THE ROCK IS ON A ROLL


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September 25, 2017 Important to Important People

Megyn Kelly has had it with political nastiness By Jeanine Poggi

BREAKING WITH THE BELTWAY

THE ROCK IS ON A ROLL

Dwayne Johnson owes his success to manager Dany Garcia. She’s just getting started By Ann-Christine Diaz

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Sheryl Sandberg and her team are betting that video is Facebook’s future. They’re in for a fight By Garett Sloane

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NEWSPAPER U.S./CAN. $9.99 U.K. £6.95

PRIMAL STREAM

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September 25, 2017 Important to Important People

BREAKING WITH THE BELTWAY

Megyn Kelly has had it with political nastiness By Jeanine Poggi

p. 56

Dwayne Johnson owes his success to manager Dany Garcia. She’s just getting started By Ann-Christine Diaz

THE ROCK IS ON A ROLL

Sheryl Sandberg and her team are betting that video is Facebook’s future. They’re in for a fight By Garett Sloane

p. 40

NEWSPAPER U.S./CAN. $9.99 U.K. £6.95

PRIMAL STREAM

p. 22

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September 25, 2017 Important to Important People

BREAKING WITH THE BELTWAY

THE ROCK IS ON A ROLL

By Jeanine Poggi

p. 56

Dwayne Johnson owes his success to manager Dany Garcia. She’s just getting started By Ann-Christine Diaz

p. 22

Sheryl Sandberg and her team are betting that video is Facebook’s future. They’re in for a fight By Garett Sloane

p. 40

NEWSPAPER U.S./CAN. $9.99 U.K. £6.95

PRIMAL STREAM

Megyn Kelly has had it with political nastiness

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9/15/17 8:47 PM

@ardentreverie

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Content created in 2 hours.

@thenomadicpeople

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We’re so confident you’ll love us, we’re giving you $25k on the Social Native platform.

Social Native. The Future of Content Advertising. socialnative.com/adage

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Photography by Helmut Stelzenberg

Creativity Pick

MIDNIGHT MUNCHIES? A NEW OUTDOOR AD LIGHTS THE WAY TO MCD’S IN THE CITY OF LIGHTS Date September   Client McDonald’s   Agency TBWA/Paris

Important to Important People

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Inside this Issue

“To me, a brand was Kellogg’s. But I have gotten comfortable with the term.”

Behind the Headlines 4 New and improved

Q&AA

Don’t let this happen to you

Flipping the bird

Why Ad Age chose to redesign

Fixes and fails: Four brands in crisis

A teˆte-à-tête with Publicis Groupe’s Arthur Sadoun

How to right Twitter, in 140 characters or less

Outgoing Glamour Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive, to The New York Times on the era before magazines were brands

Tips for transformation

Agencies tout their biggest changes Publisher Josh Golden Associate Publisher, General Manager, Marketing & Brand Heidi Waldusky

Creativity 19 Iconic changes

Famous logos before and after

Upon this Rock

‘Ballers’ star Dwayne Johnson opens an advertising agency

Fitzloff’s next act

Editors

Former W&K creative opens a Portland shop called Opinionated

Credit crazy

Adland is awash in creative credits. But what do all those people really do?

Shanghai

Tour Shanghai’s ad industry–and don’t forget the Avocado Lady

Editors at Large The Media Guy Simon Dumenco Personal Products/Research Jack Neff

Feature 40 Facebook has TV-like ambitions for its Watch video service

Accentuate the positive

A new reality

Cover stories

Saving grace

A retrospective of the biggest headlines in Ad Age history

It’s a snap (not)

TV networks learn the hard way how to adapt to Snapchat

Editorial Beat Sheet

Megyn Kelly on her turn to more uplifting news

Janie’s got a gun

Firearms get a big business boost from women

Datacenter Director, Data Analytics Bradley Johnson Director, Data Management Kevin Brown Senior Research Editor Catherine Wolf

City Spotlight 35

Watch list

Editor Brian Braiker Executive Editor Nat Ives Deputy Editor Judann Pollack Managing Editor Roberta Bernstein Member & Custom Content Editor Ann Marie Kerwin

Female executives battle African-American stereotypes

How Walmart found its footing in a brutal retail environment

Reddit is ready for its close-up The site plans a cleanup and has a new video push.

Digital Content Producer Nefertiti Anderson Creativity Editor Ann-Christine Diaz Asia Editor Angela Doland Media Agencies Megan Graham London Editor Emma Hall Retail, Finance Adrianne Pasquarelli Media Jeanine Poggi Chicago Bureau Chief E.J. Schultz Ad Tech, Ad Fraud, Search George Slefo Tech, Social Garett Sloane Agencies, PR Lindsay Stein Global Editor Laurel Wentz Food Jessica Wohl Creative Services

Opinion 95 Can these brands be saved? Simon Dumenco has ideas for reviving a trio of losers

Political divide

Strategists debate how to fix the Democratic and Republican parties

Classic ad review

How Listerine built an empire on fears of spinsterhood

Subscriber services: 877-320-1721, fax 212-210-0465, outside U.S.: 313-446-0450, email: [email protected]

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Creative Director Erik Basil Spooner Director of Video Terry Moseley Senior Art Directors Jennifer Chiu, Tam Nguyen Video Producer David Hall Digital Content Producer Chen Wu

Advertising, Sponsorship & Insights Sales General Manager, Revenue & Client Partnerships Jackie Ramsey Senior Manager, Client Partnerships Alex McGrath Senior Manager, Client Partnerships Brent Rupp Senior Manager, Client Partnerships Liz Spitaleri Manager, Client Partnerships Danika Felt Senior Account Executive, Agency Relations Karla Jordan Sales Coordinator Alexis Marrero Program Management General Manager, Product & Technology Kevin Skaggs Director, Program Management Kerri Ross Senior Marketing Programs Manager Emily Chiang Marketing Programs Manager Eniko Skintej Associate Marketing Producer Diane Firmalino Marketing & Audience Development PR & Communications Rachel Sandler Senior Audience Development Manager Maria Giatrakis Marketing Coordinator Emma Jarry Conferences & Events Senior Director, Conferences & Events, Executive Producer Tina Marchisello Associate Director, Conference & Events Nicole Nelson Senior Editor, Events Anna Sekula Event Content Manager Rocquan Lucas Events Producer Danielle Deluca Advertising Production Prepress/Production Director Simone Pryce

Crain Communications Inc

Printed in the U.S.A.

Chairman Keith E. Crain Vice Chairman Mary Kay Crain President KC Crain Senior Executive Vice President Chris Crain Secretary Lexie Crain Armstrong Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Rance Crain Chief Financial Officer Robert Recchia

Founder G.D. Crain Jr. (1885-1973) Chairman Mrs. G.D. Crain Jr. (1911-1996)

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/15/17 9:58 PM

Follow the eyeballs.

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INSIDE THE NEW AD AGE A year in the making and decades in coming By Brian Braiker

Brian Braiker is the editor of Ad Age. Isn’t that fancy? Follow him on Twitter at @slarkpope

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Hello. Welcome to the new Ad Age. For the past 12 months, while we’ve been diligently putting out our fortnightly (yes, that’s a word) magazine, we’ve been also been hard at work in secret, building something new. For you! Ad Age has been around since 1930. It has a storied and influential heritage. An early tagline, reclaimed in this reboot, was “Important to important people.” Since you, dear reader, are important, please know we did not take lightly the decision to rebrand. But the fact is, while our reporters, editors, designers, publisher and sales people have remained at the cutting edge of marketing, branding and messaging trends, the visual expression of the Ad Age brand had become a bit … fusty. Let’s play some buzzword bingo! It was time to pivot. This space was in need of disruption. Speaking of disruption, our industry is in the throes of a massive one. And it’s nearly impossible to see disruption as it’s happening. That’s why

we’re here. To define the disruption, and guide you through it. For the new look, we sent out an RFP to 10 design agencies. The brief was to bring us into 2017 in a way that accurately reflects the goals and ambitions of Ad Age as a media brand—not just a trade rag. Not that there’s anything wrong with trade rags. We ended up going with the Original Champions of Design—or OCD, which is a perfect name—for its impeccable taste, love of print and strategic understanding of what it is to build a multiplatform system. Ach, buzzwords again, sorry. Translation: They’re making us look good—wherever you find us. And that’s the point. Ad Age is not just a magazine. It’s not just a website. We’re an idea—whether it’s on a podcast, a video, an Alexa skill, an Instagram Story or whatever the next vital platform is. Except maybe Snapchat. Should we join Snapchat? Ugh, Snapchat. About that idea. We’re remaining true to our core DNA. Ad Age has

better access to and understanding of the advertising landscape than anyone. Period. But it’s time to widen the aperture. Everything is a brand. Everything is an ad for itself. So our coverage needs to reflect the broader culture beyond the weeds of our industry. We’ll still get into those weeds, but we’ll also explore the flowers. And we’ll do it with a tone that’s inviting, accessible, wry, witty and sharp. Finally, yes, we’re officially “Ad Age” now. A minor adjustment, maybe, but it reflects a shift that goes deeper. When was the last time you called us “Advertising Age,” anyway? For more on our new logo, the driver of this new design system, check out page 32. Our own Ann-Christine Diaz dissects Ad Age logos past and present, as well as other recent rebrands—some more successful than others. The theme of this rebrand issue, is, fittingly enough, reinvention. And this shines through each of our three different cover stories (collect them all!). Ann-Christine profiles Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the pro-wrestler turned megastar who is no stranger to reinvention and brand building. We sent Garett Sloane to Menlo Park to profile Sheryl Sandberg and her team as Facebook attempts to redefine the social network as TV’s next frontier. And speaking of TV, Jeanine Poggi interviews Megyn Kelly, who is repositioning herself as a morning-show host. New recurring features include an entire Creativity section, city spotlights, a regular Q&AA (see what we did there?), throwbacks to vintage ads and data. Lots of data. This isn’t merely a new look. This isn’t window dressing. This is a new Ad Age for a new advertising age. Things are moving faster every day. Which means they’ll never be this slow again.

Ad Age September 25, 2017

Photograph by David Hall

Behind the Headlines

Stop thumbs.

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Behind the Headlines Whoops!

DISASTER AREA Brand disasters follow no script: Nose goo on pizza (Domino’s). Poison in a pill (Tylenol). An oil spill that kills 11 and wrecks the basin of an ocean (BP). They can pop out of nowhere and from anywhere, even, say, the mouth of a stalwart star news anchor who lies about an attack he was never part of (we’re looking at you, Brian Williams). They can reflect something endemic to a corporate culture or an anomaly that nonetheless pulverizes all the good that came before it. But in the end, the reasons don’t matter. The mess needs cleaning up— the job of marketers and agencies and crisis management teams that will (hopefully) ensure that in the coming months or years, few will remember the nightmare, and fewer still will care. We profile four recent brand crises, taking a look at their fails and the ways they attacked them. Some, it seems, are recovering better than others.

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Volkswagen: Diesel Duplicity By E.J. Schultz Volkswagen went from Fahrvergnügen to Farfrumlegal in the wake of its 2015 emissions scandal. And once-proud owners who drove diesel VW vehicles for their environmental appeal were not shy about expressing their outrage over the company cheating on emissions tests. One ad agency even sold magnets at VWsham.com meant to be displayed on VWs with slogans such as “Future former VW owner,” “VW. German for FU” and, yes, “Farfrumlegal.” “We had a surge of interest,” says Nat Gutwirth, a partner at Philadelphia-based agency Lefthand Creative, which created the magnets in partnership with Jonathan Perloe, a communication strategist. “People who were driving these cars were embarrassed for having been bamboozled, so we wanted to give them an emblem of their outrage to share their discontent. We’re still getting orders here and there.” But two years later, VW appears to

How four brands reacted to recent calamity—and what worked Illustration by Ryan Snook

have put the worst of the scandal in the rearview mirror, based on its sales and profits, even as it shells out billions of dollars to settle legal claims. Globally, the Volkswagen Group reported second-quarter operating profit that more than doubled. In the U.S., unit sales of VW branded vehicles jumped 6.4 percent in the first eight months of 2017, according to data compiled by Automotive News. Sales at VW Group of America, which includes Audi, were up 5.5 percent. Volkswagen Group’s stock has not fully recovered, however. Volkswagen’s common shares traded for 136.30 euros on Sept. 8, compared with 165.40 euros on the same date in 2015, days before the scandal broke. In the midst of the scandal, VW resisted the temptation to run a big-budget apology campaign that might have only brought more attention to the issue. Efforts have been more tactical, like buying newspaper ads in late 2015 that declared, “We’re working to make things right,” while plugging a customer goodwill program. In the U.S., the comeback strategy

involves selling more family friendly SUVs and electric vehicles, and promoting high-tech features such as driver-assistance systems. In May, VW turned to a grandma for help, putting a 78-year-old Irish immigrant in a series of ads for the new Atlas SUV in a campaign by Deutsch L.A. That was followed by a cute ad calling the Volkswagen Tiguan the “new king of the concrete jungle” as the vehicle is shown passing a giant inflatable King Kong outside a dealership. In late August, VW got good buzz when it confirmed it was bringing back its iconic hippie-era Microbus, this time as an electric vehicle called the I.D. Buzz, slated to arrive in 2022. In the coming years, VW will have Tesla in its sights as it plans to introduce electric versions of all 300 vehicle models in its lineup by 2030 as part of a new $24 billion program called “Roadmap E.” CEO Matthias Mueller predicts that “the transformation in our industry is unstoppable. And we will lead that transformation.”

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/15/17 1:46 PM

Win hearts and minds.

There’s a new playbook for building brands in a mobile world. How ready are you to embrace it? fb.me/advertisingweek

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9/12/17 2:34 PM

Behind the Headlines Whoops!

Free chips and guacamole. Buy one burrito, get one free. Online games. New ads. None of it could save Chipotle after its food made some customers sick. Now the “Food With Integrity” chain is pinning its hopes on a new hero: queso. “You shouldn’t underestimate how much potential it has,” Chief Marketing and Development Officer Mark Crumpacker told Chipotle investors in July, ahead of the fast-casual food chain’s national queso debut. It’s been about two years since E. coli-induced restaurant closures, norovirus and salmonella outbreaks first put Chipotle on the defensive, and it has yet to find firm footing. Early apologies to the public fell flat. Its stock price plunged. And a mix of fixes, including the implementation of new cooking procedures and staffing protocols, led by James Marsden, the newly hired executive director of food safety (think: more hand washing and staying home when sick), didn’t help its bottom line. Last year was bleak: Comparable sales plunged 20.4 percent, transactions declined 14.4 percent, and total revenue fell 13.3 percent to $3.9 billion. And Chipotle had other issues to contend with, such as Crumpacker’s arrest on cocaine charges, an activist investor buying shares, shuttering its small ShopHouse Asian chain and board shakeups including the departure of the co-CEO, Monty Moran. And just as things were improving—Chipotle’s same-store sales rose in the first two quarters of 2017—bad news reared its head. A malware attack hit card transactions in March and April. A fresh norovirus outbreak at a Virginia location in July was believed to stem from someone working while sick, proving that issuing protocols doesn’t mean everyone follows them. And, oh yeah, rodents fell from the ceiling of a Texas location, an incident captured on video. Though it may have had more to do with a structural issue in the building than store cleanliness, the video went viral and viewers were plainly disturbed. Chipotle is forging ahead, hoping some of its latest efforts will kickstart a rebound: app updates, playing up its clean-label ingredient lineup in new ads and service tweaks. It’s also continuing to open hundreds of locations each year, with plans for its first drive-thru. After all, some patrons need more than queso to convince them to give Chipotle another shot. 8

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Samsung: Blowing Up the Bad Way By George Slefo In less than a year, Samsung dealt with bad press on more separate fronts at one time than probably any marketer you can think of. Yet despite the onslaught of PR disasters— phones that caught fire, washing machines reported to injure their owners and entanglement in a scandal that toppled the president of South Korea—Samsung somehow managed to generate record-breaking profits and win back consumers. The most notable fiasco followed the August 2016 debut of Samsung’s much-anticipated Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, the battery of which had a tendency to catch fire. By October, the U.S. Department of Transportation had banned the phone from commercial airplanes. After a recall, an internal investigation, a resumption of sales with a “safe” battery and the subsequent evacuation of a Southwest Airlines flight when a Note 7 started emitting smoke, Samsung gave up on the model. There were also lawsuits and memes—lots of memes. A month later, another product line added fuel to the, uh, fire. In conjunction with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Samsung recalled 34 models of its top-loading washing machines “due to risk of impact injuries” from excessive vibrations or lids coming loose. There were nine reports of wounded consumers, “including a broken jaw, injured shoulder, and other impact or fall-related injuries,” said the commission. As its products evoked Stephen King’s 1986 movie “Maximum Overdrive,” in which machines turn against humans, Samsung’s de facto CEO, Lee Jae-yong, found himself in the middle of a far-reaching political scandal in South Korea. Last month,

he was convicted on charges of bribery and embezzlement, and sentenced to five years in prison. If the bizarre onslaught hurt the company’s fortunes, however, it seems like it’s going to pull through pretty well. Operating profit in the second quarter hit $12.7 billion, a new high for the company, and its mobile division fell but remained in the black. Earlier this year, Samsung also snagged three top honors at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for a Galaxy smartphone ad about an ostrich learning to fly by using VR. Experts say Samsung was able to survive its crises by halting all marketing for a time, save for an apology ad, and being open with consumers, regulators and the media. Last November, it addressed the Note 7 debacle with a full-page mea culpa in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post, which noted that “we are truly sorry.” During the Oscars telecast in February, Samsung ran several commercials that focused on its rigorous product testing. But it also began to pivot back to other messages: YouTube personality Casey Neistat appeared in another spot, representing and courting the sort of creative types who shoot and produce everything with their phones. And Samsung significantly raised the ante when in March it introduced its Galaxy S8 phone, delivering a curved screen, better colors, facial recognition and a slew of other upgrades. This month, it released the Galaxy Note 8, the successor to the explosion-prone version.

