Table of contents for October 25, 2021 in Adweek

Climate news seems to get bleaker by the day. From a Texas-sized island of plastic swirling in the Pacific Ocean to mountains of discarded clothing washing up on the shores of Ghana, consumers are paying attention. And they’re demanding action and accountability from brands. In response, brands are experimenting with new materials, processes and business models. But while some are genuinely pursuing strategies to reduce industrialization’s impact on the planet, others are scraping by and doing the bare minimum just to look like they care. For consumers, that’s where things get fuzzy. What should sustainably minded people trust and look for in clothing brands, food companies and even wines? And how can advertisers communicate a genuine commitment to the climate? Climate Neutral is one of many organizations trying to answer…

For decades, organizations such as the Humane Society of the U.S. and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have worked toward creating a more humane world for animals. But until recently, efforts to convince consumers, businesses and governments to ban the production and sale of fur largely fell on deaf ears. The pandemic, however, may be the final push brands needed to stop selling fur. It has given consumers time to think about their values and preferences and shined a light on both threats to the environment and the role of animal fur farms in spreading Covid-19. The list of brands that have decided to go fur-free in recent months includes luxury banner Saks Fifth Avenue, outerwear company Canada Goose and luxury conglomerate Kering, the parent of labels…

How did you get to where you are today? From the early beginnings, personal and professional networking have been really important to me. I grew up with dwarfism. I chose to embrace my height difference from an early age. In my community, I was an active participant in sports, student council and honor society. I was always eager to practice sharing my story wherever I could. ‘Success is when people who I care a lot about remind me that I’ve positively impacted their life in some way.’ How do you foster strong professional relationships as you grow in your career? I truly believe that no seed goes unplanted. I try to stay in close contact with those who I meet with similar interests and career aspirations. It may be 10…

LIVING THROUGH THE golden age of television means more creators than ever are pitching nonstop to executives like HBO and HBO Max chief content officer Casey Bloys, trying to convince them to take a chance on their big ideas. And Bloys has never seen anything like it. “There’s so much material out there,” says Bloys, Adweek’s TV Executive of the Year. “It’s exciting as a development executive to think of the opportunity that’s out there for all of these shows and all of this talent that wants to work in television. It just becomes daunting. Which projects are you going to bet on, and who are you going to get in business with?” Bloys’ bets have paid off handsomely this year, from HBO’s limited series Mare of Easttown and The…

NEW YORK TIMES CEO Meredith Kopit Levien wants to make something clear: There is a difference between the news cycle and the news. That distinction—and a belief that the addressable audience who will pay for quality news will continue to grow regardless of who’s in the White House or what stage of the pandemic we’re in—will help shield the Times from Covid cohorts churning out and propel it toward its 2025 goal of 10 million subscriptions, according to Adweek’s Publishing Executive of the Year. “We are relentlessly focused on growing the Times, but we’re in an ecosystem,” Levien says. “A lot of our work is making a market for paid-subscription journalism.” The market is the roughly 100 million English speakers willing to pay for news, based on the Times’ calculations,…

IT’S NOT EVERY DAY you’re asked to collaborate with the president. For beauty entrepreneur Manny Gutierrez—known as Manny MUA—that day came this spring when President Joe Biden’s team sought him out to shoot a video with the president and his chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, about Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy. “I was so shocked—the president knows who I am?” Gutierrez, Adweek’s Digital Creator of the Year, says. “But I believe in science. I believe in the work. I was excited to get people more knowledge about the vaccine.” Gutierrez, who is vaccinated against Covid-19, states several times in the YouTube video that resulted from the collab that he’s not pushing people to get a shot, but that he wants to arm those on the fence with more information. “Baby, if…

Kammok spent $17,000 on offsets last year and plans to cut air freight emissions in half by 2022. Reformation, a clothing brand with an estimated $150 million in annual revenue, paid $159,000 to offset 28,745 tons of carbon emissions. Over the next year, it’s looking to replace conventional silk and cashmere fibers with lower-impact alternatives. Lubanzi Wines spent around $3,400 on offsets and has plans to reduce plastic in its packaging.…

The beverage category of today doesn’t remotely resemble the beverage category of five years ago—and it’s going to be unrecognizable in just five more years. That’s not because of some new technology or scientific discovery. Rather, it’s because some bold brands out there have decided to empower consumers to be healthier, truer versions of themselves. The ongoing beverage category upheaval, particularly in the growing category of low- to no-alcohol alternatives, represents a perfect microcosm of what can happen when purpose-driven brands take the lead in an otherwise stagnant category. Let’s take a look at how the narrative has suddenly flipped in the beverage and brewing category and why more brands should be embracing the vast diversity in consumer needs and preferences in their own categories. Rewriting the story for nonalcoholic…

FUTURE-PROOF YOUR MARKETING TOOL BELT Think about your career as a tool belt. As a marketer, [ask yourself]: “What are the tools that I’m going to need to be successful?” Not just now, but two years from now, five years from now.… And [ask]: “How do I get exposure and experience to connect and build out those tools?” So that when you step into this next thing—whether it is at your current company or at a future company—you have exposure, comfort and confidence. ENJOY AND EMPATHIZE Having deep, deep consumer empathy and enjoying that consumer empathy is one of those tools. That’s been very consistent for me, regardless of where I’ve been. I start with the consumer, and that helps to direct so much of the marketing activity, the strategy,…

