresh and modern” in four…

Brick-and-mortar shoppers are pretty evenly distributed across generations, but there are some key demographics that stand out, according to new research from consumer intelligence company Resonate. Families with a combined income of $25,000 to $50,000 a year account for 25% of brick-and-mortar shoppers, making them the largest group, followed by those earning $50,000 to $75,000 (20%). And while minivans filled with kids may come to mind when thinking about shopping at the mall, over half of consumers who regularly shop in stores have no children (57%). “Despite the growth in online shopping and direct-to-consumer brands, the majority of the population, across all age groups and income levels, still shops brick and mortar at a regular rate,” said Ericka Podesta McCoy, CMO, Resonate. “However … in order to tap into the…

The Animal Legal Defense Fund has brought a class-action lawsuit against Oregon dairy company Tillamook, alleging that the firm engaged in deceptive marketing practices by conveying its products as being supplied by small family farms. The complaint, filed in the Circuit Court of the State of Oregon on Aug. 19 on behalf of several residents of the state, contends that Tillamook “misrepresents the nature, source, characteristics, and production practices of its dairy products.” While the company’s traditional home is in the lush environs of the Oregon Coast in Tillamook County (its corporate headquarters are in Portland), it has emerged that a majority of the milk for its products comes from industrial farms in the more arid, eastern part of the state. The complaint contends that the company violates Oregon consumer…

The art of copywriting is as old as advertising itself, made great by industry legends like David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach. But as marketers begin turning toward tools that automate copy, is the craft in danger? Over the past few years, brands have been toying with different ways AI can double as a wordsmith. While these experiments have proven that AI’s ability to “learn” mass amounts of information give it a unique advantage when it comes to churning out copy, it’s also become increasingly clear that there’s only so much the technology can provide from a creative perspective. Take Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles, which trained IBM Watson to spit out copy for Toyota Mirai ads in 2017 as part of a campaign geared toward tech and science enthusiasts. While…

In 1960, Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt launched the age of modern marketing with a Harvard Business Review article where he wove a powerful argument, saying that companies should stop defining themselves by what they produced and instead reorient themselves toward customer needs. Using the decline of the U.S. railroad industry as an example, Levitt suggested that the railroads didn’t stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. In fact, it was rapidly growing, but the need was being filled by other means of transportation like cars and airplanes. The problem, according to Levitt, was that they assumed to be in the railroad business rather than the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented, product-oriented instead…

DRIVE SOCIETAL IMPACT I think “good”—today, in the context of what’s happening in the world—is actually one of the best words. I love the fact that it can be the unifying theme across all of these different brands. So with the mission about being a force for good, we launched these three big pillars. One is around sustainability. So we have this objective to get to a million acres of regenerative agricultural [soil] in the next 10 years. And that is a huge thing—that we can really impact climate change. General Mills is one of the biggest food manufacturers [and] can have a very active role in that. And so we have this idea, whether it’s an hour spent of your time as an employee or dollars that you give…

after his company, the former Discovery Communications, bought Scripps Networks Interactive in March 2018, David Zaslav immediately began looking for ways to make a big splash and “supersize” the audience for HGTV and the other networks in his expanded portfolio. During an early meeting with his new management team, the Discovery Inc. chairman and CEO recalls, he told them, “Let’s open up the lens. There’s a lot of great characters and properties and opportunities out there. What would we do if we could do anything?” The first answer came that July, when reports surfaced that the Brady Bunch home—i.e., the house in L.A.’s Studio City that had been used for exterior shots in the iconic ’70s sitcom about a blended family with six siblings—was on the market. During an HGTV…