United Airlines: Air Rage By Lindsay Stein The scene was a shocker: David Dao, a doctor who refused to give up his paid-for seat to a United Airlines employee in April, was forcibly pulled out of it, screaming, and then dragged down the aisle by aviation security officers. Upset passengers, some up in arms, shot the scene on phones, and videos—one of which shows the doctor’s bloodied face and pleas “to go home”—that quickly went viral. Hard to imagine things could get worse. But later that month, a giant show rabbit died during a United flight and then was cremated by the airline before the cause of death was determined, leading its owners to cry cover-up.

So much for the friendly skies. “Years of brand building have been lost, and won’t be recovered anytime soon,” says Gene Grabowski, partner at PR firm Kglobal. And he cautions not to be misled by United’s last quarterly report, which showed consolidated traffic (revenue passenger miles) increased 3.9 percent, and consolidated capacity (available seat miles) jumped 4.6 percent in July, year-over-year. It represents, Grabowski says, “short-term success.” The airline, of course, is trying to get back into consumers’ good graces. It has made a number of changes since April, such as adding new flight routes, eliminating red tape by adopting a “no questions asked” policy on lost luggage and increasing customer compensation incentives—up to $10,000—for voluntary rebooking. It also created the new role of senior vp of customer solutions and recovery, tasked to step in when a customer’s trip goes off course.

“Years of brand building have been lost, and won’t be recovered anytime soon.” Gene Grabowski, Kglobal

“We recognize that we’re on a journey to earn back customer trust,” writes Maggie Schmerin, director of brand PR for United Airlines, in an email. “And we’ll continue to work harder than ever to put our customers at the center of all we do.” The airline’s united front would be more effective if mishaps were avoided. But April was followed by new turbulence in July, when United gave a toddler’s paid-for seat to a standby customer, forcing the mother to hold the baby the entire flight. At month’s end, Comic-Con passengers were banned from packing comic books in their checked luggage in what was likely a misinterpretation of an old Transportation Security Administration blog post. The brand is trying “to paint a rosy picture while it continues tripping over itself in customer relations,” says Hennes Communications VP Howard Fencl. “To repair its reputation, United needs to upend its corporate culture and back up its promises with concrete action.”

Illustration by Ryan Snook

Chipotle: Botched Burritos By Jessica Wohl

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/15/17 1:19 PM

Enterprise software for an un-enterprise world.™

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9/13/17 1:13 PM

Behind the Headlines Here to help

#FIX IT!

Embrace your Twitteryness Reject the trolls Reward Engagement #TwitterOptimist @thinktradigital Liz Taylor, CCO, FCB Chicago

It’s too easy to experience Twitter in other media. No #fomo for not being on it. Make content that makes Twitter a destination. #exclusive @sfheat John Elder, CEO of San Francisco-based agency Heat

Three unfunny tweets and you’re kicked off. One intolerant tweet and you’re killed. @McCann_WW Susan Young, executive creative director, McCann New York

If I were Twitter, I would go to @adambain’s house, back up a dump truck full of cash

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to bring him back to oversee revenue AND product. @MikeDuda Michael Duda, managing partner, Bullish Inc.

That’s easy: Lifetime, non-reversible ban for @realDonaldTrump. @sethmnookin Seth Mnookin, director of MIT’s graduate program in science writing, and contributing editor, Vanity Fair

Since Twitter is a great forum for news as it happens it should create a “BS index” for any verified user. #unfakethenews #bullshittometer @davidlbaldwin David Baldwin, founder of Baldwin&, “a hybrid branding digital advertising mobile social media brewery thingy in Raleigh, NC” (per its Twitter bio)

Create Critter, a feed of cute and friendly woodland creatures we can

turn to when Twitter hatred brings us down. @jasonsperling Jason Sperling, executive creative director, RPA

Enact a rule that for every mean, troll-like tweet someone sends, they have to send five nice ones. @kelseyjoynelson Kelsey Nelson, director of social influence at Greenville, SC marketing agency FerebeeLane

You teach the world to write. @winstonbinch Winston Binch, chief digital officer, Deutsch North America

Monetize the stream with ad-supported personalized engaging content/products to watch, read, browse and buy. @yankeejoe Joe Hyrkin, CEO of digital publishing platform Issuu

With the exception of Russian bots, arguably no one has been more loyal to Twitter— more devoted to it, more addicted to it, more dependent on it—than media and marketing people. We’ll just come out and say it: We love you, Twitter (or love-hate you, depending on the moment—or Moment). And we’re sorry you’ve been going through a rough patch (declining U.S. user base, shaky revenue, @realDonaldTrump). We really, really want you to thrive. And so 140 media and marketing people have come together to give you some advice on how Twitter can save itself—in 140 characters or less.

Stop yourself from becoming a propaganda machine, we’ve got enough of those. @RobWeatherhead Rob Weatherhead, founder of Bidex, the London-based conference about biddable media

Buck the trend. Embrace the “filter bubble” by recommending more targeted, personalized content—and less of everything else. @JesKirkwood Jes Kirkwood, content and community marketing manager at San Francisco visual marketing software company Autopilot

Impose a get-yourhead-out-your-ass rule: 10-follow limit on people in your own industry. Five for media people. @kenwheaton Ken Wheaton, novelist and former editor of Ad Age

Twitter needs to find a mass audience: building features and marketing itself to become as sticky with the rest of the world as it is with media obsessives like myself. @thejongardner Jonathan Gardner, director of marketing at image performance platform ShareIQ

In a growing sea of noise, Twitter must be able to identify what its niche communities want and need. Become a trusted ally in their quest. @Dylan_Mac95 Dylan Macdonald, marketing and communications manager at Glasgow digital pharmacy startup Organised Health Technologies

Find a business model that accepts the reality that everyone who wants to use Twitter uses Twitter. (Good luck!) @pkafka

Use the Open Brand Safety effort to define hate and fake news sites, then extend the mute option to block such sites if the user so chooses. @craignewmark Craig Newmark, founder, Craigslist

Twitter needs to nail the problem of meaningful connections. #StopTheFireHose @bamonaghan Beth Monaghan, CEO and co-founder of Boston-based InkHouse Media & Marketing

Take. His. Phone. #MAGA @DocMastracchio Karla Mastracchio, Tampabased media analyst

Actively work to stop #fakenews covefefe. @acasale Andrew Casale, president-CEO of adtech firm Index Exchange

Peter Kafka, senior editor, media, Recode

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/14/17 3:46 PM

@twitter should modify @WesternUnion’s #telegram model & charge per character after 5 free tweets a month. Also, use telegrams’ retro design. @Matthaber Matt Haber, Bay Area journalist

Twitter should help publishers guarantee reach to its followers without gatekeeping them. Also if it created affinity groups, we’d be able to leverage it in so many ways. @HIGH_TIMES_Mag Adam Levine, CEO, High Times

@Twitter said 2016 a #transformationyear but every hour, day, year has to relentlessly transform and be user focused = good4advertisers @lindsaypattison Lindsay Pattison, chief transformation officer, GroupM and CEO, Maxus Worldwide

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Keep pursuing sponsorship opportunities that actually provide value. Promoted Tweets are too easy to scroll past. Find bigger fish to fry. @eleanordowling Eleanor Dowling Semeraro, media consultant and former Twitterite

There are only two tiny - factors holding @ Twitter back: Scale & a real value proposition for advertisers. Like I said, tiny, right? (1/3) All seriousness, @Twitter should take a page out of the @Foursquare playbook - engagement+content+data or, maybe, merge the two. (2/3) P.S. – All of this comes from a HUGE @twitter, @jack fanboy. (3/3) @rmguest00 Rich Guest, CEO, Tribal Worldwide North America

Tweets, but editable @reckless Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief, The Verge

I wish #BlackTwitter would buy shares of $TWTR and proxy vote. Twitter needs public governance. @Jack is failing us. @jmgrygiel Jennifer Grygiel, Asst. Professor of Communications, Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications

Knock it off with the algorithmic stuff and growth-hacking. You’ll never be Facebook but at least you can be good. @jeffbercovici Jeff Bercovici, San Francisco bureau chief, Inc.

Demonstrate that no one is above the Terms of Service and suspend POTUS. @espiers Elizabeth Spiers, founder of media lab The Insurrection and founding editor, Gawker

Bring back Vine. Find a way to monetize the platform and let me enjoy stupid, six-secondvideos again. @willyfrederick Will Jarvis, University of Missouri journalism student (‘18) and recovering Ad Age intern

Exclude everyone but Trump from engaging with Twitter. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? @aaronhicklin Aaron Hicklin, founder and editorial director at Grand Editorial, editor-in-chief, Out magazine

Take better advantage of real-time insights. @tcammett Tarah Cammett, VP-marketing at database software company VoltDB

The massive amount of real-time conversations could unlock massive targeting opportunities for programmatic video advertising. @fsinton

Offer a paid subscription option that’s spam- and Trump-free. @McCann_WW

Frank Sinton, founder-CEO of mobile video platform Beachfront Media

Change from social platform to destination for breaking news. Most news hits Twitter before other media, often from the horse’s mouth! @MrBuchuk

Embrace the fact that all we need from it is comedy and memes. #justsaying @HayetRida Hayet Rida, senior strategic planner, FCB Chicago

It can’t survive on ads alone. It needs subscriptions products. @MichaelWolff NYC Michael Wolff, contributing editor, The Hollywood Reporter, and founder, Newser

Daniela Vojta, executive creative director, McCann New York

Daniel Buchuk, director of communications at customerlogistics startup Bringg and former social media manager at the BBC

Focus resources on building a time machine to go back to 2010 and accept Google’s offer. #NeverGoingToFixIt #IMissMySpace @GilEyal Gil Eyal, CEO of influencer social analytics platform HYPR

For more tweets, go to AdAge.com/140fixes

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AGENCY HACKS THAT TOOK GOOD TO GREAT Change is hard. But there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a spectacular reinvention

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Behind the Headlines The transformers

By Lindsay Stein

Business never stays the same, and neither should your agency. Here, industry leaders describe the best changes they’ve made along the way— moves that run the gamut from cosmetic to existential. Their shops broke down walls, literally and figuratively, to reinvent themselves. Maybe they can inspire you to do the same. Below, their favorite changes, lightly edited: 1 Opening a second office across town to make commuting easier for team members who don’t live near our downtown Los Angeles headquarters. It’s allowed us to take the sting out of L.A.’s horrendous traffic and make a really meaningful difference in everyone’s overall quality of life.

Josh Beane, founder and CEO, Idea Farmer 2 Our commitment to the idea that “Everyone is a creative.” Ari Halper, FCB New York’s chief creative officer, coined the phrase, and we’ve come to embrace it wholeheartedly. Great ideas can come from anywhere. Now everyone has skin in the game when it comes to the products we deliver.

Karyn Rockwell, CEO, FCB New York

The decision to focus on culture and to define our culture by a set of core values. We ask everyone to operate around these values, and to believe in them. They are: Be one, do great work, have fun, give back and grow. 3

Chris Weil, chairman and CEO, Momentum Worldwide

Expanding our age demographic. Many marketers and agency owners crave the millennial perspective 4

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and prioritize assembling a team of millennials to rely on for their unique insights and contributions (and we are no different). However, we realized that we were missing the perspective of seasoned, veteran executives. The three 50-plus veteran ad and communications executives we added have had the immediate impact of contributing to our perspective as an agency, and influenced a more empathetic touch to the way we manage our clients, projects, vendors, media, staff and marketing philosophies. Shanté Bacon, CEO and founder, 135th Street Agency

Moving to our current space. We had really cool offices in 4,000 square feet, but it still felt like a startup. When two floors became available in San Francisco’s financial district, it was a chance to put our own stamp on a space and signal to potential clients that we were all-in.

toughest, happiest first weeks after birth is the greatest education of why a mother’s journey back to work is very different than a father’s.

deeply internal way as a team—a shift, a knowingness in what we’re striving for. It’s motivated us in ways that revenue and renown never could.

Susie Nam, chief operating officer, Droga5

Steve Stoute, CEO and founder, Translation

8 A weekly open-review session where any project team can present work in progress for feedback. We invite people from all disciplines. It’s reinforced the centrality of our client work ... and it offers everyone the opportunity to take responsibility—and receive acknowledgement—for their contributions.

12 In 2009, our management team retreated to Soho House for a brainstorming session. We were meditating on what the soul of Grey was and someone (no one knows quite who) put forth “famously effective.” The light bulb went off. It was an embrace of the past but equally future-facing.

Bruce Henderson, chief creative officer, Jack Morton Worldwide

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John Matejczyk, executive creative director, co-founder, Muhtayzik Hoffer 6 The creation of the Last Silo. We put a goal on the table to make everyone capable of working at the intersection of multicultural thinking and hyper-cultural execution. I was moved to action after our president decided to attack Mexicans. We couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.

Jason DeLand, founding partner, Anomaly

Extending our paternity leave and supporting fathers as well as mothers has given us incredibly positive momentum as we work toward more gender parity. For new fathers to be home during the most emotional,

9 We are seriously engaged in data and other sciences to make us smarter, allow us to measure effectiveness and review the dynamics of measurable advances. We speak with neuroscientists and connect with people to resonate in consumers’ lives. In order to communicate to individuals, you have to stand in their shoes.

Carol H. Williams, president, CEO and chief creative officer, Carol H. Williams Advertising

The introduction of our Mediaco content-creation unit as a branded specialty unit allowed PR to step out of its swim lane, proving that PR has the creative and strategic chops to not only participate on integrated marketing teams, but to lead them.

Michael Houston, global president, Grey 13 Moving the company from the woods of northern Massachusetts, where the agency lived for 39 years, to the heart of Boston in 2009. The world had evolved and so many of the brilliant young minds weren’t willing to reverse commute into the woods, so we moved the agency to where the labor was.

