Table of contents for March 22, 2021 in Adweek

The National Football League set eye-popping new rights deals for all its TV packages last Thursday, with new agreements through the 2033 season worth an estimated $10 billion annually. The deals extend NBC, CBS and NBC’s respective Sunday game packages. ESPN’s expanded Monday Night Football agreement allows six Monday games per year to air on ABC and adds ABC to the Super Bowl rotation alongside the other broadcasters for the first time since 2006. ESPN/ABC will air the 2026 and 2030 Super Bowls. The pricey new deal means that the big four broadcasters can rely on much-needed ratings boosts from the NFL through the 2033 season. Five of the top 10 broadcast prime-time shows in total viewers and in the adults 18-49 demo this season are NFL-related because football is…

Ad-tech executives and product designers should be breathing a sigh of relief now that Google has announced it will not support a cross domain identifier when Chrome deprecates the third-party cookie by 2022. Until now, the industry has been focused on finding backward compatible work-arounds, such as redesigning device graphs to work in the first party and focusing on industrywide identity solutions, such as Unified ID. Now that cohorts are the future of audience management in digital advertising, we can finally focus on building systems to support them. Shortly after Google announced in 2018 to stop sending UUIDs in ad server log files, I sponsored a project alongside a team at MIT. We investigated the level of loss in predictive power of an algorithm given the artificial constraint of grouping…

Could the secret to making beer packaging more sustainable be found right inside the bottle? Barley, a core ingredient of beer, also produces straw, and Corona is testing a new form of packaging that uses barley straw in a more environmentally friendly packaging design. Developed by AB InBev’s Global Innovation and Technology Center, the packaging has already rolled out in Colombia and will debut next in Argentina. The goal is to adopt the technique globally. A shift at that scale could have massive sustainability implications since the process uses 90% less water than traditional cardboard.…

When it’s safe for staffers of Boston-based Hill Holliday to go back to the office, they’ll be greeted with a different space than what they saw pre-pandemic. The agency is relocating and outfitting a new space—a unique and perhaps daunting challenge considering people have spent the past year proving they don’t actually need an office to work. “We have really tough competition—we need to compete with people’s homes,” Hill Holliday’s chief creative officer Icaro Doria said. According to Doria, he’s tasked the agency’s architectural firm with one goal: “Make it better than home.” He’s not alone in this challenge as agencies consider what a return to the office looks like. Some are reimagining how their workspaces can best be utilized while others are doing away with offices altogether. “A lot…

Though many people associate greenhouse gas emissions with transportation, food production actually contributes more methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. “You can innovate with cars, but it’s really hard to innovate around cows,” said Annie Longsworth, founder of The Siren Agency, which specializes in sustainability messaging. According to a report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions globally are derived from agriculture and land. Transportation is fourth at 14%. “People conflate carbon footprint with their cars, but what we eat actually has a bigger impact,” said Sara Burnett, vp of food values and sustainability at Panera. According to a survey conducted by Morning Consult in partnership with Adweek, 51% of Americans indicated they wanted to know the impact the food they consume…

With the recent announcement from Google that it will not use alternate identifiers to track data in its products, even after third-party cookies are phased out, brands and publishers are feeling the heat. Ad-tech company Adform and market research firm Dynata conducted a survey across 12 markets in Europe and the U.S. between Sept. 1-30 around control and transparency, identity, cost efficiencies and user experience. The research shows that three-quarters of those polled believe the removal of third-party cookies will impact their business. Of those polled, a similar number (78%) said they have no plan in place for this eventuality. “With a year to go, most U.S. marketers currently have no plan in place, as only 40% are actively working on first-party IDs,” said Julian Baring, gm Americas at Adform. “In…

HITTING THE (VIRTUAL) STREETS AT SXSW ONLINE Last week, South by Southwest was hosted on an all-virtual platform from Austin, Texas. It’s the second year that the annual conglomeration of festivals didn’t happen in person, meaning that the city was again deprived of the influx of business that the event usually brings. The virtual alternative also meant a different experience for attendees, who had the option to don a VR headset to walk down fantastical versions of iconic Austin streets or jump on the connected TV app to see mostly prerecorded panels and keynotes. While some of that inspiring content still resonated with marketers, the networking opportunities and brand activations were limited—and it was hard not to feel like SXSW Online was just another Zoom experience.…

LAST YEAR WAS AN EXCITING ONE FOR performance marketers, in part because they got hyped about what scared so many professionals during the pandemic: accountability. Measurable results proved their ideas worked, and worked well. So, there’s perhaps no better year for Adweek’s Performance Marketing Awards to debut than in 2021. These 24 honorees represent a discipline that rewards tracking customer journeys to clicks, leads and sales. Performance marketing was gaining in prominence long before the pandemic toppled “the way we’ve always done it” organizational mindsets, but when widespread lockdowns forced many people to work from home, it escalated marketing model changes. From lead-generating webinars hosted on a platform that 2020 catapulted to fame, to United States Postal Service deliveries viewed via email, these campaigns delivered the accountability businesses demand and the…