Table of contents for Oct-05-15 in Adweek

Facebook users experienced a serious case of déjà vu last week when they found their news feeds clogged by friends posting some variation of a “legal notice” claiming to prevent the social network from owning its users’ information and photos (or, in some cases, charging a fee to keep it private). The cut-and-pasted statements, of course, ended up being just another recurrence of a privacy hoax that first made the rounds as early as 2012. In response, Facebook cautioned, “While there may be water on Mars, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet today.”…

Hoping that adding video from digital players will help stem the cord-cutting tide, Comcast finally announced its streaming video service, Watchable. Watchable’s beta version, which will be advertiser supported, launched with content from 30 providers, including Mashable, Vice, Machinima, Disney’s Maker Studios, BuzzFeed and Vox Media—the latter two having benefited from major investments from Comcast subsidiary NBCUniversal. Watchable will be available as a stand-alone app for iOS users, have a dedicated website and a tab on Comcast’s X1 platform.…

Advertising Week XII, the Lollapalooza of marketing and media, brought with it a trove of data illustrating the growing mobile reach of social platforms Facebook, Google, Instagram and Snapchat. There was also no shortage of numbers revealed during the New York event affirming the impact of television—and yet, even the networks are embracing mobile more than ever. Meantime, the ad business, noted Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vp of global marketing solutions, isn’t just getting into the game. “The shift to mobile,” she said, “has already happened.” Millennials spend 4 hours a day listening to music, per Pandora. Since February, Facebook has seen a 25% rise in ad buyers, bringing its total to 2.5 million advertisers regularly spending money on the platform. Following its takeover of Microsoft’s ad sales in June, AOL’s…

FRANK PERDUE THE TOUGH MAN WHO MADE A TENDER CHICKEN BECAME A MEDIA STAR BY APPEARING IN COMMERCIALS. RICHARD BRANSON SOARED WITH HIS SELF-DEPRECATINGLY SUAVE STYLE FOR VIRGIN AIRWAYS DAVE THOMAS BELOVED TV PITCHMAN BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH THE BURGER BRAND HE FOUNDED. CHARLES SCHWAB RECENTLY REPLACED IN SPOTS FOR HIS INVESTMENT FIRM BY A ROBO-ADVISER…

Jared Belsky has helped 360i, which generates more than $800 million in revenue, evolve into a digital juggernaut in his seven years as president. The New York-based shop has aggressively expanded in the areas of programmatic buying, search marketing and social media, keeping clients like Anheuser-Busch InBev, Jameson, Nestlé and Red Roof Inn on the cutting edge. “In this industry, you have to have the curiosity to constantly and continually read, learn, listen and grow,” says Belsky, 38. “The changing media landscape is fueled by ongoing advancements in technology and consumer behavior, which means we must always be focused on what’s next.” For Jameson, Belsky was instrumental in creating the first 3-D video ad for Facebook and Instagram this year. “He shares our vision for how we progress our path…

Long before she joined Instagram as director of fashion partnerships, Eva Chen was a social media pro. In 2009, while working at Teen Vogue as the beauty director, Chen, 35, began using Twitter to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at her life as a Condé Nast editor. Chen soon added Tumblr and Instagram to the mix, attracting a loyal online following with everything from skin-care product reviews to candid career advice, plus the now-ubiquitous #EvaChenPose photo documenting her accessories of the day. Impressed with her social smarts, Anna Wintour handpicked Chen in 2013 to help relaunch Lucky magazine as a shopping magazine for the digital age, making her the youngest EIC in the company’s history. Though Lucky’s revival was ill-fated—by 2014, Condé Nast decided to spin off the magazine and…

USA Network’s execs didn’t know what they were getting into when they agreed to let Sam Esmail make Mr. Robot, his drama about a mentally unstable cybersecurity engineer named Elliot (Rami Malek) who moonlights as a master hacker. Esmail, 38, admits that his pilot script “feels like there was this procedural element where we’re going to see Elliot do this hack of the week. But when I pitched out the season, I pitched out to pretty close what we saw air, and then they realized, ‘This is not going to be anything like that. In fact, it’s going to get even more bizarre and out of the box.’” Thank goodness, because Esmail created a brilliantly subversive drama full of exhilarating twists that shook up summer TV, while it also gave…