Alex Leikikh, global CEO, MullenLowe Group 14 Opening an architecture practice in 2009. It’s the very special link that makes our business model unique.

Bertrand Cesvet, CEO, Sid Lee

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Andy Polansky, CEO, Weber Shandwick

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11 It’s somewhat intangible. More than ever, I feel we are driven by purpose. Not in the marketing way of telling the world why we exist and what we uniquely offer. Rather, in a

15 One improvement we made came from us focusing on the DNA that built this place, when Mike Shine and John Butler were out shooting spec spots. The culture was to make things on your own—prototype ideas and use those prototypes to learn what to do and what not to do. Sometimes the best change is just reminding yourself of who you are.

Keith Cartwright, executive creative director, Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners

Ad Age September 25, 2017

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Behind the Headlines Questions & Ad Age

Q&AA: ARTHUR SADOUN

Publicis Groupe CEO dishes on rivals, his breakneck first 100 days, his raison d’être for the next 100 and—mais oui—Marcel By Brian Braiker Illustration by John Jay Cabuay

Arthur Sadoun’s public coming out as president and CEO of Publicis Groupe was in June at Cannes. There the industry did a collective rosé-spit take over his pronouncement that the world’s third-largest advertising holding company would take a year off from all awards programs to shift its spend toward a new AI-powered professional assistant platform called Marcel. Slim and dashing, Sadoun, 46, is now repositioning the holding company as a “platform” with a flat leadership team and a client-centric orientation that has more in common with consultancies than traditional agencies. Sadoun walked Ad Age through his first 100 days—and next 20 years, “If I’m lucky.” Our conversation has been edited. You’re the group’s third CEO in 91 years. What burden does that come with? What people do not see is that when you look at the history of Publicis, it has always been in tandem—two people. It was Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet and Maurice Lévy for decades. Then it was Maurice Lévy and Élisabeth Badinter. And you should not underestimate the role of Élisabeth Badinter as chairman of the board. And now it’s proven to be working as a new team, which is Maurice Lévy and myself. So he’s still very much involved? He’s still very much involved and the roles are very clear: As the chairman of the board, he is in charge of the strategy. And as the CEO, I am in charge of the execution. We have a long history of working together, of arguing together, of deciding together. 14

What do you argue about? I would say 90 percent of what we discuss is client, and on client we never disagree. Where we could disagree is on people. I can find that somebody is great and he may think the opposite. What is the raison d’être for Publicis in 2017? This is where I have been working a lot in the last three months: It was incredibly important to redefine what we brought to the market. How do you do that? If we want to continue to be a valued partner for our clients, we have to be able to face their challenges with them. And their challenges are very easy: First, low growth. Second, a huge need for efficiencies and cutting costs. Third, brand trust and the difficulty for the brand to be trusted. Has adjusting to allow for more transparency in the wake of the rebate stuff last year put downward pressure on revenue? No. Transparency is great news for the industry because there is no way we will continue to have valued relationships with our clients if we don’t bring back trust. If we are not able to be an indispensable partner for our client in their transformation, we will lose our raison d’être. If we do—bringing in the right level of alchemy between technology and creativity—then the future looks bright. Is this where we get to Marcel— the alchemy of technology and creativity? Happy to talk about Marcel, but we need to put it into perspective. There Ad Age  September 25, 2017

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Behind the Headlines Questions & Ad Age

“What is different from me and the other holding company CEOs is I am the only one who has been in the creative business. ... And I value, first of all, creativity and the ability of creativity to deliver the value our client needs.”

is for me absolutely no doubt that we need to transform. So the first thing we did is make sure we define well our model. Our model is based on two pillars, which is: Marketing transformation—how do you improve, change, reinvent the consumer journey through media, creative and digital—which you can find in some of my competitors. But it’s based on the premise that you can’t do that properly if you don’t transform from within the business model of our clients. And this is where we have a unique place. You’re reinventing the business models of your clients? You can’t say to a client that “we’re going to reinvent your omnichannel strategy, and we’re going to build a consumer-based approach,” if you don’t work with them in reinventing their own model. In other words, acting more like a consultant. Exactly. And so the question is how can we continue to be their trusted partner in what is our raison d’être: creativity, putting data at the core and transforming their marketing model while enabling them to do that fast in an efficient way and for the long term by partnering in reinventing their business model. We work with the CMO on the creative and marketing part. And we work with the CIO on how we can link one with the other to be more efficient. This is a unique model. No one else can do it for the unique reason no one can be credible on both sides. You have WPP, Omnicom, IPG, that could work on the marketing side. Sometimes we’re better, sometimes not. You have the Accentures of the world working on the digital business transformation part. But none can link both. And you don’t think the consultancies pose a threat when they start acquiring agencies? If you look at what Accenture is doing and the price they are paying for some creative agencies, you understand why this is the future of our industry: 16

You have to connect the consumer part with the enterprise part. Talk about the internal cultural challenge of this repositioning. It is a huge challenge. How do you bring people together? It’s fun to see that in the same week we win against Anomaly the Diesel business globally, and we win against all those system integrators for the experience of McDonald’s with [global consulting and technology services company] Capgemini. The same company is doing both. Why is that important? At the end of the day, it is an integrated team. You’ve said you want Publicis to be a platform. What does that mean? Platform is a French word, so I can give my own definition! First, a platform is a flat organization. What we have done is put together a management committee that is running 100 percent of the P&L and is taking all the decisions. And this is a big difference with the other holding companies: I am not making the decisions alone. One of my reporters says he heard that the idea for Marcel came to you when you visited Sapient in India. Is that fair? No, it’s where I made sure it could work. [Laughs.] We want to be the one who will reinvent this category. Why? And how? Because we have never been more needed than today. We did Marcel for our people. The new generation wants a very simple thing: They want to be able to do things, to produce. They want to be able to have access to more things and influence more things. They want to be recognized. We are bringing to life a platform that will give the new generation an opportunity to do more. We believe Marcel has a role to play as a disrupter of the category. It’s easier to wait for some things to change than to change yourself. The problem is if change happens faster than you, then you get destroyed.

Do you find that historically, senior executives have not protected creative departments or creative capabilities? You’ve had increasing workloads and decreasing fees for years. I don’t know. The great thing is that creativity is not only coming from advertising. It’s in media, it’s in tech. It’s everywhere. This is why I love my job, by the way. The reason why we will succeed is that we will, most of all, put creativity at the center of everything. You can go to a consultant. What makes a difference in a good relationship is the product you bring. We are here to deliver an idea that will change the future of a company. You’re casting this as your differentiator. Maybe what is different from me and the other holding company CEOs is I am the only one who has been in the creative business. I come from the creative business. And I value, first of all, creativity and the ability of creativity to deliver the value our client needs. Are you saying that because you want your creatives to know that’s what you value, even though you’re not going to be submitting for awards? I think it has been overblown. Not going to Cannes one year does not mean we are changing our strategy. I heard from some that I am not standing for creativity. But I’m not going to CES either, so I am not standing for technology? [Laughs.] It exploded in a way that is interesting: If, for an entire week, people have nothing else to talk about other than Publicis not going to Cannes, it means that our industry is having a problem that is much bigger. I didn’t respond to any of the attacks, but I was laughing. What about internal pushback? You won’t find one big creative that said something against Marcel. Was the way we did it perfect? Of course not. And by the way, I was sad it became a debate about Cannes or not-Cannes, where the debate should be on where [we] are leading our industry.

Has Cannes gotten too big? It has lost its focus. The focus should be creativity. And I think it’s a mistake to say it has been too much driven by the tech companies. Yes it has, it’s true. But that’s not the issue. I have been to Cannes for 20 years. You were there to see what is the best of the best and the leading edge of creativity and of our industry. And you would leave the place with a clear vision. This was my first Cannes and that’s not what I left with. That’s my point. You can’t afford to bring all those people on the Croisette if it’s not to get that. And Cannes has to be an agent for us to understand the change we need to bring on board. As media becomes more automated, what does the role of the media agency become? The great news about that is, yes, media is getting automated, but the role of media in this complex world is more important than ever. You can’t make a difference today between the brand and the experience. Media is playing a key role. Because through the right management of data, you can actually be much more efficient in what you do. We can be much more daring in the work we sell. Thoughts on the Facebook/Google duopoly? Friends or foes? They are great partners. When they go for our talent—and when they go directly to our clients—it’s creating a competitive environment that I hope we can resolve because we have more to win together than to try to fight against each other, knowing at the end of the day we don’t bring the same kind of service. We don’t bring the same product. Or the same scale. It’s true they are a bit bigger. I will have to agree on this point. [Laughs.] They are not credible to talk to CMOs and CIOs together in the way we do. They are bringing part of the answer on the marketing side. But just part of the answer. Ad Age  September 25, 2017

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Typographer, designer and awardwinning creative Juan Carlos Pagan was selected by Ad Age Creativity to design this cover image inaugurating its regular return to print within the pages of Ad Age. See Pagan’s work for Pinterest on p. 33.

MASTER

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In late December 2016, Portland, Oregon, endured one of its biggest snowstorms in a decade. Mark Fitzloff thought all he’d have to worry about that day was his commute home, but he ended up contemplating something much bigger. Before clocking out, he learned he’d no longer be commuting to Wieden & Kennedy, his employer of nearly two decades. There, he had risen from copywriter to partner and executive creative director, helping to steer the company’s landmark successes for the likes of Old Spice, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. Publicly, the agency said he was leaving to pursue other opportunities. Fitzloff still refrains from comment. “My car spun out. I got stuck,” he says. It forced him to trudge the final mile home, where he saw his two kids’ faces pressed against the window of his house. He walked through the door, raised his arms and roared triumphantly. “I wanted to demonstrate for my kids that change, while scary, is something to be embraced in life,” he says. Now, Fitzloff has officially opened the doors of his own independent, Portland-based agency, Opinionated, starting with clients including crowdfunding platform GoFundMe and Bob’s Discount Furniture. He sees his company serving the role of a “CMO-whisperer” rather than a typical ad vendor, bringing clients the direct expertise of experienced agency executives while executing ideas with boutique nimbleness. He’s

Illustration by John Jay Cabuay

By Ann-Christine Diaz

assembled a hybrid team of seasoned vets, along with senior freelance specialists in creative, production, account service and more. Portland made sense, says Fitzloff, because “while it under-indexes in clients, it over-indexes in talent [from] my former employer, Nike and the burgeoning Silicon Forest tech startup industry.” His shop operates from a shared workspace and gives freelancers guaranteed work, health insurance and an office they can use for other gigs. For GoFundMe, Fitzloff and his team are helping the brand define how it should evolve. For Bob’s, they’ll be running new campaign work in early fall as the chain expands beyond its East Coast base. Opinionated aims to address client needs in a personal way. Its own marketing playfully offers a literal “menu” of client services with house specials. For example, there’s an offering for “Stranger in a Strange Land”—an experienced CMO who lands at a tech startup that’s founder-led and engineer-focused—or “The Shit Show,” for a marketing executive who needs to help his team figure out what the hell its brand stands for. The agency name is a nod to “the dueling opinions about where [advertising is] headed—is it dying, evolving, alive and well?” says Fitzloff. “What still remains at the core is you have a big, brand [or] client organization that needs fresh outside perspective about who they are. That’s the opinion they come to the agency for.”

The former Wieden & Kennedy creative leader opens the doors to his own Portland shop

MARK FITZLOFF GETS OPINIONATED

Creativity Next steps

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Photography by Robert Ascroft

By Ann-Christine Diaz

Dwayne Johnson has reinvented himself several times over. One thing has remained constant: his rock, Dany Garcia

Creativity Rock on a roll

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Ad Age September 25, 2017

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BALLERS

Makeup for Mr. Johnson and Ms. Garcia by Merc Arceneaux; Grooming for Mr. Johnson by Rachel Solow; Wardrobe for Ms. Garcia by Robert Mata; Styling for Ms. Garcia by David Royer; Hair for Ms. Garcia by Andrea Gangoso; Wardrobe assistant Grace Delahanty

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It’s a 77-and-sunny Sunday in Vancouver, and Dwayne Johnson, the mega-celebrity otherwise known as The Rock, is here to shoot “Skyscraper,” an action thriller in which he plays a war-vet-turned-security professional framed for setting on fire a building he was meant to protect. This, his 32nd feature, is the latest project out of Seven Bucks Productions, the company he founded in 2012 with Dany Garcia, his business partner, manager and ex-wife. It’s a far cry from one memorable 1995 day in this same city when the Canadian Football League’s Calgary Stampeders cut Johnson from the team. On his ride home afterward, he opened his wallet to find that he had $7 to his name. From that sum, he and Garcia have grown one of the hottest global celebrity brands, along with an expanding stable of creative firms under the Seven Bucks banner, which last year added digital content company Seven Bucks Digital Studios. Now it’s opening Seven Bucks Creative, an advertising agency. Our meeting and photo shoot take place at a former machine shop on the waterfront downtown that has, over time, been transformed into everything from a 1920s Parisian nightclub for the TV show “Timeless” to the steamy bedrooms of “50 Shades of Grey.” When Johnson strides into the room—6foot-5, 258 pounds and wearing an impeccably fitted suit—he seems smaller than his massive on-camera persona, even to this writer, who stands shy of five feet tall. Perhaps it’s because he makes himself accessible to everyone in the room. He obliges the photographer with alternately serious and goofy shots, confers with Garcia and his social-media team, and steps in to give his take on a shot of his business partner. He bends down to make sure he hears my name correctly. “And what’s your last name?” “Diaz,” I say. “Ann Diaz,” he repeats, locking eyes with me and still holding my hand. Part of what defines Johnson’s brand is this A-lister-next-door intimacy he has with his audience—his ability to make himself seem just a text message, tweet or emoji away. It’s what you’ll find in every photo, message and video he sends to his 166 million followers across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Within the past month, he has taken the time to meet a 10-year-old Michigan Fast and famous By the end of 2016, Johnson was the reigning king of pop culture, having been dubbed both Hollywood’s highest-paid actor, with earnings of $64.5 million (a distinction he ceded to Mark Wahlberg this year), and People’s Sexiest Man Alive. He speaks to dudes, dads, women, kids. He can deliver badass, as in the “Fast and Furious” franchise and his own HBO show “Ballers,” or funny (“Central Intelligence”) or even family-friendly (“Moana”). This year, “Baywatch” bombed with critics and U.S. moviegoers, but went on to rake in $178 million worldwide, and “Fate of the Furious” became only the sixth film in history to earn more than $1 billion globally. Later this year, we’ll see him in “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”; spring will bring “Rampage,” based on the classic ’80s video game. And then there are the brand partnerships: Project Rock, the co-branded Under Armour lifestyle line he developed with Droga5 and WME; his work for Ford as the brand’s “Ambassador of Service”; and his recent campaign for Apple, which parodied his polymathy in an ad that depicted him (with the help of Siri) touching up the Sistine Chapel, presenting his fashion line in Tokyo and creating a culinary masterpiece with a celebrity chef—all while filming his latest action flick. None of this was built on Johnson’s looks and charm alone. The Dwayne Johnson brand

boy who saved his little brother from drowning using CPR techniques he saw in Johnson’s film “San Andreas.” He also revealed on Instagram that he’s not above peeing in a water bottle to stay in the zone at the gym. “At my heart, I’m a gut and instincts guy,” he explains. “So much of what happens socially is in the moment.” It’s this instinctual of-the-people approach that drives not just his interaction with fans, but also the expansion of Seven Bucks, from making films and TV to digital content and now, advertising. That’s right. The Rock is opening an ad agency. “We’re taking our tools and point of view, our relationship with the audience, our creative skills, to help clients translate what they have and connect to their audience,” says Garcia. And this will be the case whether or not Johnson appears on camera.

“The men in my life all had a deep-down belief that you can change your destiny and your path with the amount of hard work you put in.”

