Table of contents for October 24, 2016 in Adweek

Wednesday night’s presidential debate resulted in plenty of attention-grabbing headlines, but it was what took place before the candidates faced off that created shock waves throughout the media landscape. At around 8:30 p.m., Donald Trump’s campaign urged supporters to tune in to its very own pre-debate show on Facebook Live. Touted as an alternative to “biased, mainstream media,” it featured interviews with Trump supporters like campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. News outlets across the country immediately began asking whether the livestream had confirmed what some media watchers have been theorizing for months—that Trump’s presidential run is, in fact, part of a larger strategy to launch his own TV news network. (In fact, the Financial Times reported just last Monday that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner had spoken…

Complaining about wireless providers is quickly replacing overeating as the great American pastime. The four big providers—AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile—have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars in their attempts to endear themselves to consumers. Their efforts might actually be working, based on social chatter. A new study by Infegy, a Kansas City, Mo.-based social media intelligence firm, took a look at social media conversations around the telecom giants and gleaned some interesting results. Most surprising: The majority of millennials and boomers are happy about network speeds—at least in what they say on their social feeds. “Customers want brands to engage with them on a personal level,” said Infegy CEO Justin Graves.…

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This summer, Jim Parsons hopped into a New York City taxi and suffered a fate that often befalls celebrities. Parsons, the star of The Big Bang Theory, noticed the driver stealing glances his way, trying to place his face. Finally, the cabbie remembered where he’d seen Parsons, though it wasn’t on the hit CBS sitcom. “Hey” said the driver, “you’re that guy in the Intel ad!” (Fun fact: Parsons got the Intel gig after execs from the brand spotted him on the cover of Ad-week in the offices of the agency mcgarrybowen.) Parsons shared the story about the cab driver with Intel CMO Steve Fund during a recent video shoot. It’s only fitting: Not only have Intel’s marketing campaigns earned plenty of buzz this year, but the brand has also…

Whether you’ve used its famous 3-Step System, spotted the unmistakable pale yellow of its Dramatically Different Moisturizer Lotion on your mother’s vanity, or gotten a whiff of its best-selling fragrance Happy, there’s a good chance you’ve had some experience with Clinique. Launched in 1968, the results-focused company has become one of those iconic brands that’s part of the beauty culture. If there was one blemish, it was that while Clinique had legions of fans, Estée Lauder wished more of them were millennials. And turning a younger generation onto a legacy brand was a job that fell to Jane Lauder. The granddaughter of company founder Estée Lauder, Jane Lauder joined the business in 1996, eventually rising to oversee brands including Origins, Ojon and Darphin. In 2014, she was named global brand…

Luke Wilson is a busy man. With 64 movie and TV projects to his credit (and three more in postproduction), the Santa Monica, Calif.-based actor doesn’t have a lot of time to hang out in Detroit—let alone stand on a roof in Detroit to host a short film. But last month, that’s what Wilson did. It wasn’t to shoot a comedy or another bro flick, either. This time, Wilson led a 360-degree camera on a tour of the former Argonaut Building at 485 West Milwaukee Ave.—better known as the Shinola factory. “To be someplace where things are getting made from scratch to completion seems like a particularly American endeavor,” Wilson notes. That’s an understatement. If Shinola’s popularity owes itself to one thing apart from the coolness of the products themselves,…

A young boy sits on the streets of India, begging, when Adam Braun spots him. It is 2006, during a post-college trip, and Braun decides to approach the child, asking him a simple question: “If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?” His greatest desire, it turns out? A pencil. Braun then reaches into his backpack and gives the boy just that. He watches as joy spreads across his face. In that moment, Braun realizes that this simple act of kindness has handed a child so much more than just a writing implement—but also, immense possibility and promise in a world where 250 million children cannot read or write and will never get the chance to go to school. That day, the idea for Pencils of…

‘So often when you’re presenting trends, it can seem somewhat intangible.’ Lucie Greene, worldwide director of the Innovation Group, JWT In late September, J. Walter Thompson’s innovation think tank, JWT Intelligence, took some of its proprietary data on the habits of millennial and Gen Z women and decided that rather than publishing another study bogged down by numbers and graphs, it would present the information in a way that more brands and consumers could actually understand—in a women’s print magazine. “So often when you’re presenting trends, it can seem somewhat intangible and quite often brands will come to us and say, ‘What should I do with this data?’” said Lucie Greene, worldwide director of the Innovation Group at JWT. Greene’s team created the magazine, titled Glass, mainly to present current…

