Table of contents for November 1, 2021 in Adweek

Mark Zuckerberg is now the CEO of Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. As a social media company, “we build technology to bring people together,” Zuckerberg said, noting that while Facebook is one of the most-used products in the world, it doesn’t represent everything Meta does. “All of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: To help bring the metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.” Reaction to the rumors swirling around about the name change was mostly pessimistic, with Gartner’s Chris Ross calling it “a classic lipstick-on-the-pig scenario,” and The Social Element’s Ashley Cooksley telling Adweek, “It’s presumably more about distancing the parent company from the Facebook product, so that any toxicity in Facebook stays…

As a hairstylist, Carolyn Aronson knew her clients’ frustration with not finding a multipurpose product with simple ingredients. So in 2006, she hung up her stylist apron and founded It’s a 10 Haircare and its signature Miracle Leave-In product, and built a multinational brand that has gone all the way to the Super Bowl. Aronson’s love for hair started early. At age 8, she began changing her own hairstyle for fun. “This change was instantly empowering,” she said, “and I felt how hair could make someone feel better about themselves.” She started working at age 13 in a doctor’s office, graduated high school early and enrolled in beauty school. To build up her clientele, she “mailed out thousands of free service coupons” and booked extra appointments on nights and weekends.…

BETWEEN A GLOBAL SOCIAL movement that raised the stakes around racial equity and the harrowing peak of the pandemic, the last year has made clear that a perfunctory approach to purpose-driven marketing is no longer going to cut it. With these wake-up calls in mind, Google vp of global marketing Marvin Chow has emerged as a leading voice in modeling a new approach to cause marketing, one that engages with big societal issues in a sincere and impactful manner. “I’ve experienced the renewing energy that comes from being jolted out of autopilot,” Chow, one of our 2021 Adweek 50 recipients, says. “This experience has given us an incredible invitation—if not mandate—to burn it down and start again at first principles. Embracing that willingness to rethink everything is inspiring for me,…

Fifty years ago this month, 60 Minutes took its viewers on a tour that marked the passing of an era. MGM, the mightiest of the “big five” movie studios, was bulldozing back lot No. 2. During Hollywood’s golden age, most movies were shot on back lots, and MGM’s was the mother of them all: 38 acres of shady streets, mansions, tenements, churches and even an ersatz Great Wall of China. As he strolled down the deserted sidewalks where Hepburn, Garbo and Grant had risen to stardom, host Mike Wallace mourned “the end of the glory and the glamour.” What had ended it? The studio system had collapsed under an antitrust lawsuit just as the rise of TV kneecapped the theater business. But the true villain was Kirk Kerkorian, who’d bought…

START WITH AUTHENTICITY If you are going to start anything, think about what makes you uniquely positioned to do that. For Walker & Company, by solving my own problem [a need for simple health and beauty products], I knew there were 80% of folks who looked like me who had the same problem, and many of those folks shared the same values that I have. As a result, we were able to slowly and gradually build a [large community] who believed [in what] we did. For folks who were trying to start companies … everything starts with authenticity. Without authenticity you can’t have empathy, and empathy is everything. WHAT GUIDES YOU SHOULD ALSO APPLY TO YOUR COMPANY That’s something I try to preach all the time. Before I started the…

The third quarter was very good to WPP, which posted revenue growth of 14.7%. Chief executive Mark Read credited the jump to several sources, but there was a clear standout: WPP’s public relations services saw year-over-year organic growth of 16%, as well as 12.6% compared with 2019. “In previous times, public relations has often been the first part of our business to be cut. That wasn’t the case during Covid. But scope in their services has continued to increase,” Read explained. “It shouldn’t be any surprise with topics of purpose, reputation, employee activism, political polarization and racial challenges—people’s issues that companies are increasingly expected to wrestle with and have a point of view on,” he added. “And I think that, as a result, there’s been a lot of demand from…

In every company, there is the face of the organization and there are those who keep the body and brain operating smoothly and efficiently. Our annual Adweek 50 honors those luminaries in marketing, media and tech, offering them much-deserved recognition on their paths toward becoming household names. // This year’s honorees brought their organizations safely to the other side of an ongoing pandemic, and despite such difficult circumstances, found opportunities to achieve personal and organizational excellence. That includes Betsy Wilson, vp of digital marketing and brand management at 114-year-old UPS, who saw an opportunity to partner with small minority-owned businesses during the pandemic; NBCUniversal’s ad sales chiefs Mark Marshall, Laura Molen and Krishan Bhatia, who saw their strongest upfront ever in 2021 and are now turning eagerly toward a record-breaking…

Most every brand will tell you that its founding story is inspirational—even emotional. You’ve probably heard a few of the more famous ones. How Steve Wozniak would drop his Apple I prototype off at Steve Jobs’ house, hoping the thing would work. How high school buds Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield started an ice cream parlor because they couldn’t afford the equipment to make bagels. But few founding stories pluck the heartstrings quite like that of Yankee Candle, started in the early 1970s by Michael Kittredge II. Despite the regal trappings of that name, the Kittredges were not affluent. Michael Sr. sold ads in telephone books. By the time he was 16, Michael Jr. had a job flipping burgers. But as Christmas 1969 approached, the teenager had no money to…