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‘I just gotta entertain’ “What Dany brought was instilling the confidence,” Johnson reflects. “Oftentimes, when we look inward, we look with a filter. There are insecurities, all this crazy shit we deal with, so a lot of times it’s easier for other people to assess and say, ‘No, this is really good.’ Her astute business background and acumen helped tremendously, too.” It didn’t hurt that by the time she met Johnson, Garcia was already an entrepreneur-in-the-making. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, she began honing her business skills as a child in her native New Jersey. When she was 12, she “ran a barn,” she says, doing everything, including cleaning stalls, hauling manure and even driving a tractor

and Seven Bucks are the products of business acumen and a generous helping of risk-taking. Johnson’s “core” has always been “these two hands that I have,” he says. Born in Hayward, California, in 1972 to a Samoan mother and black Canadian father, his family went through tough times, living paycheck to paycheck and even being evicted as they lived in different parts of the world. “The men in my life all had a deep-down belief that you can change your destiny and your path with the amount of hard work you put in,” he says. “I had my first game in this town, and a couple days later I got cut and told, ‘You’re not good enough.’ But the willingness to put in the work was still there.” Along with those “two hands,” there’s Garcia, the business brains behind Seven Bucks, and her talent management and holding company, The Garcia Companies, through which she manages the recently signed “Man of Steel” star, Henry Cavill, among others—all while making time to train and compete as a professional bodybuilder. Johnson and Garcia met as “kids” at the University of Miami. She was 21, and he was 18. Both were athletes—Garcia rowed crew while Johnson, the first in his family to attend college, studied on a football scholarship. “When I first saw him, I went, ‘Wow, he is something,’” says Garcia. “I knew inside of him was something special.’” She’s been the co-architect in every step of the Dwayne Johnson brand evolution, despite the hurdles. The pair were married for a decade, then divorced, and remained business partners throughout.

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Ad Age September 25, 2017

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(which, she laughs, might have brushed up against child-labor laws). That was all so she could keep the horse, Bucky Dent, that her parents, not well off, managed to buy for a couple hundred bucks. During high school, at the age of 15, she sold men’s suits in her hometown, and when she met Johnson, she was a business student, working for the dean of the business school. “My father had to leave high school to get here from Cuba and worked at an autobody shop since he was 16,” she says. “In my head, I was always like, ‘If I could be a millionaire, I could just take care of my family.’ But as I got older, I realized I just love building business and enterprise.” After college, Garcia went to work at Merrill Lynch, ultimately rising to VP, while Johnson pursued his football career. When that didn’t pan out, he made that fateful turn toward wrestling. Both Johnson’s father and maternal grandfather had been wrestling pros. Still, he started at the bottom, with stints making just $40 at flea market matches and then maybe a few bucks more, selling Polaroids of himself afterward. He eventually worked his way up to join World Wrestling Entertainment (then called the World Wrestling Federation), where he carved out the persona of “The Rock,” the lovable villain with that wiggly eyebrow. In wrestling, he laid the groundwork for his everyman popularity. “Wrestling was exploding, the WWF just went public, and people were asking, what’s this company that’s pulling ‘Monday Night Football’ ratings away?” he says. “It was perfect timing to ride the crest of a wave.” In 2000 he did his first of what’s now five “Saturday Night Live” appearances, and then Hollywood came knocking. That led to Johnson’s first film, an appearance in “The Mummy Returns” (albeit mostly in CGI), followed by “The Scorpion King,” “Walking Tall,” and “The Rundown.” With these successes, Johnson decided to put his focus on movies—and in the process learned a lot about the perils of rebranding. “If I’m going to have a career in film with lon-

“We had a lane that no one else traveled, and we just started making it larger and larger,” says Garcia. “He didn’t become Tom Cruise. He’s not Will Smith.”

A return to the ring Garcia just had to build. She had wanted to create a business around Johnson—one inspired by what she saw in professional wrestling. “They have such an incredible business model around the talent—different verticals, merchandise, etc. I started to wonder, ‘What would a model look like if all this infrastructure was placed around an individual?’” Their new agency gave them the chance—and support—to test that out. “We sat with [WME CoCEO] Ari Emanuel and presented what we needed: marketing, finance, business development, and they gave that to me,” says Garcia. “They came over with huge ideas, none of them

gevity and diversity, I’m going to have to commit,” he says. That meant heeding the advice of his managers at the time, who, he recalls, told him: “You can’t be as big as you are, we’re going to switch your name to Dwayne Johnson, no more eyebrow, no more wrestling references.” So he tried to slim down his muscular frame to fit the current leading man mold (think Clooney, Cruise, Smith) and said goodbye to wrestling. “You buy into it because you think this is all proven on the biggest stars in the world, moving the bottom line for the studios. But with every photo shoot, every junket and every movie around that time, it started to feel more sour and rotten,” he says. “I just wasn’t myself. Something just felt off.” That sourness was a signal for Johnson and Garcia to make a change. She became his official manager, and they switched agents from the Creative Artists Agency to William Morris Endeavor. The goal was to give Johnson room to be himself, and Garcia the freedom to build an enterprise around him. “I love to entertain, on a multitude of levels,” says Johnson. “I feel that deep in my bones, whether it’s at a grassroots level, in the WWE, on a TV show, or in singing a song, there’s always going to be that element. I just gotta entertain.”

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Ad Age September 25, 2017

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had been tapped into,” recalls Brad Slater, a WME partner in talent development. “They wanted to do a little bit of everything, but never had been presented the opportunity to do the creative things they wanted to do.” The move to WME also made safe a return to the WWE, which Garcia and Johnson say was a pivotal moment in his career. “It grassrooted me again,” says Johnson. It solidified “the anchoring ideology of always remaining connected to the people. It was so interesting that the idea of me going back to wrestling, at another company, was a step backward.” “Strategically, it was one of our most important moves,” adds Garcia. “Now, we had a lane that no one else traveled and we just started making it larger and larger, but staying in this very grounded, rooted space. He didn’t become Tom Cruise, he’s not Will Smith. He lives and breathes with the people. That connectivity is a platform of all our companies.” In creating Seven Bucks, Garcia explains, “It was a natural space for us to put this positioning of ‘audience first’”—whether that’s by entertaining with films or TV shows, via Seven Bucks Productions; digital content through Seven Bucks Digital Studios, whose productions so far have included “Millennials: The Musical” with Lin-Manuel Miranda; and now, connecting brands with consumers

through the ad agency Seven Bucks Creative. The creative company will be led by Chief Marketing Officer Chet Gulland, a former head of strategy at Droga5. The move was inspired by what Seven Bucks had been doing with its own productions, other films Johnson had been involved in and previous partnerships with marketers. “When we were working on major projects, we were taking steps that producers don't usually take,” says Garcia. “We had taken an approach to eventize and start the marketing process so early.” With Gulland at the helm, SB Creative aims to provide structure and professionalism around that process.

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Ad Age September 25, 2017

“Dwayne and Dany’s approach to storytelling is one where they are always living the moment and relaying his everyday activities as if you were right by his side,” says Todd Montesano, Under Armour senior VP for strategic partnerships and entertainment. “This is an approach that has made its way into the walls of Under Armour and influenced our marketing as well. We can clearly credit them for that.” Advertising likely will not be the duo’s last stop, though. Last year, the media went wild after the Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg penned an opinion piece suggesting that if Donald Trump could be president, well, Dwayne Johnson could too. Johnson then took to social media and fessed to the likes of Vanity Fair and GQ that he wouldn’t rule out a POTUS bid. Even today, he sticks to his guns, citing his loyalty to the people. “It’s on the board, it has to be,” he says. “When there’s that many people saying, ‘I want you to consider it,’ then you consider it.” Garcia demurs. “I haven’t really wrapped my head around it just yet,” she says. “When the time comes, if that comes, I’ll get ready.”

“I love to entertain, on a multitude of levels. I feel that deep in my bones.”

NOW MORE THAN EVER CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.

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Creativity So many credits

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Adidas Originals reached a creative high with its “Original Is Never Finished” campaign from Johannes Leonardo, which earlier this year earned the Cannes Lions Entertainment for Music Grand Prix for a spot featuring a reworked version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The latest installment of the TV and online effort features celebrities such as Kendall Jenner, NBA star James Harden, and rappers Playboi Carti, 21 Savage and Young Thug. In it, they look defiantly at the camera in gritty modern interpretations of iconic works of art like Boticelli’s “Venus” and Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man.” The credits were many. We thought this would be a good case study for answering the question: What the heck did all those folks do? Here, the agency explains in its own playful style.

By Ann-Christine Diaz

How many people does it really take to make an ad, and what exactly do they do? We’re glad you asked

TAKING CREDIT (AND CREDIT AND CREDIT)

Maintained everyone’s composure on set, before she lost all composure off of it.

Gulru Soylu, account supervisor, Johannes Leonardo

Made the impossible possible. Including call times that no one thought were human.

Tina Diep, senior producer, Johannes Leonardo

Found the time and money for everything. Except a reasonable amount of sleep.

Stine Moisen, senior producer, Johannes Leonardo

Responsible for having a vision. And making everyone rise to it.

Ferdinando Verderi, creative director, founding partner, Johannes Leonardo

Fostered trust between the agency and Adidas Originals. Also, helped Jan with that shelf.

Leo Premutico, chief creative officer, Johannes Leonardo

Responsible for having a vision. And driving his producers insane with it.

Made a space where creativity was king. Then made space on the agency’s awards shelf.

Moved everything three pixels to the right. Then two to the left. And then just one more.

Hunter Hampton, senior art director, Johannes Leonardo

Wrote more words for this page you are reading than he did for the ad, which is entirely a song. Suffered crushing existential doubt for months to come.

Jeph Burton, senior copywriter, Johannes Leonardo

Responsible for being the most courageous and trusting one of everyone. And genuinely making it all happen.

Jenny Pham, global communications director, Adidas Originals

Did things with a camera that made Edwards, Phelan and Verderi squeal embarrassingly from video village.

Terence Neale, director, RSA Films

Responsible for also having a vision. And giving his accounts team PTSD with it.

Wesley Phelan, creative director, Johannes Leonardo

Matthew Edwards, creative director, Johannes Leonardo

Jan Jacobs, chief creative officer, Johannes Leonardo

Discovered that the “City of Broken Dreams” is also the “City of Broken Sleep Cycles,” after managing products, timelines and everything but her nervous tics.

Completely embraced the vision. Went to the desert. Had another vision, as is the case with most people who go to deserts.

Organized chaos.

Kat Pryor, account supervisor, Johannes Leonardo

Whose job it was to be nearly omniscient, and who was frighteningly good at it.

Championed the creative from start to finish. Then championed a well-deserved glass of Champagne at the end of it all.

Dominique Dalton, account director, Johannes Leonardo

Alexandra Olivo, associate producer, Johannes Leonardo

Edi Borrelli, senior manager communications, Adidas Originals

John van Tuyl, senior director, global brand marketing operations and creative shoot production, Adidas Originals

Wrestled the sun for daylight. Beat the clock to within an inch of its life. Didn’t lose his hair in the process.

Adam Gong, print producer, Johannes Leonardo

Produced this massive body of work, all while staying calm, cool and collected— and giving you a look that said you’d better do the same.

Maria Perez, executive producer, Johannes Leonardo

Helped a team of freelance editors pay their rent for months to come.

Dana May, head of integrated production, Johannes Leonardo

United literally five continents and 149 countries under one brand campaign. Cats only wish they were so difficult to herd.

Alegra O’Hare, global vp of brand communications, Adidas Originals

Kept everyone on time, on schedule and off their sleep cycles.

Justin Townsend, senior shoot and production manager, Adidas Originals

Led a team of incredibly unruly people. (Then became unruly himself at the wrap party.)

Sam McCallum, group account director, Johannes Leonardo

Ensured everything went to plan. Even when said plan changed 6,000 times.

Jules Daly, executive producer, RSA Films

Whose eye for fashion and trends was only surpassed by her other eye.

Gabby De Gersigny, stylist, RSA Films

Served as DoP for the film. Was stalked by nearly every other director thereafter.

Alexis Zabe, director of photography, RSA Films

Dealt with the lawyers. Was later christened Saint Ann Marie Turbitt by the agency.

Ann Marie Turbitt, senior business affairs manager, Johannes Leonardo

Watched the ad more than anyone else did so that, eventually, everyone else could.

Marta Stajek, director of business affairs, Johannes Leonardo

Planned. Schemed. Connived. And had the creative team thank her for it.

Miné Cakmak, strategist, Johannes Leonardo

In charge of communication between client and agency, agency and each other, and herself and the growing number of voices in her head.

Adriana Mariella, account executive, Johannes Leonardo

Edited. Then re-edited then re-reedited. Until the agency was exiled from Exile.

Christopher Fetsch, editor, Exile

Put the film together, even though it caused him to fall apart.

Robert Lopuski, editor, Exile

Shot an awardwinning piece earlier in the year. Was a masochist to do so again.

Colin Howard, executive producer, Cape Town Egg Films

Walked the length of the Andes Mountains in two days to ensure everyone got what they wanted.

Rozanne Rocha-Gray, producer, RSA Films

Sat with the creatives—even when they were being a bit hard to stand.

Julie Sawyer, producer, RSA Films

Ad Age September 25, 2017

Ensured everyone got what their hearts desired. Or, at least, their budgets.

Paul Kawasaki, executive producer, RSA Films

Exhausted bank after bank of “glitch” effects. Possibly resorted to making some with his mouth.

Steve Rosen, sound engineer/sound design, Sonic Union

Suffered emotional trauma after a year of covering “My Way” in too many ways.

Morgan Visconti, creative lead/music director, Human

Did what he always does: Made it impossible for anyone to peel their eyes from the film.

Tom Poole, colorist, Company: 3

Captured legendary photography for an outdoor campaign­— and being from West London, possibly people’s purses, too.

Oliver Hadlee Pearch, photographer

Made everyone in front of the camera look spectacular and gave everyone behind it a serious inferiority complex.

Richard De Jager, stylist, RSA Films

Broke footage. Maimed classical paintings. Defaced iconic artwork. Was applauded by all.

Iwan Zwarts, VFX supervisor/2D lead artist, Blacksmith

Was paid to be the brains behind the operation.

Mark Aaronson, head of strategy, Johannes Leonardo

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Working with design firm OCD and typographer Tobias Frere-Jones,

That nameplate evolved over the years, including the customized drawing featuring Moderno created by Roger Black in the ’90s, later updated by James Montalbano in 2015. But it was starting to feel stodgy.

When we reimagined Ad Age, we started with our logo. To embrace the strength of our heritage, the new nameplate evokes Ad Age’s founding as a broadsheet in Chicago in 1930, with a sans serif wordmark that spelled out “Advertising Age” in the Kabel typeface, a design created by founder G.D. Crain Jr.

Using logos as visual shorthand dates back at least as far as the Lascaux cave paintings. These days, of course, there are myriad ways for brands to get their messages out—so it’s all the more remarkable that a single image remains the most efficient means of communicating. Imagine a McDonald’s campaign without the golden arches.

Creativity By design

2013

When Airbnb dropped its script-based logo for the singular “Bélo” symbol in 2014, there was a frenzy over its resemblance to, well, lady parts or, depending on your perspective, a butt. Or both! Three years later, the logo remains. What’s not around? The v-jokes. The brand worked with London-based DesignStudio on the marque to illustrate “Belong Anywhere.” The goal was to create something that “anyone could

1930s

2014 draw—something that transcended language,” DesignStudio explains on its site. The logo is also meant to convey four concepts: people, places, love and the Airbnb brand.

1950s

MAKING A MARK

2017

1970s

1980s

In May 2016, Instagram streamlined its old-school camera symbol to a simpler graphic representation. The new rounded square, circle and dot set against a multicolored gradient of hues aimed to represent the diversity of Instagram users. “The old camera icon told you what Instagram was and what it did: It took pictures and had filters you could use to make the pictures look old-fashioned,” wrote Liam Stack

2015

By Ann-Christine Diaz

9/14/17 5:56 PM

in a New York Times piece, “The Great Instagram Logo Freakout of 2016.” The design change didn’t deter user growth, however. By December 2016 the platform hit 600 million users, and as of April 2017 it jumped to 700 million.