You accepted this role during a transitional period for FCB. What do you see as the big challenges of your new job? It’s more of an opportunity than a challenge. I’m excited about the depth of our client base and having the portfolio integrated under one P&L. I didn’t come into anything broken … there’s an incredible momentum, and I feel very lucky to continue to ride this wave. FCB Chicago has been known in recent years for humorous work like “Ship My Pants” for Kmart. Do you see the tone changing? I think the tone should always reflect the personality of the brand and the conversation. The work has to be diverse; there’s no one size fits all … it’s about how you make a brand matter. What’s your…

If he had his druthers, Arnold Schwarzenegger would continue his 30-year-plus streak of voting Republican in the upcoming presidential election. In his perfect world, he’d be casting a ballot for himself. That can’t happen, of course, because the actor-politician-businessman-bodybuilder-philanthropistadvertising pitchman is a native Austrian, from a bleak working-class town called Thal. But a rags-to-riches immigrant can dream, can’t he? “If I’d been born in America, I would’ve run,” he tells Adweek one early September afternoon in the offices of the Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “Because now? This was a very good time to get in the race.” What a different contest it would’ve been. Though purely hypothetical, political observers say the man dubbed “the Governator” during his two…

Almost from the day in 1995 that GlaxoSmithKline introduced Flonase, it was a runaway hit. The nasal spray alleviated seasonal allergy symptoms without causing drowsiness, and Americans (50 million of whom have allergies) clamored for a prescription. Flonase did $600 million in sales by 2000, and in 2005 raked in $1.3 billion. But Flonase’s patent expired that year, opening the door to generic competitors. So when GSK returned to the market with an over-the-counter formulation last year, it needed an aggressive marketing plan. And digital marketing director Meredith Herman delivered it. Departing from the pharma category’s traditional reliance on TV advertising, Herman put digital front and center. “The allergy category is very competitive, and private label is never far behind,” she says. “Search impressions are massive for this category. We…

Barbie made her first public appearance at the Toy Fair in New York on March 9, 1959. She was tall, blonde and slender, and soon became one of most successful toys Mattel ever produced. But that was a long time ago. By 2012, Barbie, for years the best-selling doll in America, was in trouble. Search any parenting blog and you’re likely to come across reasons why the doll had fallen out of favor, but the main issues were body image and race. The fact was that Barbie didn’t look like many of the girls she was presumed to appeal to. This past January, Barbie—the doll and the marketing behind it—finally got serious attention. Leading that effort was svp and global brand manager Lisa McKnight. McKnight’s team brought Barbie from the…

It would be understandable for a marketer who hails from the glamorous world of beauty to be a little self-conscious about moving to a fast-food brand known for late-night snack binges by college kids. Prior to becoming Taco Bell’s CMO, Marisa Thalberg spent years at legendary cosmetic companies like Revlon, Unilever and Estée Lauder. But since January, her business has been strictly burritos and Crunchwraps. “Are you implying that [Taco Bell] is not a natural career transition?” Thalberg deadpans, before explaining that the worlds of cosmetics and convenience foods are not as different as they might seem. “I went from brands and products rooted in culture to brands and products rooted in culture, from products people crave to products people crave,” she says. Though Thalberg is less than a year…

THE NAME The 1950s-era chrome connecting script denotes “Heritage Special,” even though the styling of the bike pretty much does that on its own. THE FENDER A signature element of cruiser bikes overall, the molded front fender, along with the lace-spoked whitewalls, immediately signifies the Heritage Softail. THE TANK A signature feature of the Softail is this two-tone, five-gallon teardrop tank with a cat’s eye console on top and a chrome-and-cloisonné medallion. THE FORK Originally introduced in the Hydra-Glide model of 1948, the hydraulic front fork, thick as a beer can, is a classic feature that Harley retained for the Heritage model. In 1981, business wasn’t looking so great at Harley-Davidson. The company’s bikes—legendary as they were—had been struggling to climb from an industry-wide slump created by Japanese makers flooding…

 AKQA is known for its tech-driven, highly creative work for clients like Nike and Google, so it’s no surprise that its offices reflect this creative spirit as well. In São Paulo, Brazil, AKQA Casa oozes that quirky vibrancy baked into the agency’s core. Located in a residential neighborhood, the South American team took over the space from its previous owners—an older couple that found themselves with too much room after their children grew up—in 2014 and called in architectural firm Estúdio Penha to give the space an ecologically friendly face-lift that brought in the outdoors. “The main task was let’s make a house that does not feel like an office, but a hub that attracts the best innovative minds to come together to encourage a collaborative approach to creating the…

