Table of contents for February 21, 2022 in Adweek

The halftime show was not the only ’90s throwback in Super Bowl 56—QR codes, invented in 1994, made appearances in not one but three ads. Most notable was cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase’s minutelong (!) spot featuring a color-changing QR code that bounced around like a screen saver, though ads from Rocket Mortgage and Crypto.com had codes too. The surprise comeback of the QR code began during the pandemic on restaurant menus and in-store marketing, and is continuing on screens. They’re good for getting consumers to take action because they combine the mass scale of TV with the interactivity and analytics of digital promos, according to Flowcode CEO Tim Armstrong. QR placements in ad products like pause screens on streaming platforms Hulu and Peacock are starting to become more common because much…

Greg Via broke into sports marketing by helping Michael Jordan sell Gatorade. He pulled Derek Jeter, Roger Federer, Tiger Woods and Thierry Henry together to pitch Gillette razors. But one big name explains his switch from traditional sports superstars to esports personalities: Duke Nukem. “I was a closet [gamer] when I was at Gatorade: I played PC games and played Duke Nukem and tried Doom,” he said. “I just loved those games, but never had a console or any of those things growing up. When we got a computer, I said, ‘You know, I’m gonna start.’” Now as the head of partnerships at Cloud9 Esports, Via helps the gaming company and its teams “speak marketing.” But his initial career interests didn’t involve esports, or even sports marketing. Running track and…

What’s one thing we can start doing today to help close the gender wage gap? Something we’ve done at Bacardi is bringing in a third party to complete a pay equity analysis. That way you get a full view of how people are compensated across genders, races, functions, cities and more to ensure pay equity. I’m a big believer that you need information and transparency to then find solutions. ‘Giving yourself permission to remove or reframe impasses is key to making the best of every situation.’ Can you share a situation in which you’ve been unfairly characterized in the workplace, due to conscious or unconscious bias? How should women address these when they occur? I once heard a marketing director say about me, “Anyone who talks like that can’t be…

Durant captured the sports world’s attention on Independence Day in 2016 when he left the Oklahoma City Thunder and signed with the Golden State Warriors. On the court, Durant formed a superteam with Stephen Curry and won back-to-back championships in 2017 and 2018. But the move to California also led to Durant’s awakening to the tech space, giving him exposure and access to entrepreneurs and startups right in his backyard. “Being in the Bay Area, playing for the Golden State Warriors and being around that network in Silicon Valley for three years really helped us and threw us in the fire, basically,” Durant says. “We were learning along the way. The San Francisco area really taught us and put us in the right position to do what we’re doing now.”…

GO WITH YOUR GUT We spend the first half of our careers being the most learned, overprepared, thorough people. Great decks, great articulation, practice in front of the mirror so you can be good at details. Then you actually reach a part of your career where you change that and you go with your gut. You realize you don’t have to be the most thorough person presenting—it’s a very different experience. For me, I’ve always gone with my gut. It goes down to what is right for you at the time. DISTILL WHAT MAKES YOU DIFFERENT I was asked on a panel once, “How does it feel to be 50?” And I said, “Why do we always judge ourselves by our achievements in life?” At 40, you’re supposed to own…

MICHAEL JORDAN A six-time NBA champion and the NBA’s undisputed GOAT, Jordan has created a lane in branding and business that is unparalleled in athletics. A subsidiary of Nike, the Jordan Brand generated $4.7 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2021. Jordan is also invested in sports data company Sportradar, sports betting and fantasy sports DraftKings and, like Durant, Dapper Labs. MAGIC JOHNSON A five-time NBA champion with the Los Angeles Lakers, Johnson started Magic Johnson Enterprises in 1987. Johnson offered $100 million in loans to minority- and women-owned companies struggling due to the Covid-19 pandemic through his EquiTrust Life Insurance Co. The former MVP put up $50 million in Guggenheim Baseball Management’s $2.15 billion purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012. JERRY WEST West, best known as the…

Sometimes, niceness is just flexibility, a lesson Breeze Airways learned from adopting key portions of the Southwest Airlines template (though the challenger airline has a few more miles to go before it can manage the elder airline’s malleability). It’s why Southwest offered free cancellations and changes long before Covid-19. It’s why it blocked off middle seats, reduced boarding groups from 30 to 10, and limited or eliminated food, beverage and alcohol service on board during the pandemic. It’s the reason why, as passengers returned, the airline began restoring pre-pandemic space and amenities, but made changes during the process. After a rough October 2021, during which it canceled more than 3,900 of its flights (3.8% of all flights, compared to 2.1% for the rest of the industry) and had just 67%…

Let’s pretend it’s 150 years ago and you wanted to have your picture taken. You’d have to get yourself to a photo studio and be prepared to spend time and money. The photographer would get under the drape of his wet-collodion camera—a milk crate-sized box bolted to a tripod—then remove the lens cover. Since it took up to five minutes for the light to react to the silver halides on the glass plate, you’d have to sit completely still, a task accomplished by attaching metal braces to your head and neck—“iron instruments of torture,” as one observer termed them. Sound like fun? Of course not. Sitters hated it. But photographers, who dreamed of cameras they could take into the field, hated it even more. One of those was a German…

A house that welcomes you when the door opens. A stove that makes dinner. Rosey from The Jetsons. These are the promises of smart home technology. But like the flying cars of that 1960s cartoon, they remain just that: promises. Sure, we have robot vacuums and voice assistants and doorbells controlled with an app. And even though 39% of American households have the most familiar element of smart homes—voice-activated smart speakers—up to a quarter of people who buy Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices stop using them within two weeks of purchase, according to internal documents obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek. And people who do use Alexa-enabled devices primarily use them to listen to music, set timers and turn lights on and off. Not exactly life-changing stuff. A recent analysis of conversations on Reddit…

In the annals of customer service, it’s hard to look at something as impersonal as the drive-thru window as a big step forward. Does anyone feel normal yelling into a microphone from the front seat of their car? But if the drive-thru is not an intimate invention, it’s an essential one—or so the pandemic has taught us. According to NPD, the number of drive-thrus surged by 22% in 2021, suggesting that Americans are happy to trade standing at the counter for some social distance. The drive-thru’s main selling point, though, has always been speed. A bank in Syracuse, N.Y., reportedly opened the first drive-thru window in 1928, but it was fast-food chains (starting with West Coast staple In-N-Out Burger in 1948) that enshrined it. These days, we’re all used to…