2016

1990s

As Ad Age changes its look, we recall the good, the bad and the ugly of recent logo redesigns

MASTER

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To mark our logo redesign, we look back on other notable overhauls, including some brilliant successes and some epic fails.

we conceived a new, abbreviated logotype that embraces the sensibility of Crain’s original while springing it forward. The descending “g” serves as a focal point that acts as a purposeful, consistent clip, and can be affixed to whatever deserves your attention—from headlines to images to critical data—while serving as a building block of the entire branding system.

Designers Mike Deal and Juan Carlos Pagan created the original classic script Pinterest logo in 2010. In 2011, while wanting to avoid something explicitly thumbtack-y, they settled on a pin concept, evident in the brand’s badge with a single “P” and a new wordmark. This year, while retaining the badge, Pinterest dropped the wordmark for one with a plain sans serif font. As designer and critic Armin

2010

Vit described in his blog Under Consideration, “It’s like a 1960s corporate identity got dropped ... next to this friendly ‘P’ mark and the two look like a hippie and a business executive in line at the grocery store, brought together by circumstance more than mutual agreement.”

2017

2013 into the 21st century, the logo was changed to “jcp” in a blue box at the top left corner of a red-framed white square, suggesting an American flag. But Johnson’s tenure proved catastrophic, and the patriotic symbol had a short shelf life. In 2013, the logo returned to the original, pre-2011 wordmark.

2012

Sometimes it’s woe to the marketer that messes with a classic logo. JCPenney learned this in 2011 when it changed its straightforward JCPenney nameplate to all lowercase in sans serif type, with the first three letters enclosed in a red box. The retailer called it the “most meaningful update to the company’s logo in 40 years.” Not meaningful enough. In 2012, after then-CEO Ron Johnson was hired to bring the retailer

2014 a younger demo. The modernization may be working: According to the company’s most recent reporting at the beginning of August, global sales were up 23.1 percent year-to-date.

2013

Cadillac dropped a chunk of old-fashioned iconography from its logo by losing the long-familiar wreath in January 2014. Created in-house by Nathan Korkus at the company’s Brand Identity and Badging Studio, the revamped emblem includes a stretched-out version of the brand’s coat of arms. The symbol aims to convey a sleeker, less flashy profile as part of an effort to attract

1975

In June 2000, Amazon.com tapped design agency Turner Duckworth to convey founder Jeff Bezos’ mission to make the company “the most consumercentric brand in the world,” Turner Duckworth explains on its website. The firm reshaped the downward-sloping yellow line under Amazon’s name

1999

JCPenney’s doomed logo lasted an eternity compared to this disaster. In October 2010, the Gap replaced its simple, non-offensive name-in-a-blue-box for a symbol that looked like the result of an extreme exercise in blandification: the Gap name, in Helvetica, randomly adorned with a blue square gradient over the “p.” It was slaughtered on social media and the

2010

Though the space theme is once again omnipresent in marketing, NASA remains the icon of aeronautics. Its logo, in place since 1992, features a sphere that stands in for a planet, stars representing space, an orbiting spaceship and more. It’s a riff on the original 1959 version, affectionately known in aeronautics design circles as “the meatball.” In 1975, NASA switched to a simpler and more era-appropriate “worm” wordmark, but in the early ’90s then-NASA

1992

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Ad Age September 25, 2017

in the original logo to an upward curving smile-like arrow that travels from the letters “A” to “Z” to connote that it sells, well, a lot of different stuff.

2000

retailer pulled it within a week, going back to the blue box with its white uppercase letters. If you blinked, you would have missed it.

2010

administrator Dan Goldin felt a return to the meatball would help “invoke memories of the one-giant-leapfor-mankind glory days of Apollo and show that ‘the magic is back,’” historian Steve Garber writes on the organization’s site. The classic vibe feels very today, given consumers’ infatuation with all things retro, and you’ll find the meatball on T-shirts sold at big retailers including Target, Old Navy and H&M.

Two days packed with predictions, intelligent discussions, tangible takeaways and peer to peer opportunities. Join us as we explore what’s defining innovation and where marketing and advertising professionals should be placing their bets for 2018 and beyond.

Cindy Gustafson Bob Lord

Chief Digital Officer IBM

Fernando Machado Scott Spencer Ad Age Next

Co-presenting sponsor

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Chief Strategy Officer Mindshare

November 15-16 Metropolitan Pavilion, New York, NY

Head of Brand Marketing Burger King

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Register at AdAge.com/Next

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9/13/17 4:29 PM

City Spotlight Shanghai

City Spotlight SHANGHAI Everything you need to know about China’s ad capital— plus the Avocado Lady By Angela Doland

Illustration by Hyesu Lee, Photograph by Jon Arnold/Getty

Illustrations by Hyesu Lee

Ask people to describe Shanghai’s agency scene and the word “dynamic” comes up a lot. A megacity where charming ramshackle streets meet futuristic skyscrapers, Shanghai is China’s hub for multinational companies and ad agencies. It’s the place where the industry figures out where the country’s 1.4 billion consumers are heading next. “You learn on the go with advertising here in Shanghai,” says Alvina Seah, Shanghai-based general manager of Energy BBDO. That’s because China’s digital-savvy consumers embrace change with gusto. When Starbucks started accepting digital payment service WeChat Pay this year, it represented nearly a third of transactions that same quarter. E-commerce is a way of life in China, with its 751 million internet users, 96 percent of whom go online with a mobile phone. (China has more than twice as many mobile internet users as the U.S. has people.) About 57 percent of China’s ad spending is expected to go to the internet this year, compared to less than 20 percent five years ago, according to WPP’s GroupM. Agencies have had to quickly ramp up their e-commerce and digital capabilities through hiring and acquisitions. “In China you can book a manicure or a masseuse in your home—you can get anything brought to your home with a click of a button,” says Seah. “E-commerce and m-commerce are part of everything we do now; you can’t go in with a campaign or plan that doesn’t contain them. It’s because of the way consumers live their lives.” Things getting tougher Most of the major international agencies have a presence in Shanghai, which has a population of about 24 million, equivalent to all of Australia. WPP has long been the powerhouse among them, with sleek offices spread across 20 floors of a skyscraper. WPP’s Ogilvy & Mather was an early entrant to the market—it has Important to Important People

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City Spotlight Shanghai

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In Shanghai’s Yu Gardens, chefs prepare hundreds of the city’s famous ‘xiao long bao’ soup dumplings.

Los Angeles and just had an initial public offering on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Small Shanghai creative shops are getting attention too. An agency called Civilization has made successive hit viral videos for Pepsi, and another shop called W helped make Timberland cool in China. Not easy finding talent Starting salaries in the ad scene in Shanghai are low, around $675 to $900 a month. But at the top, salaries are on par with those in the U.S. Finding talent is the big challenge—agencies need people with digital and e-commerce skills, and they’re competing with China’s three internet giants. Alibaba Group, for example, hired WPP’s VML China CEO Chris Tung to be its chief marketing officer. There are foreigners in Shanghai’s ad scene, but agencies increasingly need people with deep China insight. That’s because shops see increasing opportunity in Chinese brands that are going international, like smartphone powerhouses Huawei, Oppo and Vivo—especially now that some mainstay multinational clients are having a harder time in China. “It’s very, very hard now to come into Shanghai without at least Chinese-language capabilities,” says Jean-Michel Wu, the Asia Pacific CEO of executive search agency Grace Blue Worldwide, who previously spent 10 years in Shanghai at Ogilvy and WPP. Local Chinese employees, Wu says, see the most attractive employers as the Chinese internet giants, followed by consultancies, brands and then agencies. Since there’s such stiff competition, he says, “the future of advertising in China will be pretty bleak for international agencies if they don’t come up with

better projects and initiatives to attract local talent, and I’m unsure whether that’s a priority for them.” Work-life balance Shanghai is surprisingly livable. Air pollution is an issue, but it’s better than it is in Beijing. Some agency staffers cycle to work using one of the bike services that have become ubiquitous as China’s sharing economy went into overdrive. Or they commute on the Metro, which will have 17 lines by year’s end. Twenty years ago, there was only one line. Shanghai is cosmopolitan, an easy place to find a niche, and many of its residents aren’t natives of the city. “It’s easy to get connected to other people—there’s a friendliness, an openness,” says Carat China’s Hou. The adventurous might spend the weekend snacking on Mexican fish tacos or Turkish cacik yogurt dip, taking a Zumba class or attending an English-language performance of the immersive play “Sleep No More.” Shanghai consumers crave novelty, and brands test new concepts here, which makes it a fun place to work in advertising. There’s a KFC staffed by robots, and supermarket chain Aldi live-streamed a fashion show where the clothing was made of food. But there’s also tradition and history in Shanghai. Shops including BBH, Anomaly, Wieden and McCann Worldgroup are headquartered in the former French Concession, with art deco architecture, charming cafes, shady plane trees and street food from every corner of China. Advertising staffers love to hang out there, because in a fast-paced megacity, it still feels like a neighborhood, and it’s a lovely place to wind down from the stresses of agency life. Ad Age September 25, 2017

Illustration by Hyesu Lee, Photograph by Andrew Rowat/Getty

26 years of history in mainland China, which didn’t adopt market-opening reforms until about four decades ago. Interpublic Group of Companies’ R/GA and MDC Partners’ KBS are relative Shanghai newcomers. Another MDC Partners shop, CP&B, opened last year in Beijing, which is China’s capital but a smaller agency town. China is the world’s second-biggest ad market after the U.S. Foreign agencies don’t face the heavy restrictions some other industries face in China, where Silicon Valley internet giants Google, Facebook and Twitter are censored for the masses, and where foreign automakers are required to have joint ventures with local partners. Still, things have become a lot tougher. First, the economy has slowed. After almost three decades of 10 percent average annual economic growth, GDP growth has been slowing since 2010, sliding to 6.7 percent in 2016, according to official government statistics. There’s this too: Multinational brands, mainstay clients for foreign agencies, are having a harder time in China as local brands make more interesting products and try edgier marketing. Local brands gained market share over foreign ones last year in 18 out of 26 fast-moving consumer goods categories, from candy to diapers to makeup, according to a study by Bain & Co. and Kantar Worldpanel; foreign brands made gains in just four categories. Overall, local brand sales grew 8.4 percent, while for foreign players that figure was just 1.5 percent, the study said. Procter & Gamble, long the top ad spender in China, is among the multinational players that has struggled to find its footing. Most big foreign agencies are no longer expanding the way they did when China was still experiencing double-digit growth in the ’80s, ’90s and the first decade of the 2000s. Ellen Hou, CEO of Dentsu’s Carat China, says well-established multinational shops have hit a “bottleneck” stage. “Agencies need to look into themselves to think about how to disrupt the past and explore some new ways of doing business,” says Hou, a Shanghai native whose first ad job was at TBWA in 1998. She says multinational agencies can no longer take the stance that “‘we have the advantage, and everyone needs to copy us.’ Megagroups need to be more humble, and learn from local partners and local culture.” Multinational agencies once had an edge partly because China had less experience with the art of branding. Product advertising all but disappeared in the Mao Zedong era and re-emerged in the late ’70s and ’80s. Now strong local agencies have developed, many catering to China’s unique digital landscape, where the big players are Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, not Google and Facebook. One local powerhouse, the Leo Digital Network (no relation to Leo Burnett), was formed when a Chinese pump manufacturer purchased some of China’s best local digital agencies. Today, the network’s clients include Coca-Cola, Sony, Siemens and Johnson & Johnson. China’s BlueFocus Communication Group had more global revenue last year than MDC Partners or Edelman’s parent company, DJE Holdings, according to Ad Age’s DataCenter. Chinese digital agency Hylink opened an office in

City Spotlight Shanghai

WPP: 399 Heng Feng Rd. Most WPP agencies occupy 20 floors in a new skyscraper. But some staffers grumbled when they had to move there two years ago, trading in the tony former French Concession locale for a neighborhood near a train station. Omnicom Media Group: 15F, Eco City, 1788 West Nanjing Rd. OMG is located next to Jing’an Temple. The Chinese name means “Temple of Peace and Tranquility,” but the surrounding streets are a mess thanks to a massive construction project. Wieden & Kennedy: 1035 Changle Rd. W&K is located in Shanghai’s former French Concession, which, with its art deco architecture, charming cafes and streets shaded by plane trees is the place to hang out. Other agencies have offices in the area as well, including Anomaly, BBH and IPG. BBDO: 1 Hongqiao Rd., XuJiaHui, Xuhui BBDO’s office tower is in a neighborhood filled with malls—and a very grand, 100-year-old Roman Catholic cathedral. It was a backdrop for Steven Spielberg’s Shanghai wartime epic, “Empire of the Sun.” Fred & Farid: 200 Huangpu Rd. (Hongkou District) Independent shop Fred & Farid probably has the best view in town. Its office is in a converted warehouse on the Huangpu River. Leo Digital Network: 3300 N. Zhongshan Rd. The Leo Digital Network has offices at Global Harbor, a super-intense megamall. The mall architecture is what you’d get if Caesars Palace had a baby with the Mall of America. The Economist once pointed out that it has as much floorspace as nearly 70 soccer fields. Dentsu Aegis Network: 16/F, 5 Corporate Ave., 150 Hubin Rd. (Huangpu District) The network moved into a modern tower in an area that was filled with charming but run-down homes. The area has developed rapidly, with buildings razed and longtime residents forced to move.

Xujiahui Park’s dancing aunties: 889 Zhaojiabang Rd., Xujiahui, Xuhui Chinese parks and squares are filled with crowds of 38

“dancing aunties,” who blast music as they line-dance. Avocado lady: 274 Wulumuqi Rd. If you get a craving for imported foods like Hershey’s syrup or Ocean Spray cranberry juice, the Avocado Lady will have it in her crowded, chaotic shop in the former French Concession. No-shit signpost: Intersection of Donghu Road

and Huaihai Middle Rd. In the park across from IPG’s offices, there’s a sign illustrated with cute cartoon dogs and a caption in English: “No dog shitting here, please.” Interpublic Group: 1045 Middle Huaihai Rd. IPG’s offices are next to one of the toniest malls in Shanghai where a Prada, Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana have replaced market stalls with counterfeit goods.

People’s Park’s marriage market: Huangpu District, south of Nanjing Road, a major shopping street On Saturdays, parents hang out in People’s Park and hold up signs advertising their single adult kids as good marriage material.

Yangcheng Lake for hairy crabs: 45 miles east of the city in Jiangsu Province Shanghai is famous for hairy crabs, a delicacy consumed in autumn. (They’re not actually hairy, though their claws are fuzzy.) Yangcheng Lake supplies them.

Fake Pentagon mall: southeastern Nanhui District Shanghai built a mall in the shape of the Pentagon, and nobody came.

In & Out: 150 Hubin Rd. Not to be confused with the California burger chain, this is a trendy spot for spicy cuisine from Yunnan province.

Hakkasan: 18 Zhongshan Dong Yi Rd. If you have to impress someone, go for drinks and Cantonese food at Hakkasan on the Bund. Robot-run KFC: 333 Songze Ave. In this futuristic KFC concept store, cute robots take your order.

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

Illustration by Hyesu Lee

The PuLi Hotel and Spa: 1 ChangDe Rd. (JingAn District) The PuLi Hotel and Spa is where agency bigwigs stay when they visit. It’s an urban oasis; the airy lobby bar blends minimalism and Asian antiques.