The story of Vox editor in chief Ezra Klein, not unlike the stories of so many other stars of the digital age, begins in a dorm room. It was in 2002, as a college freshman, that Klein started his first political blog. The future policy expert didn’t have much of a plan then—and even less of an audience. “I think there was this period after 9/11 when it didn’t matter if you were or were not interested in politics, because world events were interested in you,” says Klein, 31, who is also policy analyst for MSNBC. “There was one war going on and one potentially about to start, so it focused attention in a way that is unusual for American politics.” After graduating from UCLA in 2006, he landed at…

Brendan Ripp’s career came full circle last year when he was named publisher of Sports Illustrated. The son of Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp, the younger Ripp, now 37, started his career as an intern at the iconic sports title in 1996. He hasn’t slowed down since. Before his current post at SI, Ripp held several other leadership positions within Time Inc., serving as publisher at Time magazine (where, at 33, he was the youngest publisher since founding editor Henry Luce) and Money before moving to Fortune as vp, sales and marketing. Though SI’s print business continues to deliver a weekly audience of around 18 million, Ripp’s sights are firmly set on digital. “[It’s] incredibly important that we continue to diversify the Sports Illustrated brand to maintain overall growth,” as…

By 2020, there will be 1.4 million computing-related jobs in the world, but women are only on track to claim a measly 3 percent of those roles. Even as women increasingly nab top executive jobs and corporate positions, the technology industry remains heavily weighted toward male employees. Reshma Saujani wants to change that. After discovering how wide tech’s gender gap was while campaigning for Congress in 2010, Saujani opened Girls Who Code in New York’s Flatiron district in 2012 to steer girls toward careers in science, technology, engineering and math. “The schools I visited in New York City had a remarkable disparity in the way boys and girls approached technology education,” says Saujani, 39. “Our country’s competitiveness in the 21st century will depend on our ability to diversify and broaden…

Tristan Walker had already built an impressive resumé by the time he finished his MBA at Stanford in 2010, having cut his digital teeth at Twitter and developed some of Foursquare’s first ad products. The story behind getting the Foursquare gig is worth a little ink all by itself, entailing a dose of good, old-fashioned persistence as well as a plucky sense for adventure. From his California home, Walker emailed the startup’s CEO, Dennis Crowley, eight times before getting a response. “When he finally emailed back, he asked if I was free to grab a coffee the next day—in New York,” remembers Walker, 31. “I was in Los Angeles and said to my wife, ‘How do I respond to this?’ I emailed him back yes, booked a flight that night,…

Kate Spade iPhone-Charging Clutch $189 In a perfect world, we’d all travel with a backup iPhone power bank. But in reality, they tend to be a pain to recharge—not to mention that you have to actually remember to bring it along in the first place. Kate Spade’s new line of smart bags, created in collaboration with Everpurse, solves both problems in style. The clutches, totes and backpacks never need to be plugged in—just place the bag on its wireless charging pad to refuel—and since the battery is integrated into the bag itself, it’s always on hand. And did we mention that the collection is also ridiculously cute? Available at katespade.com in November TRAVEL Weekend Stow-away Rise Weekender Bag $139 Frequent travelers are all too familiar with the annoyance of living out…

Publishers’ ad-blocking headaches were front and center at Advertising Week in New York. Scott Cunningham, svp at the IAB, called ad blocking “highway robbery” for small publishers while his organization launched resources like Web code that help media brands detect when their ads are getting stiff-armed. Google and AOL execs also tackled the topic during the conference’s keynote talks. “Any threat that ad blocking is doing is because people aren’t innovating enough on ad formats and delivering value to consumers,” said AOL chief Tim Armstrong. “I ran into the Pope. You know what he told me? ‘You gotta go mobile.’”AOL CHIEF TIM ARMSTRONG AT AOL’S FUTURE FRONT EVENT…

As I’m about to turn 39, people often ask how I continue to lead a media company aimed squarely at 20-somethings. It often seems impossible to keep up with each new startup, platform or app we need to download right this second—I had barely started playing around with Meerkat and then it was all about Periscope, all while I’m still trying to find my friends to add on Snapchat. It was easier when I was younger. I had no fear. I just kept playing and experimenting, and it all felt so intuitive. But as the PopSugar brand grows older and I age, admittedly it has become harder to keep up. Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way to maintain that level of freshness and innovation as the…

