Table of contents for March 21, 2022 in Adweek

After Covid-19 canceled the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament in 2020 and restricted the crowd size for last year’s return, advertisers were eager to be part of the first “normal” March Madness games since 2019. CBS and Turner Sports sold out their advertising inventory for the tournament earlier than ever, bringing in more than last year’s estimated $1 billion combined haul. “If you look at this past year, having sports air when they’re supposed to air and having arenas full of excited fans, it’s just shown us that audiences can return, even in linear environments, to live sports at levels they were pre-pandemic,” said Jeff Gagne, svp of strategic investments at Havas Media. “From a marketing standpoint, it’s a lot of upside, certainly versus the last two chances, where…

The careers of most successful female founders often resemble a winding road of unanticipated pivots and graceful (but no less begrudging) concessions until they find their footing. This is not to say these women did not have well-orchestrated plans for their businesses, but reality has a way of interfering with even the best-laid plans. That reality, in the case of female founders fighting their way to the top of their fields, predominantly comes in the form of capital constraints, lack of organizational support and broad-based, often subconscious gender bias. While capital availability and organizational growth are easier to measure through, for example, invested dollars and head count, subsurface bias is harder to root out. After working with hundreds of female founders, a few patterns have emerged that map to higher levels…

ENJOY THE JOURNEY Brown: What’s been most important for me is realizing the people that I would work with would become friends who I now also consider family. As I’ve gotten older in my career, I’ve started to adopt contributing back to culture as a responsibility. Because I would not be here without culture, without watching Michael Jordan commercials, without enjoying those Sprite commercials, music, entertainment—all these things have put me on a path to be where I am now. USE CULTURE TO CONNECT Paige: We went out and hired young marketing majors, journalism majors, and all the major cities gave them a press pass. We said, “Go out and capture culture.” I just remember all the emerging talent that these kids brought back. They were capturing artists like Vic…

MediaCom’s credo, “People first, better results,” has been on full display over the past two years. As the pandemic’s uncertainty upended the industry in 2020, the WPP media behemoth nurtured and grew relationships with clients while taking care of its employees and cultivating new capabilities. In 2021, that same mindset steered MediaCom out of choppy waters and toward growth. The agency won a mass of new business, with $2.9 billion in account wins globally, and it had a record year for retention and expansion, with $4.7 billion based on its clients’ media spend. The success streak resulted in MediaCom being named Adweek’s 2022 Global Media Agency of the Year, marking two consecutive years of claiming the honor. A long string of victories, including JPMorgan Chase and Google, culminated in WPP’s…

WENDY’S One of Spark Foundry’s greatest strengths is its relationships with media partners like WarnerMedia, says Wendy’s CMO Carl Loredo. The agency capitalized on the network’s IP, creating a Rick and Morty-themed drive-thru in Los Angeles to celebrate the launch of new limited-edition Coca-Cola flavors Mello Yellow Portal Time Lemonade and Berry Jerryboree. Customers waited in a line of cars for nine hours to experience the activation, creating organic videos on TikTok and Twitter that were viewed almost 60 million times. CAMPBELL’S A single insight—that adults eat Goldfish crackers by the handful—led to billions of impressions on TikTok for Campbell’s. Ebony Jones, vp, content at Spark, says with that in mind, there was no one better to center a TikTok challenge around than Boban Marjanović, who has the largest hands…

Canned water Liquid Death’s latest campaign is not just on brand for its entertainment-first messaging, but also its star: Jackass’ Steve-O, who had the brand’s name tattooed below his right ear using Liquid Death water instead of ink. Once it heals, the body art disappears. The concept came from creative agency Party Land, with Liquid Death’s Andy Pearson noting, “The only benefit to getting tattooed with water is pain. So it seemed like a perfect fit for Steve-O.”…

The “girl boss” movement, an exclusive empire that has allowed outdated and exclusionary feminism to flourish into the 21st century, has officially reached its expiration date. Famously coined in 2014 by author and businesswoman Sophia Amoruso, girl boss culture has undergone a complete memeification by virtue of TikTok users, who pair the phrase with words like “gatekeep” and “gaslight” to underscore its damaging effects. According to Amoruso in her book #Girlboss, the term embodies an aspirational woman who is “in charge of her own life.” The movement, which rejected the misogynistic belief that women in power are overbearing or bossy, has branded feminism as an individual’s endeavor as opposed to a group effort. While the movement served a purpose for some women during its early days, the state of inclusion…