AND CHECKING THEM TWICE

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Ad Age  September 25, 2017

Its ambitions are ‘TV-like,’ but Facebook’s video play needs to be so much more if the social network is to battle with the likes of YouTube, Netflix and Hulu. But to hear Sheryl Sandberg and her team tell it, such big bets are business as usual By Garett Sloane Photography by Kwaku Alston

Sheryl Sandberg doesn’t want to be the star, but it is her show. The moment the Facebook COO arrives at a photo shoot at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, the room is hers. Her top lieutenants appear instantly energized by her entrance; the volume in the open space ticks up, and it feels like old friends getting together. Today, she’s wearing that familiar Facebook-blue dress. Her team converges like some social-media Justice League, with Carolyn Everson in solid orange, Nada Stirratt in all white, David Fischer in dark blue blazer and jeans and Instagram COO Marne Levine in burgundy. They assemble for the shoot in front of the dripping-neon mural by Maya Hayuk in the lobby at Facebook’s offices. Sandberg takes command of the shoot. She doesn’t want this to be about her, she says. She wants “this” to be about her team, some of whom go way back with her. She’s known Fischer, VP of business and marketing partnerships, and Levine since their time together at the U.S. Treasury Department during the Clinton administration. Stirratt is the newcomer, the VP of marketing solutions in North America since May. Everson, who spends 80 percent of her time traveling as Facebook’s diplomat to the brand world, has been VP of global marketing solutions since 2011. These are the people at the top of Facebook and Instagram’s sales chain, even if they shun the word “sales.” Everson insists, “Our job is not to sell Facebook and Instagram. That’s [a] word I ban. You’re not a bunch of salespeople.” (She prefers “consultants” and “strategists.”) Sandberg continues to direct the shoot. She wants to show their fun side. Any ideas the photographers had are now the MySpace of plans. You get the feeling that’s the way it often is with Sandberg and Facebook, a company that has handled the tech world with deter-

mined strength, built an ad business with obsessive focus and is about to spend at least a billion dollars challenging a new target, Hollywood and TV. In the year ahead, Facebook will make one of its biggest investments in video yet, pursuing perhaps the company’s most aggressive transformation since it turned fully mobile-focused in 2012, the year it went public. Since then, Facebook turned a mobile weakness into an unparalleled business built around its app, which had once only been an afterthought. Now, it has just deployed a video destination called Watch with a slate of digital shows. The success of the program depends on Facebook’s ability to turn consumers of its social media feed into viewers of video. This will not be easy. There is no proof yet that people in a social mood are looking to sit back and watch longer videos. Facebook has plenty of video in its main feed already, but advertisers are lucky to get anybody there to watch for even two seconds, the industry standard for what constitutes a view. The Watch section, which rolled out widely in the U.S. this month, will rely on Facebook’s ability to negotiate rights to premium entertainment properties from TV networks and sports leagues. It will put Facebook in closer competition with YouTube, Netflix, Hulu and the rest of the connected TV market. Watch delivers a TV-like ad model that’s new to Facebook: commercial breaks in videos designed to be played with the sound on. The content and format encourage viewers to sit through until the end, unlike the News Feed, where the autoplay, soundoff presentation can be scrolled past as quickly as you can twitch your thumb. “We will be experimenting,” Sandberg says. “We don’t know exactly what will work. It seems like it will be pretty TV-like in its experience, but I never judge in advance what consumers will want and what will really work for consumers.”

FACEBOOK LEANS INTO VIDEO Important to Important People

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Video killed the radio star. Will it define the reigning social king? Left to right: Everson, Fischer, Stirratt, Levine and Sandberg

Moving targets Netflix is the North Star for any digital video startup, a model to envy for how thoroughly it reoriented the entertainment industry. Facebook sees a chance to have a similar impact with its ad-supported Watch, but it has plenty of competitors with the same goal and same desire to gobble up video. This summer, Disney decided to end its relationship with Netflix so it could build its own digital property to stream “Star Wars” and other mega-franchises, looking for a more direct line to its vast fan base. Netflix plans to spend $7 billion next year continuing to build its homegrown library, which includes hits like “House of Cards” and “Stranger Things.” “The consumer is moving so quickly that we have to continue evolving, and this is yet another massive shift in consumer behavior,” Everson said a couple weeks earlier in New York City, on the rooftop at Facebook’s 15-story downtown offices. Facebook is going to dangle its pool of 2 billion users in front of content creators and television networks and studios to attract them to Watch. It initially rolled out with shows from media partners including Business Insider, The Atlantic, Hearst and Condé Nast. These publishers already work closely with Facebook, trying to make money from content on the platform’s Instant Articles format, and they are eager to turn video there into a profit center. They have also been the most affected by the rise of Facebook and its shake-up of the media landscape. Getting NBC, CBS, Fox and other traditional TV and movie players to join Watch has been trickier. Industry insiders familiar with lengthy negotiations say studios and networks are playing hardball before agreeing to empower Facebook in video. They feel burned by how things went down with Netflix, which achieved market dominance thanks to the devil’s bargain they made, turning over top-quality content in exchange for cash. “The early checks everybody got from Netflix, that was fantastic,” says a top ad exec at one of Facebook’s video rivals, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Now they’re asking how did they let that happen, creating a sizable competitor taking the attention of our audiences.” Face-off Many conference rooms around Facebook’s 430,000-square-foot Building 20 have Hollywood names—25 of them are Nicolas Cage references such as “Leaving Las Vegas” and “The Rock.” One room’s name is a play on the Indiana Jones franchise: “Corporate Raiders (Of The Lost Ark).” All joking aside, this is a company that

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bought Instagram for $1 billion and once offered Snapchat $3 billion—and when Snapchat wunderkind Evan Spiegel rebuffed the advance, Facebook quickly and ruthlessly copied its most innovative features. Sandberg sits in a central location in this wide-open office across from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, where their desks hardly stand out from anyone else’s. Today is the day after Sandberg’s birthday, though, so it’s filled with flowers. She is now in more comfortable clothes, a white knit tunic sweater and jeans, but she’s still uncomfortable with being the focus of attention. She protests the idea that any story should focus on her, and not the rest of the Facebook organization. Then she launches into what sounds like a well-practiced product pitch for video on Facebook. “We think that video on Facebook for consumers, both sharing their own videos but also taking in other people’s videos, everything from premium content to the most user-generated content, is a really big opportunity,” Sandberg says. “Where that crosses with ads is that advertisers have always loved video. It’s a great way—the sight, sound, motion, the creative canvas of being able to tell a story and really make a brand, product or service come alive.” Video has become one of the main formats on Facebook and Instagram to tell those stories, with the autoplay News Feed videos, Instagram Stories with vertical video breaks, and now Watch offering a commercial break in a setting where the sound is typically on and consumers are more inclined to view until the end. “That will give us more traditional ad inventory with ad breaks,” Sandberg says. “That’s not why we’re doing it, that’s how we will monetize it, but I think those things come together.” Facebook is in the middle of an unprecedented online advertising run, having made that successful transition to mobile. Nearly 90 percent of revenue comes from ads on mobile devices. However, Facebook is not without headwinds: It has told investors and industry watchers that its meteoric growth rate would meet resistance when it runs out of space in its main News Feed to keep turning up the ad frequency. In the News Feed, several brand executives say they average 1.7 seconds of view time on posts, a number Facebook has said is standard in mobile. The company adds that when viewers get at least to the 3-second mark, videos average 5.7 seconds a view. Facebook started testing ad breaks earlier this year in live video, and says they have a 70 percent completion rate. With the benefits of digital data, most parts of a consumer’s path to purchase are theoretically calculable online, setting up

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

mobile for a different standard than TV, where advertisers could never get as complete an accounting of what worked. But the success of campaigns relies on Facebook’s ability to show advertisers data, the kind only it could possibly know about how many people viewed the ads and their impact. And Facebook this past year found itself in trouble with advertisers for misreporting certain video view stats and metrics important to them. Since then, Facebook has been opening the platform to independent measurement firms. It also wants to prove to advertisers that the ads are contributing to their bottom-line goals, whether that’s sales, subscriptions, e-mail signups or other concrete actions. “There is a lot of concern around the industry about how long an ad is watched,” Sandberg says. “But really it’s traditionally been a proxy for sales, because they couldn’t measure sales.” Friends with benefits “Facebook is a big part of that new modern brand building,” says Eric Reynolds, chief marketing officer at The Clorox Company. The company is increasing its spending with Facebook at a time when other packaged-goods companies like Procter & Gamble have raised alarms about the entire digital ecosystem. This year, Clorox is entering a new level of relationship with Facebook, and is now inside an unofficial benefits program Facebook calls the “partnership circle.” The increased partnership provides better data services, with Facebook helping target ads to special audiences, and creative services that help brands craft winning messages in video and other formats. Reynolds wouldn’t say how much money a brand must spend with Facebook to be a part of the circle, but it’s tens of millions of dollars, according to advertising insiders familiar with Facebook’s levels of brand services. “As their data got bigger and better, and their analytics got better,” Reynolds says, “we’re feeling more confident in the platform. That’s a place we can put significant time.” Though advertisers have said the price of entry to play in Facebook’s premium business class is becoming ever more expensive, Facebook says the advertisers-with-benefits program is not a formal designation, and doesn’t rely on spending commitments. It was reluctant to discuss all the perks. Facebook puts in significant time with Clorox, too. The Facebook rep has a badge to Clorox’s Oakland, California, offices. To Everson this is the ultimate sign that her team is doing its job. The Facebook team is organized by industry in the U.S., not

Important to Important People

“We don’t know exactly what will work,” Sandberg says. “It seems like it will be pretty TV-like in its experience, but I never judge in advance what consumers will want.”

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region, and it is trying to apply that model globally. “We have experts in each field,” Everson says. “You are there to advise your client. We don’t take a position like ‘Don’t run on TV, give us all your TV money.’ We would never do that because maybe that’s what they do need.” Clorox, which has run video campaigns for Liquid-Plumr and Brita, will put more than half its media budget into digital this year for the first time, Reynolds says. Of that, Facebook represents a big portion, but Reynolds would not specify how much. He did say that 60 percent of the Facebook budget would go to video. “We’re internally learning how to create and reinvent storytelling for this form,” Reynolds says, “because we have to tell stories for three and six seconds, and that’s a new kind of skill.” Across the industry, digital surpassed TV for the first time in money spent in the U.S. last year, with both representing about $72 billion. This year, digital spending is expected to be $10 billion more than TV in the U.S., according to eMarketer. Meanwhile, digital video will grow 23 percent this year in the U.S. to $13.2 billion, according to eMarketer. Facebook does not break out video ad sales from the rest of its nearly $40 billion in yearly revenue. It’s complicated Still, even Facebook has its limits. The company’s headquarters lie across from protected salt flats, a natural barrier to where the company can physically grow. Beyond that, there is no guarantee it can become a part of people’s daily viewing habits.
“We can’t swim upstream against consumer behavior,” says Mark Rabkin, VP of ads and business platforms at Facebook. “The cell phone has tons of awesome content, a lot from Facebook and a lot from other apps. Everyone has this infinite choice of how to spend their time, and people have very high expectations and a lot less patience to sit through something they don’t want to sit through.” To seed Watch with content, Facebook had to acquire new skills, like video production. It developed some of the early programs itself, including a show called “Returning the Favor,” hosted by handyman Mike Rowe, featuring everyday people’s stories of personal sacrifice. Facebook helped some media partners develop programs, paying hundreds of thousands an episode and covering costs for them. It will also share ad revenue with media companies that post clips to Watch, like many do on YouTube, with Facebook taking 45 percent of the revenue. The social network could also license content. There’s a Watch channel for pro surfing. And Facebook has clear ambitions for more sports programming. It recently made a failed run at the digital rights to the professional Indian cricket league, offering $600 million. It does have rights to select Major League Baseball games. Some media partners are concerned by the dynamics of the platform, unwilling to contribute their content without assurances from Facebook that it will get equal treatment from the algorithm that decides what people see which video programs. Facebook’s talks with major networks like NBC include negotia-

tions around guaranteed audiences for programs, according to media executives speaking on condition of anonymity. “That’s where the tension comes in,” says a media exec, who works closely with Facebook on partnership negotiations. “Does Facebook run into conflict when it promotes its own videos, and does its algorithm favor that?” Certain major marketers have been slow to try out the ad breaks program since tests in live video became available earlier this year. Reasons for the reluctance include a lack of real control over where ads run. Brands click the “ad breaks” option—and their spots run where Facebook drops them. “Facebook is going to control the sale,” says a media executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Facebook is saying I have to go to them and can’t buy it directly through the content provider.” Brand safety is a top concern for advertisers like JPMorgan Chase, one of the brands that is still avoiding YouTube after an eruption of press reports about ads running in front of terrorist-themed videos and content from political hate groups. It wasn’t among the marketers caught unintentionally supporting objectionable YouTube videos, but it took a zero-tolerance approach against unsafe content, fake news and any risqué material. In addition to professional video production companies, Watch will be open to almost any creator who meets community guidelines, which raises more uncertainty for advertisers. Even if their ads don’t run in a specific video, many brands are wary of appearing in videos adjacent to objectionable content, a possibility that is hard to rule out entirely. Facebook Live’s mostly tame videos, for example, have included live streams of violence and mayhem. More than one death has been live-streamed. “Every brand will decide brand safety differently,” says Kristin Lemkau, the chief marketing officer at JPMorgan Chase. “For us, I don’t think we will ever trust an algorithm.” JPMorgan Chase has decided not to try out mid-roll video ads on Facebook—yet. “We hold Facebook to the same standards we hold Google and YouTube,” Lemkau says. Still, the company is a big spender on Facebook, even without mid-roll video ads. “We’ve got a lot invested on Facebook that’s working [so] we don’t need to necessarily go there yet,” Lemkau says of the Watch program. Facebook has an opportunity to pay closer attention to what content makes the Watch hub from the outset, and try to avoid the trouble YouTube has encountered with unsavory video creators who scare off brands. Facebook hired 3,000 reviewers to manually police its platform for bad actors. It’s a topic that Sandberg and Everson and the rest of the team clearly want to handle correctly. By the nature of the medium, all of that online toxicity threatens to pollute Facebook’s new video property. But Facebook moves fast, iterating on products quickly even if it makes a mess as it goes. That’s how it went for its mobile rebirth in 2012, says Sandberg. “We had to essentially change the tires while the car was in motion.” With video, the car is still in motion and the tires are changed. But now Facebook is driving while watching.

Eyes up here: With digital spending projected to be $10 billion more than TV in the U.S. this year, Facebook has plenty to gain from its big bet. To sweeten the pot, Facebook is dangling its 2 billion users in front of content creators.

“You are there to advise your client,” says Everson. “We don’t take a position like ‘Don’t run on TV, give us all your TV money.’ We would never do that because maybe that’s what they do need.”