Being in Istanbul during the Turkish city’s Gezi Park protests in 2013 inspired Kayvon Beykpour to create Periscope, the livestreaming mobile video app that has shaken up media and marketing. “Those events served as a seed for thinking more broadly about how powerful, authentic and important it would be to see the world [in] real time,” explains Beykpour, 28. “My co-founder Joe Bernstein and I became obsessed with the idea of building a teleportation machine—a way to see what was happening around the world, right now, through someone else’s eyes.” Beykpour’s team debuted the app at the beginning of this year before selling to Twitter in March when it was relaunched to great fanfare. Ten million people every month now use Periscope to broadcast their lives in real time, while…

Two years ago, Vine was the hottest app around, with a burgeoning group of creators who quickly mastered producing six-second videos for brands while building up millions of followers. Fast-forward, and marketers now work with many influencers to crank out sponsored content across Snapchat, Periscope, YouTube, Meerkat and Instagram. Recognizing the massive opportunity to make it easier for brands to work with social media stars, Rob Fishman and Darren Lachtman co-founded Niche in 2013, a platform that lets brands cherry-pick the top social talent to work with. “The motivation here was never to create a talent agency or collective,” says Fishman, 29. “From the beginning, we wanted to build tools for anyone on the planet who uses social media professionally.” The initial focus on Twitter-owned Vine pushed the microblogging site…

Seemingly overnight, a new type of celebrity has conquered the notoriously insular fashion industry: the social media model. She (or, occasionally, he) is young, well-connected and genetically blessed. She’s just as likely to be found in the pages of Us Weekly as on a Paris runway. And most importantly, she commands an army of millions of Instagram followers. No one represents this phenomenon better than supermodel Gigi Hadid. While the 20-year-old California native didn’t exactly appear out of nowhere—she first appeared in Guess ads as a child, and her mother, former model Yolanda Foster, is one of the stars of Bravo’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—it’s her own social media savvy that has helped her become one of fashion’s most in-demand faces. Whether she’s hosting “Ask Gigi” Q&A sessions on…

Josh Morse grew up with a passion for film, working in video stores throughout high school and college, studying filmmaking at Cornell University, and serving as a production assistant on movie sets. Post-grad, Morse worked at an equipment-rental agency—a gig he says helped him land his first agency job. “I quickly realized the only people who wouldn’t argue with me about the cost of rentals were people filming the commercials,” says Morse, 33. Morse was willing to go to great lengths to get a job in advertising—even offering one agency camera equipment in exchange for a job interview. That agency was JWT New York. While his bartering skills didn’t work initially, a few months later the shop did offer him an associate producer position. Morse later moved on to Cliff…

When Shahrzad Rafati was studying computer science in the mid-aughts at the University of British Columbia, she could see a change in how media was being distributed. “At the time, audio was shifting to digital distribution and I could see that video was going to be next,” she recalls. So Rafati did what came naturally for her: She drafted a business plan that would eventually serve as the DNA for BroadbandTV, the multichannel network that was launched in 2005 and has since become one of the largest in the digital space. BroadbandTV has evolved into the world’s second-largest multiplatform network (MPN), with 37,000 creators amassing 5.7 billion monthly views spanning verticals including gaming, music, entertainment, kids/family and news. According to comScore, BroadbandTV is the fastest-growing MPN since September 2014, recording…

While developing Lifetime’s riveting drama UnReal—set behind the scenes at a Bachelor-esque reality dating show—Sarah Gertrude Shapiro worried that audiences would see it as just satire. Then, “we had a week where we were reviewed in The New Yorker and Us Weekly, in equal measure,” says Shapiro, 37. “That was the amazing thing about this show. You can have a lot of fun with it, but people are also getting it on a really deeper level.” The show’s critical acclaim and popularity with audiences (with a median age of 43, it is the network’s youngest-skewing drama ever) validate the gamble Shapiro took after toiling as a Bachelor field producer in her mid-20s before literally fleeing California to get out of her contract. In 2005, she joined Wieden + Kennedy as…

Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin were terrified. It was 2012, and the friends, who first met at a study abroad program in college and reconnected years later working for NBC News in Washington, D.C., had just quit their jobs. “We had worked so hard to get our foot in the door and felt that we had grown up at NBC News,” recalls Weisberg. “We saw, though, that our friends—who are smart, on the go and well-educatedweren’t watching anything we were producing for a living.” So the pair, both now 29, started up theSkimm, a morning e-newsletter that tells its young female readers what’s going on in the world in terms that connect with them. “We looked at what we do first thing in the morning—grab your phone, turn off the…

How addicted are you to social media? I’ve said on record, I’m waiting for some sort of charismatic leader to take me away from technology. But until that time, I do feel pretty powerless. I did a reading vacation with my boyfriend [Key & Peele’s Jordan Peele] where we were just going to read books. I turned my phone off in the morning, and I think I went 40 minutes before I had to turn it back on. I was like, “I need to research something!” How often are you on social media during a given day? It’s probably 70 percent [of the day]. I used to smoke cigarettes; anytime you’re a little bored, you step outside and have a cigarette. Social media is like that. Any time there’s any…

With the first week of the 2015-16 TV season in the books, we have a good snapshot of which new shows seem likely to receive full-season pickups and which may be destined for early exits. On NBC, Blindspot took advantage of its lead-in from The Voice to earn a 4.5 rating in live-plus-3, while ABC had a solid turnout for The Muppets (3.8). Two shows are already on life support: Fox’s Minority Report, which brought up the rear in the 18-49 demo on Monday with a 1.7 rating, and NBC’s The Player (1.8), which pulled in less than half the 18-49 audience of time-slot rival How to Get Away With Murder on ABC.…

For years, NBCUniversal’s ratings guru Alan Wurtzel has been criticizing the deficiencies of Nielsen’s current ratings system—he says as much as 35 percent of NBC’s audience for an average episode isn’t measured by Nielsen’s C3 and C7 metrics, which don’t include most streaming activity, particularly on mobile and tablets—and he’s tired of it. “The time for just whining about this is over,” said Wurtzel, NBCUniversal’s president of research and media development. “We really need to get proactive.” As live TV viewing continues to decline—in the first week of the new TV season, three broadcast networks suffered double-digit drops in adults 18-49 versus a year ago: Fox (20 percent), ABC (19 percent) and NBC (10 percent)—networks and buyers have intensified their pleas for a new metric to accurately measure viewing across…

How does it feel being back? I never left. I’ve been coming to work at Columbia every day for more than 50 years. They just hadn’t pointed the camera at me in a while for some reason. But I do like the distraction. I can get a bit bored chasing down our salesmen about their expense report receipts. I mean, $4.50 for a cup of coffee? Did it come with a new car? What’s changed since the last time you were in commercials? In the last campaign, I was really the center of attention, and I think that served its purpose. But now I’m excited we’re going to put the spotlight on the rest of the company. We are a more global company, and it will be great to see…

Plenty of Hollywood stars have created their own lifestyle brands—Gwyneth Paltrow, Blake Lively and Reese Witherspoon, to name just a few. But none has scored quite the success that Jessica Alba has with her eco-friendly venture, The Honest Company. Valued at more than $1 billion, Alba and co-founder Christopher Gavigan built a business focused on transparency, providing products made with natural ingredients to give parents peace of mind, something Alba, 34, herself needed after she’d become pregnant with her first child. Curious about the ingredients in the products she’d keep in her home, Alba found “there weren’t the options in the marketplace that I could trust to be as responsible for my loved ones as I was,” she tells Adweek. “The brand that I needed just didn’t exist, so I…

When MDC Partners’ kbs+ promoted former president and co-chief creative officer Ed Brojerdi to the role of CEO in 2014, the agency was putting a veteran creative and “avid technologist” in charge of its general operations, and for good reason. Earlier in his career, he served as co-founder and COO of IPG’s creative technology organization Split and later helped launch digital/technology organization Spies and Assassins at kbs+. Brojerdi, 35, tells Adweek, “Being a creative business partner to our clients necessitates a depth and breadth of expertise across many facets of marketing: content, social, creative technology and so on,” adding that kbs+ has “drastically expanded our offering in the past few years and will continue to bring forward emerging specialty practices across our global footprint as we go into 2016.” Brojerdi…