AFTER SPENDING MOST of his career as an independent filmmaker, Sterlin Harjo had grown accustomed to the routine of debuting his movies at small film festivals, “and then they kind of die on the vine after that, and no one gets to see them,” he recalls. So Harjo kept expectations low for his first TV creation, FX on Hulu’s Reservation Dogs, about four Indigenous teenagers coming of age in a rural Oklahoma town: “I just thought, well, I hope at least a few people watch it and like it.” Instead, Reservation Dogs quickly became a critically acclaimed sensation, and just a month after its August debut, Harjo found himself and his cast presenting at the Emmys, where he fielded well-wishes from A-list fans like JJ Abrams. Says Harjo, who co-created…

AS THE EDITOR AT THE helm of New York Magazine, a source of cultural accounting for a city whose influence shapes the world in its image, David Haskell has yet to enjoy a slow news day this year. Since last October, Haskell has presided over coverage that has explored the most divisive presidential election in modern history, an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the despair of a pandemic winter, an outburst of fractious financial tools, a contentious mayoral primary, the legacy of a racial reckoning, the resignation of a disgraced governor and the unsatisfying catharsis of a city still aching from its trauma. “That ability to bounce from beat to beat and topic to topic is the New York Magazine signature, and it’s something that people count on us to…

FOR SOME PEOPLE WHO ascend to the C-suite, the journey is a smooth one. For Vanessa Pappas, chief operating officer of TikTok, the opposite is true. Pappas joined TikTok in December 2018 as general manager, U.S., after nearly eight years with YouTube, and was then elevated to general manager for North America, Australia and New Zealand in July 2019. But it was a little over a year later when things really started to get interesting. Then-President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One in July 2020 that he intended to ban TikTok in the U.S., accusing the platform of sharing user data with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and with government officials in Beijing. Trump threatened to invoke emergency economic powers to prohibit U.S. contractors from working with the…

The crucible of 2020 forced brands to reconsider how they define and express their identities. The pandemic, a racial reckoning and national politics all shaped the public’s attention and attentiveness, and the storytelling brands did reflected this new sensibility. The notion of “brand purpose” can’t be considered a mere lagniappe anymore. It’s not a gauzy statement tacked on to a commercial or a logo. Consumers demand to know what marketers actually stand for, and storytelling is how a brand’s values and voice are understood. Hope, help, humor and history were common themes brands including Apple, TikTok, Verizon, Wendy’s and even the United Postal Service explored in the past year. And as Adweek has done for the past five years, we honor the best of those efforts in our Brand Storytelling…

As you read this, 80% of the country’s annual 1.5 billion-pound pumpkin crop is finding its way to retail outlets—many of them setting out Howden pumpkins, the fat orange heirloom variety best for carving jack-o’-lanterns. Close to half of households now take a knife to pumpkins these days, though Americans didn’t adopt the practice until the middle of the 19th century. When the Great Famine sent millions of Irish émigrés to America, the old-country practice of carving scowling faces into potatoes and turnips (thought to ward off evil spirits) came to include the pumpkin, which was larger and easier to cut. By the 1930s, as shown in the photo here, pumpkin carving was a Halloween ritual bigger than trick or treating, which was just then coming into prominence. Most Americans…

Before the credits to 1999’s The Best Man finished rolling at the theater, Kimberly Wilson was ready to mail her internship application to BET headquarters. Wilson was looking for a career change when she saw actress Nia Long’s character, Jordan Armstrong, a music and TV producer at the network. “I remember looking at the screen and thinking, ‘Oh my god, I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I want to do that,’” Wilson said. “Her character was polished and educated and just seemed to have it together.” Wilson’s resume didn’t match the profile of a typical BET intern. The Chicago native had just gone back to college at 27 and had no experience in marketing, but her folder landed on the right person’s desk. “After I mailed…

WHEN COURTNEY A. Kemp created Power—about James “Ghost” St. Patrick’s dual life as a nightclub owner and drug dealer—a decade ago, her strategy was simple. “I was trying to make basically a Black Sopranos, with some Homicide: Life on the Street pieces, just cobbling it together from the things that I loved growing up,” she says of the hit series, which debuted on Starz in 2014 and ran for six seasons, drawing more than 10 million viewers a week at its peak. Little did Kemp know she had actually stumbled into her version of the Marvel or Star Wars universe: a franchise that has become the holy grail for networks in the Peak TV era. Power ended in February 2020, but Kemp, Adweek’s TV Creator of the Year, built that…

HOTTEST MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR The Atlantic The Atlantic’s reporting, especially its coverage of America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, propelled it toward 1 million paid readers this year. It now has more than 833,000 total print and digital subscribers, the highest circulation the magazine has achieved in its 164-year history, per the Alliance for Audited Media. Readers especially responded to journalist Ed Yong’s must-reads on the pandemic, earning Yong a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting this year. The Atlantic’s narrative podcast Floodlines also won a 2021 Peabody Award, and the publication launched three new podcasts as well as a multiyear cross-platform project called Inheritance, about American history, Black life and the resilience of memory. —Lucinda Southern HOTTEST IN FOOD Epicurious, Condé Nast The culinary world was rocked this year…

When October rolls around, millions of Americans take comfort in the familiar harbingers of fall: The leaves turn colors, the sun sets earlier, Starbucks pours pumpkin spice lattes—and a six-block line forms outside the nearest Spirit Halloween. Odds are, in fact, that you’ve stood in that line yourself. Not only do 65% of adults now celebrate Halloween, according to the National Retail Federation, but those who do will drop $3.3 billion on costumes. And though it’s easy enough to find a Dracula cape or a pair of Bernie Sanders inaugural mittens online, many of us prefer to browse the aisles of the local Spirit Halloween. Which isn’t hard to find: This year, there will be more than 1,400 of them. “We are the world’s largest Halloween retailer,” senior marketing director…