Table of contents for October 31, 2016 in Adweek

It was four years ago this month that Twitter bought Vine for a reported $30 million, but now the relationship has fully withered. On a Medium blog post Thursday, Twitter revealed that it’s shutting down the looping video app in the coming weeks. It’s been known for many months that Vine has been struggling to keep marketers’ attention due to its inability to compete with Instagram and Snapchat for Gen Y’s and Gen Z’s attention, though most industry watchers were expecting the app to survive into 2017. The end of Vine wasn’t the only bad news to come out of Twitter HQ: The tech company also said it will be cutting 9 percent of its global workforce, or about 350 people, despite beating recent earnings expectations. MOOD BOARD The Week…

The 2016 presidential election has ushered in many “firsts,” from the nomination of the first female major party candidate to the first time (at least in memory) that a presidential nominee has been recorded saying that he likes to “grab women by the pussy.” In light of these firsts—and many, many others—a host of women’s magazines not exactly known for taking sides in the political arena are now making their opinions heard loud and clear. In mid-October, Vogue officially came out in support of Hillary Clinton—the first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate in the magazine’s history. “In the past, Vogue has made every effort to profile Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, but our editors recognized that this election required a different approach,” a spokesperson for the magazine said, adding that…

Comfort and ease have always been high priorities for business travelers, and as technology continues to penetrate every aspect of consumers’ lives, they have more options to make trips as seamless as possible. A new report out from Deloitte Digital used social media listening techniques to compile data about the business travelers’ experiences, with a specific focus on apps. “Knowing business travelers’ priorities can help advertisers serve up the right kind of ads at the right time, and know where to prioritize their ad spend,” said Deloitte Digital research manager Beth Kelley. “This kind of social data can inform the content of marketing campaigns, through both topics and language that will resonate with key audiences. Many of the pain points for business travelers came from the customer experience, so having…

In a Washington Post op-ed, Mckesson endorsed Hillary. Immediately, tweets flew that his vote had been paid for by her campaign or George Soros. DERAY MCKESSON is tweeting. More specifically, he’s tweeting about the rapper Young Thug. We’re sitting in a mostly empty Mexican restaurant inside the Dream Hotel on West 16th Street in New York, where we’ve been talking about the movement, about Black Lives Matter, about Campaign Zero, about his work for the Baltimore public schools, about his blue Patagonia vest, about Twitter, and community and relationships. It’s a good conversation, one we’re both engaged in. But there’s a little problem. Young Thug is one of the only other people in the room, and at some point we’re going to have to accept the fact that we’re both distracted…

‘[It] shows a lot of longterm foresight, which TV networks often don’t have.’David Campanelli, svp, director of national broadcast, Horizon Media There’s a lot more to see as truTV’s original series return for their new seasons this fall. All of the network’s prime-time original shows, including Impractical Jokers, Adam Ruins Everything and Billy on the Street, feature up to four-and-a-half additional minutes of content (each episode now clocks in at 24 minutes, 30 seconds), part of truTV’s strategy to reduce ad load by up to nine minutes—47 percent—per hour. The move came out of discussions last year among truTV president Chris Linn; Donna Speciale, Turner ad sales chief; and Joe Hogan, Turner evp of portfolio sales and client partnerships for ad sales, about improving the audience experience. “Out of that…

What’s your role as Runner’s World’s first managing director? The managing director role is a role that [focuses on evolving and expanding] the Runner’s World footprint—to think through how the brand becomes more than the magazine and the website, becomes a brand in and of itself. Part of that is evolving a lot of the current efforts we’re doing from a content perspective, and rethinking what content means. And also evaluating partnerships—the running industry is huge and it’s grown so immensely in the past couple of years, and the role of Runner’s World as the authoritative brand in running needs to evolve as well. The company and the brand have tested out a few different partnerships and haven’t been quite sure where to fully invest our time and dollars, so…

2007 MCKESSON GRADUATES WITH A DEGREE IN GOVERNMENT AND LEGAL STUDIES FROM BOWDOIN COLLEGE. July 2012 BLACK LIVES MATTER IS CREATED BY PATRISSE CULLORS, OPAL TOMETI AND ALICIA GARZA AFTER GEORGE ZIMMERMAN IS ACQUITTED FOR TRAYVON MARTIN’S DEATH. August 2014 MICHAEL BROWN IS SHOT AND KILLED BY DARREN WILSON, A WHITE POLICE OFFICER IN FERGUSON, MO. March 2015 MCKESSON LEAVES HIS JOB AT MINNEAPOLIS PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND MOVES TO ST. LOUIS. August 2015 MCKESSON, ALONG WITH FELLOW ACTIVISTS BRITTANY PACKNETT, JOHNETTA ELZIE AND SAM SINYANGWE, LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN ZERO. June 2016 MCKESSON GOES TO WORK FOR BALTIMORE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.IN OCTOBER, HE LEAVES FOR UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. July 2016 MCKESSON IS ARRESTED DURING A PROTEST IN BATON ROUGE, LA., FOLLOWING THE SHOOTING OF ALTON STERLING. October 2016 MET WITH DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE…