For Lauren Crampsie, 34, there have been many firsts. In 2008, just four years after joining Ogilvy & Mather, Crampsie became the youngest new business director in the agency’s history. She also holds the distinction of being Ogilvy’s youngest partner ever, as well as senior partner. Then, in 2010, she was named the agency’s first chief marketing officer for North America, quickly rising to global CMO in 2012. In that role, she launched Ogilvy’s first worldwide marketing plan. Crampsie points to helping land the Tiffany & Co. and Ikea business as among her key accomplishments at Ogilvy. She is also proud of the fact that she has achieved a retention rate among her staff at what she estimates to be 90 percent. “To see my team every day and their…

Jared Grusd served as chief strategy and business development officer of AOL when it bought The Huffington Post in 2011, and in that role played an important part in the headline-making acquisition. So it seemed only natural in August of this year when Grusd was recruited from Spotify to become chief executive of HuffPost following Jimmy Maymann’s move to a new post overseeing AOL’s consumer brands, reporting to CEO Tim Armstrong. As Arianna Huffington wrote in a staff memo announcing the hire, Grusd, 39, “was part of my first discussion with Tim that led to the acquisition of HuffPost. Jared brings an incredible range of experience to the role, and the timing couldn’t be better as HuffPost continues to expand around the world and innovate in every way.” Prior to…

Anush Prabhu attributes his success in the agency world to one thing above all: big data and the insights drawn from it. Yet Prabhu, whose agency pedigree was built up during stints in planning and analytics at JWT and mcgarrybowen, insists that data is what you make it and that its applications go far beyond media buying strategy. “If there’s one thing that I’ve done across my career, it’s try to figure out how larger data-driven insights can affect how brands go to market,” says the partner and chief channel planning and investment officer at Deutsch. He adds that the principle can apply to creative work as well, explaining, “Data can be the marriage counselor between creative and media in many ways today. I have been able to move data…

Cris Rivera has brewed up some unconventional methods to reach millennials. A few months ago, the director at MillerCoors’ MIller Lite unit noticed that typography and design were trending big time on Instagram (nearly 3 million photos and videos carry #typography and related hashtags), and that the platform was attracting more millennial dudes than ever before. So, Miller Lite ran a summer campaign on the photo-sharing site that spoke to men 21-34 with specially styled fonts designed to make a splash. Keeping up with younger consumers can be a challenge, admits Rivera, 34, because “they’re constantly evolving.” Marketers must “stay on top of trends, changes in the media landscape, evolving values and beliefs and consumption behaviors.” Mixing traditional and digital media maximizes reach and boosts engagement, he says, noting, “These…

From House of Cards to boy bands, America is no stranger to borrowing things from the British and making them our own. Whenever something from her majesty’s kingdom washes onto our shores, there’s no shortage of consumers, it seems, eager to gulp it down like a cup of Earl Grey. Such is true of tabloid journalism. While the U.S. has long indulged in the guilty pleasures of political gossip, celebrity shenanigans and oddball news stories via our own headline-blaring outlets—the New York Post, Us Weekly, TMZ—somehow the edge that comes so easily to our cousins across the pond was largely missing. Enter the Daily Mail, which for 119 years has been the top dog of the British tabs and which started up an online edition in the U.S. five years…

THE MYTH “The reason everyone knows the jingle,” Tom James, son of Slinky inventor Richard James, once told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “is that we were too broke [after James abandoned the family] to buy a new one. We burned it into the mentality of the country.” THE CHARM “A Slinky just sitting there isn’t very exciting,” Betty James, wife of the toy’s inventor, once told CNN. “If it hadn’t been for Gimbels giving us the end of a counter to demonstrate, I don’t know what would have happened.” THE JINGLE The famous Slinky jingle was composed by Johnny McCullough and Homer Fesperman, with lyrics by Charles Weagley. The words changed several times as the years progressed. Slinky took its first springy steps toward becoming a fixture of popular culture on…