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Ad Age  September 25, 2017

Important to Important People

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9/15/17 12:29 PM

Annie Get Your Gun

Important to Important People

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In the Trump era, women take on a new role in gun sales By E.J. Shultz Illustration by Zigor Samaniego

For most of her life, Carrie Lightfoot had no use for firearms. “Guns were just not a part of our world at all,” says the mother of four, who was born in New York and raised her family in Arizona. “There weren’t guns in the house. I didn’t even let my boys play with squirt guns.” She had a change of heart a few years ago, after leaving a violent relationship with a boyfriend and catching a TV news story about a man who murdered his ex-wife. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, that could be me.’ ” So in 2010 she bought a gun for protection, thinking, “ ‘I’m never going to be a victim again.’ ” Lightfoot has since become a leading pro-gun evangelist, founding a group called The Well Armed Woman, the aim of which is to educate, empower and equip women who want to buy guns. She’s part of a growing movement of women and women-led organizations giving the gun industry new energy— and leading to new female-friendly product lines and gun accessories—that are narrowing the gender gap in the traditionally male-dominated $13 billion guns and ammunition business. Industry efforts to target women are not entirely new. But they are more meaningful now as gun makers deal with a post-Obama political dynamic that has led to a softening of overall demand. When President Obama was in office, anti-gun advocates counted on him to push for stronger gun control—but accompanying fears of new regulations also spurred gun sales, fattening gun makers’ bottom lines. Firearm sales soared last year, as buyers stocked up in anticipation that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency and follow Obama’s lead. The number of U.S. federal background checks, widely considered the best proxy for gun sales, reached a record 27.5 million, according to the FBI. But Trump’s surprise win eased those fears, eliciting a slowdown that took a toll on the market in the first half of 2017. Through July, 14.3 million background checks were performed, down from 16 million in the same period last year but still ahead of 2015’s pace. But to boost sales, gun makers and retailers—which stocked up in anticipation of a

Clinton win—were forced to give discounts to pare down elevated inventories, according to analysts. “Coming out of the election we saw a lot of inventory,” Chris Killoy, CEO of gun manufacturer Sturm, Ruger & Co., told investors in May. “So we had to be aggressive on our promotions.” Going forward, women buyers could be one way for gun brands to emerge from the so-called Trump slump. “With the overall decrease in demand for guns, the increasing prevalence of female consumers is more important to gun manufacturers than ever before,” says Kevin Cassidy, who covers the industry for Moody’s. The NRA’s fiery female ambassador In the U.S., 48 percent of white men say they own a gun, while 24 percent of nonwhite men say they own one, according to a Pew Research Center report published in June. The ownership rate for women is 24 percent for whites and 16 percent for nonwhites. But the potential female market is much larger, according to gun industry research. Southwick Associates, a market research firm specializing in hunting, shooting and sportfishing, found that women account for 46.8 percent of the 24 million Americans who have yet to purchase a firearm but are interested, according to a study the group conducted for the National Shooting Sports Foundation. “More women are working, more women are single, more women are in their own homes and they have a very unique interest in self-protection that they never had before,” says Deb Ferns, co-founder of Babes with Bullets, which runs a traveling firearms academy geared to female first-time gun buyers. A forthcoming study by Northeastern and Harvard universities also paints a tightening gender gap, albeit a lower percentage of female owners. Gun ownership among American men dropped from 42 percent in 1994 to 32 percent in 2015 while female ownership increased from 9 percent to 12 percent, according to the Guardian, which got an early look at the data last year. The typical female gun owner favors a handgun, not a rifle, and keeps one for protection purposes. She is also more likely

FEMALE FIREPOWER 50

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Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/15/17 12:34 PM

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firearm from the victim and use it against them,” she says. The California measure, called Prop. 63, requires background checks for bullet purchases and prohibits possession of large-capacity ammunition magazines. It passed despite the ad. But the California Rifle & Pistol Association downplayed the loss, suggesting in a post-election statement that the measure had become redundant because the state legislature had already passed duplicate gun control laws. “With our victory in the presidential election, successful legal challenges will now be filed against all these new ill-conceived and unconstitutional laws, and those cases will be heard by a new Supreme Court that will see these laws as the Second Amendment violations that they are,” the group stated.

The Best Defense? Women are more likely than men to say protection is the only reason they own a gun.

% of gun owners saying... Women

92%

Men

91%

27%

8% Protection is a reason they own a gun

Protection is the only reason they own a gun

SOURCE: Survey of U.S. adults conducted March 13 to 27, 2017, and April 4 to 18, 2017. PEW RESEARCH CENTER

‘Pretty-looking’ guns But as pro-gun groups push their agenda they will be met by an equally ardent group of gun control proponents, including one female-led organization called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. “The NRA has figured out … they have to create a culture war now to sell guns. They don’t have a bogeyman in the White House to use in their marketing campaign, so they have to make Americans afraid of one another,” says Shannon Watts, a mother of five who founded the group in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. (See sidebar, p. 54.) Moms Demand Action celebrated numerous legislative victories in a report it issued earlier this year, including defeating proposals for permitless carry—which allows the carrying of concealed guns in public without a permit—in 20 of 22 states. But pro-gun groups are winning battles in other parts of the country, including North Dakota, which as of Aug. 1 became the 12th state to allow permitless carry. In Missouri, a new permitless carry law that took effect Jan. 1 has spurred female gun demand, according to one store owner. “We are getting a big influx of ladies,” says Dave Hart, owner of Kirkwood Outfitters, a store that sells guns and gear on the outskirts of St. Louis. He suggests female demand is coming from people concerned about crime in St. Louis. In response, the store has stocked up on what he referred to as “pretty-looking” guns in colors such as pink and purple that are easy to find in a purse. “Those are the ones that the females are buying mostly,” he says. Two years ago the store might lure one female shopper a day accompanied by a husband or boyfriend, he says. But now an average of five women come into the store daily, he estimates, including many single women who visit by themselves or with girlfriends, moms or sisters. That’s a good sign for gun makers trying to get sales back on track after the sluggish start to 2017. In the first half of the year, Sturm, Ruger & Co.’s net sales fell to $299.2 million from $341.1 million in the

Photograph by Babes with Bullets

than a male gun owner to live in an urban area, and less likely to have grown up in a gun-friendly household, according to the report on the survey by the Guardian. This is why the gun industry views females as a growth opportunity. Consider the National Rifle Association, which is aggressively pushing the narrative that women need guns to protect themselves from rapists and domestic abusers. The NRA’s most visible female supporter is conservative talk show host Dana Loesch, who last year was named the group’s special adviser on women’s policy issues. She has appeared in a series of videos hosted on the group’s NRATV online network that promote female gun ownership while taking on Second Amendment critics. In one video that drew national headlines, and backlash, she targeted The New York Times, calling it “an old gray hag,” while saying, “We are coming for you.” In another video, she directly addresses rapists and domestic abusers. “Your life expectancy just got shorter, because there’s a very good chance your next target will be armed, trained and ready to exercise her right to choose her life over yours,” she says. “This is what real empowerment looks like.” The NRA also runs a Women’s Leadership Forum that includes women-only shooting events and hunting excursions. While the group has been around for more than a decade, it is now “one of the largest and most influential philanthropic groups within the NRA, gaining momentum with each passing day,” according to its website. Last year, an NRA-backed group called the Coalition for Civil Liberties, which opposed a California ballot measure to toughen the state’s gun control laws, ran an ad showing a woman shooting an attacker in a parking garage. A second ad featured a transgender victim. The tagline for both: “Take away our rights, take away our life.” Cameka Crawford, chief communications officer of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, calls such messaging “misguided.” The hotline has “heard many stories from survivors that make it clear how easy it is for an enraged abusive partner to take a

9/15/17 12:35 PM

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By E.J. Schultz

Maria Pike cries as she holds a picture of her son, Ricky Pike,who was fatally shot in 2012 at the age of 24.

first half of 2016. But Killoy, the CEO, points to its more diverse consumer base, including “a lot more women shooters,” as reason for optimism. American Outdoor Brands, whose brands include Smith & Wesson, reported a 4 percent increase in revenue to $229.2 million for its quarter ending April 30. But that trails the 40 percent growth in its first quarter and 63 percent uptick in its second quarter, which was followed by “flattish” growth in the third quarter, as noted by investment analyst firm Wedbush Securities. Across the industry, market research group IBISWorld projects that gun and ammunition industry revenue—including consumer and military purchases—will grow annually by 3.5 percent from $13.3 billion in 2017 to $15.8 billion in 2022. Amid this year’s slowdown, American Outdoor Brands kept accelerating its advertising, which mostly includes TV and magazine ads, as well as printed materials. Spending increased to $22.3 million in the year ending April 30 from $21.8 million the year prior, including selling and marketing expenses, according to its annual report. In magazines and online ads, gun and firearm gear manufacturers are making direct appeals to women. “Confident Women Carry the Cross” states a banner ad for gun holster brand CrossBreed that recently ran on Women’s Outdoor News. A Smith & Wesson ad shows a woman grasping a handgun with the copy, “Where protection meets performance.” The website for Miss Concealed includes a variety of female gear, such as a stylish “concealed carry purse.” Boise, Idaho, resident Lorelei Fay founded the retailer in 2014 after noticing “there is nothing out there that’s even remotely feminine,” she says. Female training camps Grassroots female-led gun training groups—not political advocacy or fancy ads and retailing—might be providing the biggest boost to the female market. In 54

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The National Rifle Association has a new adversar—a foe armed with infants and diapers. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, founded in 2012, pushes its gun-control agenda with a variety of tactics, including an attention-grabbing one called “stroller jams.” These involve crowding statehouse halls with babies and moms armed with infant gear like diaper bags, making it “impossible for lawmakers to get by without answering our questions,” says the organization’s founder, Shannon Watts.

When Sandy Hook happened, “it really spoke to me as a mom,” says Watts, a former corporate communications executive who at the time was a stay-athome mom in Indiana. She looked to join an organization like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but for gun safety, and couldn’t find one. So she started a Facebook page that evolved into an organization created to demand action from legislators, companies and educational institutions to establish gun reforms. Last year, the group won the North American Grand Effie for a campaign called

short, women are teaching other women about guns. Lightfoot’s The Well Armed Woman sports the tagline, “Where the Feminine and Firearms Meet.” It oversees an online discussion forum and a nonprofit organization that helps gather local groups of women around the country that “meet monthly to practice, learn and grow as shooters,” according to its website. As of early August, the group oversaw 357 chapters in 49 states, with the 50th state, South Dakota, expected to be represented soon. Lightfoot started the group after finding gun makers were unaware of the needs of women and relied on outdated marketing. “If you look at any gun magazine, it’s a lot of metal and a lot of black and a lot of grey. And up until recently, if there was a woman represented in that magazine it was in a sexual expression,” she says. “It was either the babes in bikinis holding a gun … or ‘Here, little lady, let me tell you what you need.’ ” Gun makers have taken notice. National sponsors of The Well Armed Woman meetings include Sturm, Ruger & Co. and Glock, according to Lightfoot. Ruger also sponsors “The Women’s Gun Show,” a weekly podcast co-hosted by Lightfoot and Barbara Baird, publisher of Women’s Outdoor News. The Well Armed Woman also provides regular feedback to gun makers about female-friendly gun designs. Some 200 members of the group actively participated in the design of a new lightweight rifle by gun maker LWRC that is specially designed for women, Lightfoot says. Ferns’ Babes with Bullets has backing from Smith & Wesson, which sponsors the 11 female training camps it’s running this year, from California to New Hampshire. Smith & Wesson furnished the camps with loaner guns, holsters and other financial support, such as gun-range fees, Ferns says. (Women cannot buy guns at the camp.) American Outdoor Brands did not respond to a request for comment.

“Groceries Not Guns” by Grey Canada that pressured Kroger and other retailers to ban open carry of guns in stores. The group says it supports the Second Amendment, but wants “common-sense solutions” to help “decrease the escalating epidemic of gun violence that kills too many of our children and loved ones every day,” according to its website. “There’s never been a grassroots movement in gun violence prevention. It’s really been male-run think tanks mainly to shape federal legislation,”

says Watts, who now resides in Boulder, Colorado. “For decades the NRA has been able to generate emails and calls and industry meetings and outrage with the flip of a switch, and we needed that kind of power on our side. And we have that now.”

Ferns, 63, of Arizona, didn’t shoot her first gun until her 45th birthday. As a corporate meeting planner, she was always on the road shuttling among Tucson, Phoenix, San Diego and Palm Springs. At one point she decided, “I want to take my personal protection a little bit more seriously,” she says, and soon began spreading the message to other women after co-founding Babes with Bullets in 2004. About 85 percent of the attendees of the Babes with Bullets camps have never touched a gun before they arrive at the multiday sleepover camps, she says. “It’s women teaching women,” she explains. Much of the new gun demand, she notes, comes from women who travel long distances for work during off hours and in crime-ridden neighborhoods, including female veterinarians, nurses and real estate agents. Women gun owners appear to be more accepting of at least some restrictive gun policies. Of gun-owning Republican women, 60 percent favor banning assault weapons and 57 percent support creation of a federal gun-sales tracking database, according to a recent Pew survey. That compares with 28 percent and 35 percent, respectively, for Republican men gun owners. (Pew did not include a similar statistic for Democrats.) Both Ferns and Lightfoot say their groups avoid getting overtly political. “It’s just women who want to protect themselves,” Ferns says. “We have a large number of gun-owning, more liberal women … that are maybe more liberal-thinking on the social issues but believe firmly in the Second Amendment and their right to own a gun.”

Photograph by Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The Mother Movement

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/15/17 12:35 PM

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9/15/17 1:24 PM

The former Fox News favorite starts a new day, every day, as she joins NBC’s morning lineup. But will viewers tune in? By Jeanine Poggi Photography by Stephanie Diani

MEGYN KELLY’S WAKE-UP CALL Important to Important People

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In the year since battling with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, who attacked her over the questions she asked during a Republican debate hosted by Fox News, Megyn Kelly’s work life has become far sunnier. She threw the first pitch at a Durham Bulls game, sang John Denver during a family camping trip and danced with Derek Hough of “Dancing With the Stars” fame, all for lighthearted pieces on NBC’s “Today,” where her new 9 a.m. hosting gig starts Sept. 25. It wasn’t the Kelly viewers know from Fox News, but she says politics was never her obsession. “My separation from it, I think, worked professionally,” she says. “It’s also the thing that made it unsustainable for me, because you have to have deep passion.” Kelly’s first outing with NBC this year, the news magazine “Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly,” suffered some rough patches. The most public was when parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School asked the network to spike a segment featuring Alex Jones, a conspiracy peddler who has called the massacre a fake. Kelly argued that Jones’ influence with Trump was reason enough to cover him, and earned good reviews for the piece once it aired. Ratings for the show’s eight episodes averaged below the repeats of “60 Minutes” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos” airing opposite, but NBC says it’s not trying to topple “60 Minutes” out of the gate. “It’s not going to be perfect on Day One, and we’re not going to be in first place on Day Two,” NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack said in comments reported by Variety before the show began, and recently confirmed to Ad Age. The show returns in the spring. Meanwhile, after two months of traveling nationwide to promote her new morning show, Kelly landed back in New York at the end of August. She discussed her plan to inject some positivity into the news, her “year of Trump” and how “Megyn Kelly Today” will handle the president. Our conversation has been edited.

What’s your mind frame in the weeks leading up to the show? It’s exactly the kind of storytelling I want to be doing—taking viewers on an emotional journey I know they’re going to love. The stories that I have in the bank right now are just so uplifting and empowering and amazing. What do you think you’re bringing to morning TV that’s missing? It’s not so much that there’s a void that needs filling. I’m trying to create a place that rejects the constant outrage and hostility. Our mission is not far from my life motto, which is to settle for more joy, more love, more human connection. There’s an increased desire to feel connected to your fellow human beings in what is increasingly a disconnected country and world. You won’t get punched in the face, metaphorically. So is this a departure from politics and hard news? Well, a departure from politics. There will be hard news, but I don’t want to be covering politics every morning. If it’s big enough that it crosses over into my world, I’ll do it. But our mission is in no way political. Will you be talking about President Trump? Let me see how I want to phrase that. The bar will have to be high for any news from inside the Beltway. Now having said that, there’s a different way of getting at some of these stories without going political. If the show had been on during the incident in Charlottesville, where white nationalists clashed with counter-protesters, how would you have handled it? Would we have been debating what President Trump said? No, we would not. That’s cable. Would I put on a bunch of skinheads? No. We’re not trying to go to the darkness. There are smart, uplifting ways of getting at these stories that will help people learn how other people feel in a way that can be cathartic and not offensive. I’m not interested in doing, with all due respect because Geraldo Rivera is a friend of mine, the show with a bunch of skinheads where chairs get thrown. I’m trying to help people think through issues, improve their lives, get their arms around things that may have been daunting to them or even scary to them, and grow. I want to grow. So this is an opportunity to counter-balance the negativity prevalent since the election. Yes, this is that opportunity. It’s been crafted by design. That’s not the stew in which I want to immerse myself. There are people who love it. You don’t get excited by any part of it? Well, I like politics. Don’t get me wrong, I do. You have to love it to do it 24/7, and to stand in the midst of all that nastiness, day after day after day after day, and continue to love it. When I got into cable news, it was not all politics. I covered the Supreme Court my first three years at Fox. That was fun. I had been a lawyer. I did “America’s Newsroom,” which was a 9 a.m. show with Bill Hemmer. That wasn’t all politics. It wasn’t until I got to cable-news primetime that it became mostly politics, but not even in the beginning.