Every month, some conference, roundtable, festival interview or trade column presents another thought leader offering a jargon-infested declaration stating that whatever you currently accept as normal is now dead. The AOR is dead. The 30-second spot is dead. Creative departments are dead. The commercial production company is dead. Print and radio are dead. Your marketing model is dead. All soon to be replaced by whatever the heck that particular pundit is currently shilling. I know it’s a sexy, ballsy way to make your case, but enough already with all the DOA. We all know that every executive producer at every production company, agency producer and cost consultant is now muttering the same nervous refrain that clients are expecting $800,000 in production for $200,000. And somebody is going to find a…

For its 75th anniversary this year, Jeep handed its customers the keys and let them drive the brand message. Bringing its “We don’t make Jeep, you do” mantra to life, the iconic nameplate shared anecdotes from more than 20,000 enthusiasts across a dedicated microsite and social platforms. Among #MyJeepStory contributors: veterans who had driven Jeeps during their military service; owners who had taken the vehicles on the rugged trails of Moab, Utah; and a millennial woman who loaded her “pack” of rescue animals—dogs, cats and ducks—into a Renegade for wilderness excursions. “Giving owners and fans the opportunity to tell their own story adds an emotional lens that ties them directly to the brand,” says Olivier François, CMO at Jeep parent Fiat Chrysler. “They feel that sense of adventure. They feel…

Three years ago, when Denise Karkos was named CMO at TD Ameritrade, she had her work cut out for her. Her task: make the stodgy and often-character-free financial services industry relatable—even fun—to Americans. Such a feat would require a departure from how brokerages usually advertise. Not only is talking about online trading boring to most people, it risks conjuring memories of the Wall Street meltdown of 2008 and the recession it unleashed. But with years of experience at creative shops including Hill Holliday and The Via Group, Karkos knew a way around those pitfalls, and she switched up the brand’s playbook to bring data and creative together. “It’s about art and science being inextricably linked,” Karkos explains. “My team really believes in the fact that you need both the analytics…

In 2011, on a lark, Jonathan Mildenhall tried Airbnb for the first time. It turned out to be a transformative experience, he says now, one that not only sold him on the home-sharing concept but also got him thinking about how the brand could be marketed, a full three years before it became his job to do so. The occasion was the 40th birthday of a female advertising friend in London, where the Britain-born Mildenhall had worked at various agencies himself before coming to the U.S. in 2007 to help run Coca-Cola’s marketing. “I said, ‘I’m not giving you another trinket. We’re going on this thing called Airbnb, and I’m going to rent an English farmhouse. You can invite anybody you want, and we’ll be there for a week,’” he…

As anyone who travels regularly can tell you, airline marketing often bears little resemblance to the real world of delayed flights, cramped seats and screaming babies. Unless it’s first class they’re promoting, airlines face a turbulent predicament: how to make an economy carrier look attractive? Fortunately for JetBlue, Elizabeth Windram has the flight plan. Prior to joining the carrier as director of brand management and advertising this past February, Windram spent six years putting together marketing campaigns for Barefoot Wine & Bubbly. Targeted to younger drinkers, the E. & J. Gallo brand is known for the playful attitude it takes toward a stuffy product. “I got to be part of democratizing a category,” she recalls, guiding work tagged “Get barefoot and have a great time”—designed to demystify a range of…

The Field Desk $1,850 When it comes to recording ideas on the fly, laptops and tablets might score high on the portability scale, but sometimes you need to hunker down at a desk with pen and paper in hand. The Field Desk from Best Made Company will keep you prepared for such occasions, with a folding design that opens up to create a surface perfect for writing, drawing, doodling or whatever strikes your fancy. Designed in collaboration with H. Gerstner & Sons, the 110-year-old Ohio company known for its handcrafted wooden tool chests, and illustrator Ross MacDonald (you’ve probably seen his work in publications like Vanity Fair or The New York Times), The Field Desk is made from kiln-dried American cherry and features a shoulder strap, felt lining and multiple…

What’s the first information you consume in the morning? The very first thing I’m doing is [opening] my New York Times app. And then the second thing I’m doing is going to Politico. Before I even go to the bathroom. It’s become almost an addiction during the election cycle. Sometimes even in the middle of the night, I’m checking my newsfeed. It’s not good. [Laughs] Is there anyone you’re following closely on social media? I’m really into Lena Dunham and Lenny and the pro-Hillary voices out there. I’m also reading The Washington Post and very happy to work for a man [WaPo and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos] who I feel has been instrumental in unearthing some things that might change the way this whole thing goes. Your father is a…