When Benefit Cosmetics opened its first store in San Francisco in 1976, the brand’s founders, twin sisters Jean and Jane Ford, also inadvertently opened the door for transgender people to feel seen. At the time, Benefit’s store was in the Mission District, a San Francisco neighborhood with a large LGBTQ+ community. Over the last 46 years, the company has maintained that connection as it’s grown its product line, featured trans models in its campaigns and partnered with trans beauty influencers like Nikita Dragun. “It’s so natural for Benefit because inclusivity and breaking traditional beauty norms is in our DNA, so it hasn’t ever been a conscious choice to use them [in campaigns],” Toto Haba, global svp of marketing and communications at Benefit Cosmetics, told Adweek. While some brands like Benefit have…

When he founded VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk didn’t even know media and creative agencies had split apart decades earlier. So it didn’t occur to him to have separate creative and media agencies inside his fledgling holding company, VaynerX. Becoming a full-service agency was always the plan. Legacy holding companies, on the other hand, are now trying to mash their separate agency brands back together. Campaign data, modern leaders have figured out, can lend strategy to creativity. But getting remarried can be messy when it disrupts the status quo and long-established practices like creatives leading the creative. VaynerMedia entered the creative space over a decade ago. It rose to prominence alongside Vaynerchuk, whose approachable social media presence turned out to be rocket fuel for VaynerX and its subsidiaries. Despite its name, VaynerMedia…

POKÉMON “P25 MUSIC” On Pokémon Day, millions of fans from around the world tuned in for a virtual concert experience, featuring a motion-capture version of Post Malone performing an exclusive concert. The campaign turned music fans all around the world into Pokémon fans, with more than 2 billion media impressions and 10 million streams. The campaign was a Cannes Lions 2021 gold winner. PEDIGREE “DOGVERTISING” To boost sales of Pedigree Dentastix in Croatia, the brand and agency saw an opportunity to gain canine and pet parent attention in Croatia’s out-of-home landscape. MediaCom formed technology partnerships to build a machine learning tool that could detect dogs in images with 99.99% accuracy. When dogs and their owners passed a digital out-of-home site, the campaign served them an ad, using creative optimization to…

Everybody is scrambling to figure out their metaverse strategy, with Heineken unveiling the first beer brewed for the virtual world. Announced inside a brewery created within Decentraland, Heineken Silver is the first metaverse beer “with no calories, no hidden ingredients and no beer. Try … to try it now.” Of course, it was all a lighthearted joke created by Publicis Italy and Le Pub. “[Heineken Silver] is a self-aware idea that pokes fun at us and many other brands that are jumping into the metaverse with products that are best enjoyed in the real world,” head of brand Bram Westenbrink said.…

Direct-to-consumer razor brand Harry’s and big-box retailer Target generated a lot of buzz in 2016 when they announced a partnership intended to marry the best of DTC with physical retail. Shortly after, according to research from analytics firm Numerator, Harry’s sales tripled as big-name competitor Gillette saw a “substantial decline in share” at Target. Today, Harry’s products can be found at a range of traditional retailers, including Bed Bath & Beyond, CVS and Walmart. In fact, while Target had one of the most noteworthy early deals, Walmart has proven to have a hearty appetite for DTC brands itself. Since Harry’s expanded to America’s largest retailer in 2018, it has been joined by a flurry of additional DTC brands, including feminine care brand Lola, skin care brand Bubble, health care brand Ro,…

BOSE In an effort to drive its DTC sales, Bose partnered with VaynerMedia last summer to build a DTC engine that could fuel success over the 2021 holidays. In Q4, using the VVM, the agency tested content with dozens of cohorts, unlocking new fan segments including football fans, music lovers, productivity masters, college students and holiday gift-givers. VaynerMedia created more than 160 pieces of social content with thousands of permutations. As a result, across all Q4 activity, VaynerMedia campaigns drove orders on Bose.com up 213% more than the campaign target. TINDER Tinder needed to entice Gen Z women in order to drive growth, but that demo had preconceived notions of the platform as a “hookup app.” To alter Tinder’s perception and drive downloads, it homed in on TikTok, Snapchat and…

Publicis Media delivered an astonishing year of new business in 2021. Its agencies—Spark Foundry, Zenith and Starcom—reeled in some of the biggest fish, as the group collectively landed Walmart and automaker Stellantis. Zenith snagged over a billion dollars in managed media spend for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Inspire Brands’ Dunkin’ and Arby’s, while Starcom ended 2021 by wrestling McDonald’s $700 million account away from Omnicom. In total, Publicis Media won nearly $7 billion in new business, according to COMvergence’s 2021 new business report. When adding the accounts the group retained and lost, the net value of Publicis Media’s new business ranked first among the industry’s media groups. “We are truly living the Power of One, but it took us awhile to get there,” says Chris Boothe, chief operating officer,…