THE STORY The most popular and recognizable creature in the Pokemon franchise, Pikachu is the creation of the design team led by artist Ken Sugimori, and dates to the original character series that appeared in 1996. Pikachu is an electric mouse, which Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri explained this way: “‘Pika’ is the sound Japanese say an electric spark makes. And ‘chu’ is the sound a mouse makes. So Pikachu is like an electric mouse.” Reportedly, the little yellow rodent wasn’t Tajiri’s first choice as the character to represent all of Pokemon, but Pikachu’s popularity with both boys and girls quickly became too strong to ... well, to fight. THE TUMMY Pikachu weighs about 13 pounds, which represents successful weight loss. A look at late 1990s renderings reveals Pikachu was far…

1 Each bottle of champagne represents a company milestone. The giant panda bear, Skimm Skimm, “was born out of an April Fools’ Day prank gone awry, but has since become our mascot,” Zakin said. 2 TheSkimm employees are always reading new books to recommend to their audience. Before they moved into this office, they had an open house in their old one where they laid excess books on the floor in hopes they’d be taken. They thought it looked cool, so decided to keep books on the floor of the new space. 3 The duo counts meeting Britney Spears as one of the greatest days of their lives. “We were able to go backstage before the show,” Weisberg said. “We were so starstruck, we forgot to ask her if she…

‘THERE’S NO DENYING THAT INSTAGRAM’S FUNCTIONALITY HAS MOVED IN A SNAPCHATTY DIRECTION.’Topher Burns, group director, product innovation, Deep Focus Since its debut in 2010, Instagram has accrued an impressive 300 million daily users. But with the ascendancy of 4-year-old Snapchat, which now boasts 150 million fans and counting, Instagram is looking over its shoulder. Their fierce rivalry for the hearts and minds of millennials and Gen Z touched off in late summer when Facebook-owned Instagram added disappearing stories to the mix, clearly mimicking a feature that’s been key to Snapchat’s success since day one. “There’s no denying that Instagram’s functionality has moved in a Snapchatty direction,” noted Topher Burns, group director, product innovation at Deep Focus. Andy Amendola, director of digital strategy at The Community, said that the Instagram stories…

Chatbots are treated like the simpletons of the artificial intelligence world, overshadowed by movie-trailer-creating Watson and its ilk, or the suggestion engines of huge etailers. But a good implementation of a simple chatbot requires a deft understanding of the interplay between man and machine. And as technology slingshots us forward, the comprehension of this “in-between” space will be a prerequisite for any brand or advertiser hoping to make it in a world profuse with new and amazing digital experiences. When, and how, do we “hand off” the experience from the machine to the human, and vice versa? Programmatic targeting is facing a similar issue, in an industry unsure how the coupling mechanism between man and machine should work. Sure, The New York Times has accurate data on its audience, but…

‘We got to make news, and we got to talk to each other.’ Has social media has become imperative for social activism? As people of color, we’ve always seen issues of erasure, and erasure often manifests in two ways. One is that either the story is never told or is told by everybody but us. In this moment we really aren’t erased, we were literally able to push back against the cultural emeritus. There was no longer a filter. There was no longer a filter for what was news. We got to make news, and we got to talk to each other. So not only were we sort of combating larger narratives, but we were going to build community and build relationships with each other in ways that we didn’t…

Fade Task Light $250 The quality of light in your workspace might not be something you think about too often, but you certainly should: Both light temperature and brightness can alleviate (or exacerbate) eyestrain and fatigue. The minimalist Fade Task Light, built by San Francisco design firm Box Clever, lets you customize your light to suit your particular needs, from working on a computer to matching color swatches. A control pad on the lamp’s rotating base shifts the 16 LEDs from warm to cool (2700K-5600K) and dim to bright (94-450 lumens), while its flexible steel backbone can be easily bent and repositioned thanks to integrated magnets that hold it in place. Buy it: fadestudio.com BREATHE Fresh Air Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link $600 Dyson’s latest addition to its line of high-tech…

What’s the first information you consume in the morning? I wake up to an alarm that has some affirming message or a reminder of what I’m doing. Let’s say I have a lot of travel days back-to-back—sometimes you can wake up exhausted or disgruntled, so I like to write myself little love notes like “You’re doing great!” or “You got this!” or “Almost there!” It really helps! What’s your go-to social platform? Twitter. And Snapchat. And Instagram. To be totally frank, I use Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram basically all day, every day. How do you balance the three and decide what content goes on what channel? I don’t overthink it too much. If I have a funny thought, I tweet it. If I see a cool thing while I’m walking…