“I looked around and said, ‘Oh, wait. I’m not enjoying this anymore.’ ... I never wanted to be a political animal.” 58

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When did it change? In the era of Trump. It’s sort of how you boil the frog: You put him in the water when it’s cold and then you turn it up. That’s kind of what happened to me. Then I looked around and said, “Oh, wait. I’m not enjoying this anymore. This is not exactly what I thought I was signing up for. I wanted to cover the news. I wanted to be in storytelling. I never wanted to be a political animal.” One of the ironies is, one of the things that made “The Kelly File” so successful was that I was not on either side. I would call B.S. on anyone. Because I really didn’t have a horse in the race. Do you feel like, at some point, you would have needed to pick a side? No, I never have. I think there was pressure from certain people out in the ether. Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/15/17 2:39 PM

Important to Important People

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From your viewers? No, but I think in 2017 America there’s almost an expectation that a journalist is going to do that. I never had an affinity for either side, ever, Republicans or Democrats. I can see both sides of every issue. I’ve voted for both sides. I’m a registered independent. I think it’s not right to expect that of a journalist. What did you learn during the election, especially the encounters with President Trump? I had many takeaways. I do believe it reminded me that adversity is an opportunity. It’s not fun to go through. I emerged from that whole nonsense stronger and knowing myself better, and closer to my most intimate people, from my husband and my children to my friends. I also learned that the negative buzz out there, the negative people, whether it’s direct attacks from certain websites to more indirect criticism you might get from media critics or what have you, not to listen to it. Because if those types of attacks could kill me, I would have been dead long ago. All that matters, in terms of your professional success, is your relationship directly with your viewers. I was well aware that a lot of my audience was Republican, and a lot of my audience loved Donald Trump. I was well aware that it would not serve me well to go out there and bash Trump every night, and I didn’t. But when Trump did something controversial and deserved calling out, like ripping on Judge Curiel in very xenophobic terms, or ripping on a Gold Star family, I called him out on it. Do you think you should have been harder on President Trump? Me? No. I think I nailed it. One of the things I’m most proud of is how my team at “The Kelly File” held steady at the helm and under immense pressure. You talk about your audience staying loyal. Who do you think your audience is for the morning show? Do you have a natural constituency following you? I certainly hope that some of the Fox viewers will come over and sample. I hope that the “Today” show viewers who are watching from 7 to 9 will give us a try and check it out. One of the things I’ve noticed in the media, in the build-up to my daytime show, is it seems like some of these critics expect Moses to come down with the tablets. Do you feel pressure? There’s been a lot of hype. I realize some people want to make it into something with much higher stakes than really exist. I don’t feel that. The only time I start to feel stress is when the vitriol in my life crosses over into my family. The threats to my family’s security. I would imagine that’s incredibly scary. That is by far the darkest thing I’ve dealt with since I became a journalist. I was grateful that during the whole Trump nonsense, they were too young to really get it. Some of the things seeped down, but my husband and I never discuss politics or President Trump in front of our kids. No good can come of that. They’ll even come home and say, “I heard President Trump is bad, President Trump is terrible.” Even with them, I’m saying, “Try to keep an open mind. Like anybody, he’s not all bad. He’s not all good. It’s more complicated than that.” They’re 7 and 6. My 4-year-old is not yet there. They have enough to deal with. They don’t need the stress of worrying about our president.

“I generally feel that the critics, if they say something negative about me or my show, I’m sure I probably deserved it. I believe in karma.”

What do you make of criticisms about your Sunday news magazine? I generally feel that the critics, if they say something negative about me or my show, I’m sure I probably deserved it. I believe in karma so, even if I don’t deserve that particular criticism that day, I’m sure I’ve done something that warrants their ire. I try to just accept that and work on being better and doing better, and putting better karma out in the world. It’s not pleasant for me. It’s not that I want to sit down and have cocktails with people who write unkind things about me, but I generally am forgiving about where that comes from. I find it more helpful to just work harder and try to do better. You’ve had a daytime show on cable, so moving into morning is not completely new for you. But do you think there’s an element of reinvention that you have to go through to start “Megyn Kelly Today”? For me, it’s not a reinvention because this is who I am. It’s not that I wasn’t my authentic self in “The Kelly File.” That was authentically me, there’s no question. My friends all say, “Oh, so this is going to be you. Like the you we know?” Because when I was with my friends, or I was with my family, I wasn’t acting like you’d see me on “The Kelly File,” except for the humor. People who didn’t watch “The Kelly File” think I’ve never shown my humorous side. People who watch every day are like, “Yeah, of course. We know, she’s like a 9-year-old boy.” Is this what you saw yourself doing when you quit law? One-hundred percent yes. I saw myself covering the news and telling people stories, telling the stories of our time. Never once did I think about being a political animal, or telling political stories at all. It’s just that’s what cable news has become. I would submit to you, when I joined it back in 2004, it was not that way. It wasn’t always so serious. At all! At all. We did fun legal debates about guys who would go to strip clubs and get a stiletto in the eye, and then sue. Is it harder for women in the news now? There’s no question. There’s so much misogyny, online in particular. I don’t think it does us a lot of good to complain about it. I haven’t figured out how to solve it without discussing it. Will your show be a forum for topics like that? I don’t want to lecture to anybody, because I find there’s no better way to shut down their listening skills than to start lecturing them. I’m that way personally. But it’s absolutely going to be a place where women will feel empowered and they will feel supported. If we’re dealing with rampant misogyny, in any given instance, then we ought to identify that instead of pretending it’s better than we think it is. Then, talk honestly about how we can get past it. I don’t think it’s helpful to whine. What do you watch when you’re not making the news? “Game of Thrones.” “This Is Us.” How much do you use social media? Any favorite platforms? I don’t. If I want to post something on Facebook or Twitter, I email it to my staff. They post it. I’ve removed those from my phone. I’m a much happier person for it. They’re just negative places. There’s too much anonymity. It brings out people’s worst demons instead of their best angels. My own experiment has proven that just living one’s life in the actual world instead of the virtual one leads to far greater happiness and wellness. Do you think that there’s a need now to hear these kinds of things in TV and in the news? The country is going through something right now, something... significant. I hear it from both sides. There’s no good, and there’s no respect for someone’s desire to go through one’s day with joy. It’s not that people want to live as Pollyanna, but I think they want to consume the news without being smacked in the face with constant awfulness.

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Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/15/17 2:40 PM

Learn more about The Science Behind What’s Next at nielsen.com. TM

Copyright © 2017 The Nielsen Company (US), LLC. All Rights Reserved.

WE INTERRUPT THIS INTERRUPTION FOR AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE BY MICHAEL STROBER EVP OF CLIENT STRATEGY AND AD INNOVATION AT TURNER AND CO-HEAD OF TURNER IGNITE

There’s no shortage of haranguing pundits predicting the end of advertising. Yet worldwide ad spend is set to top $580 billion this year, according to eMarketer, and a large portion of that will be spent with television networks. ¶ The reason? At the end of the day, TV ads put butts in seats and push steel off dealer lots. In fact, a recent study published by Neustar found that for a $1 million investment, TV’s lift is consistently seven times better than paid search and five times better than online display advertising. ¶ TV ads work. But, can they be better? Absolutely!

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Ad Age September 25, 2017.

9/11/17 5:14 PM

Publishing Partner

The value exchange between consumers and brands has been upended given all the tools consumers can use to avoid ads and the options they now have for on-demand and streaming programming. We need to redefine this relationship that has been predicated on interruption, particularly among plurals (13- to 21-year-olds) who consider advertising the Brussels sprouts of their media diet. We live in a world straight out of science-fiction novels—there are driverless cars on U.S. streets, we’re knee-deep in planning a manned mission to Mars, and our phones can virtually transport us halfway around the world in a matter of a few taps. So it doesn’t seem all that far-fetched that the time is here to reinvent a 50-plusyear-old ad model, starting with these considerations:

Give Consumers Control … Really

Better Big Data

Every year, we as an industry churn out a ton of ads. We have some of the most brilliant creative minds in our world working on ads that invade the user experiences of sites, airwaves and apps like uninvited houseguests. And, while it’s nice to pick up our awards at Cannes Lions every year, we have to think differently if we are going to continue to connect with customers. There have been some nominal attempts at industry-wide initiatives to do so, such as the ill-fated Coalition for Better Ads. But there has been a resurgence that has led to much more positive results, particularly around reduced TV commercial loads and increased adoption of ad targeting. But we must forge a path forward in a more dramatic and bold fashion, casting aside the notions of TV advertising we grew up on and still put into service today. People who watch TV today do not do so the same way as people did 50 years ago; and in 10 years, how we watch TV today will seem just as antiquated.

Data is everywhere in the ad industry, and increasingly being used as a tool for television. We don’t have a data problem—we have a problem with harnessing the right pools of data, and creating audience-targeting models that are accurate and predictive. This will only become more imperative when TV inevitably becomes fully IP-delivered. Turner’s Ignite team has been at the forefront of these advanced TV models for nearly four years, and there is momentum within agencies and brand advertisers to adopt them more widely. Not only do these audience-driven solutions produce better results for advertisers through increased ROI, they also deliver a better ad experience to viewers with more relevant ads.

Connect the Technology

Today, people are accessing video on a myriad of platforms and devices, but the ad tech enablement on each of those endpoints—everything from ad serving to measurement—is still not there and causes some pretty awkward situations. Seriously, nobody needs to see the same deodorant ad 17 times, trust me! Marketers are left guessing how effective their dollars really are as they try to make sense of the chaotic chasm separating digital and TV, all while struggling to coordinate messaging across these channels. We must move beyond just paying lip service to the power of cross-platform and actually connect all of these consumer touchpoints, inclusive of the TV environment, creating a fully addressable environment powered by a robust and unified device graph.

Sponsor Content

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Television’s mass reach is unparalleled, but punctuating content experiences with just “we’ll be back after this commercial break!” misses out on marketing opportunities that allow consumers to take part and lean in. People don’t want to just be talked at, and they appreciate when they are given options and tools to personalize their ad experience in a meaningful way. Hulu’s Ad Selector format is a great example, allowing users to choose what ads and advertisers they’d rather see. The creative community is certainly up to the task of developing new, highly engaging experiences that take advantage of the various television-viewing environments; it’s a matter of empowering them further, pushing our imagination to what new ad formats and experiences can be.

Cast Aside Organizational Inertia

This week’s issue of Ad Age marks a new chapter, and by extension, for the ad industry which it chronicles. We ought to take a page out of Ad Age’s book and rethink the “look and feel” of how we approach our consumers, understanding that we have a shared imperative to move faster than we ever have before. We have the opportunity to coordinate around bigger ideas today, and to take on and invest further in our own moonshot-type projects that will transform our industry. We just have to have the courage to interrupt our own regularly scheduled programming to meet the demands of this inevitable future.

About the Author

As EVP of client strategy and ad innovation for Turner and co-head of Turner Ignite, Michael Strober is charged with both capturing client insights and developing next generation ad capabilities, notably around audience targeting and advanced TV solutions. In January 2016, Strober came together with Turner’s head of content partnerships, Dan Riess, to launch Turner Ignite, the company’s insightsdriven content and data solutions unit designed to power the next generation of advertising capabilities.

About Turner Ignite

Turner Ignite is focused on reimagining advertising. Powered by unrivaled branded content services, data-rich ad targeting capabilities, first-of-its kind social optimization tools and global distribution, Turner Ignite empowers brands to build more meaningful connections with consumers and drive return on investment at scale. The business unit is backed by Turner’s wide-scale audience of diverse fans of its portfolio properties.

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It’s a stereotype as pernicious as it is tired. It’s so pervasive that political opponents of first lady Michelle Obama used it as a shorthand for why voters shouldn’t trust her. It’s a taunt that’s been used in recent months to taint women from Rep. Maxine Waters to Serena Williams to ESPN’s Jemele Hill. The angry black woman. She is unreasonable, and that gives us permission to dismiss her statements and her concerns. Perhaps not surprisingly, the label is most often used to undercut the successful professional woman—a code for saying she succeeds by being aggressive and rude. This trope, plus other negative imagery, shows up in both TV news programs and reality shows, such as VH1’s “Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta” and Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” The latter had an entire storyline that revolved around cast member Porsha Williams’ “anger management.” A growing group of 15 (and counting) ad agency executives and educators has had enough. The informal consortium, which includes women from Publicis Groupe, SapientRazorfish and Howard University, is overseeing an initiative to quantify the impact of such imagery on all Americans, raise awareness of the issue and recommend countermeasures. This includes asking marketers

who support such shows to consider what their brand dollars help to disseminate. “We’re not asleep. We’re very much aware and awake,” says Sandra Sims-Williams, chief diversity officer, Publicis, who’s part of the group. “And other women need to wake up.” The survey, coordinated by the American Advertising Federation’s Mosaic Center for Multiculturalism and the historic black sorority Zeta Phi Beta, should help. Being released this week at the 47th annual Legislative Conference of the Congressional Black Caucus and at Advertising Week, it has two sections: The first was sent to 500 (in total) African-American and Caucasian women ages 18 to 24, and a follow-up was sent to a broader sample of 500 women of all races. Some of the more startling statistics from the former: When asked how best to describe how African-American women were portrayed in the media, the adjectives most cited were “argumentative” (60 percent), “lazy” (46 percent) and “corrupt” (45 percent). “Only 12 percent of African-American and Caucasian women believe there are positive images of African-American women in the media,” says Mary Breaux Wright, international president, Zeta Phi Beta. “Something has to be done.”

“Producers, you know what? Get real. Middle-class black families exist.” Sandra Sims-Williams, chief diversity officer, Publicis Groupe

Just as disturbing, some seemed to find some of the imagery aspirational. “Our findings were alarming,” says Wright. “Our girls were being enticed by these harmful images of African-American women, some seeing reality TV and ‘social media celebrity’ as their chance for success over their education.” Waking up Discussions about the topic first began at the Mosaic Center’s council after the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement that followed. “When the Ferguson riots broke out, a lot of the images being shown repeatedly on the news were really shocking,” says Kendra King, VP of marketing and consumer strategy at SapientRazorfish, who at the time was chair of the Mosaic Council. “[The images] being rebroadcast and repurposed were the riots, even though there were peaceful protests happening too. And we were afraid ... viewers would think, ‘Maybe these people deserve this if they are acting this way.’ ... We wanted to start a dialogue. We thought, ‘How can we use our talents we’ve earned in the marketing, advertising and entertainment world to do that?’ ”

“We thought, ‘How can we use our talents we’ve earned in the marketing, advertising and entertainment world [to start a dialogue]?” Kendra King, VP of marketing and consumer strategy, SapientRazorfish

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Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/15/17 7:47 PM

The group grew, and began its work in earnest in 2015 with TV reality show “watch parties” on college campuses, and in the offices of ad agencies in 10 cities, including Chicago, Detroit, New York and Philadelphia. They were co-hosted by the AAF and Zeta Phi Beta, and more than 400 people attended, including educators, college students and advertising and entertainment executives. One reason the watch parties were so important, the group says, is that African-Americans watch many more hours of TV than other demographic groups. According to Nielsen, African-American TV viewers watch roughly 57 hours more than white viewers, an average of 213 hours per month. African-American women watch 14 more hours of TV a week than any other ethnic group, and they are 59 percent more likely to watch reality TV programming. At these events, seven clips from shows were shown (see sidebar, p. 66) and then discussions followed, including on how race and power were central to story arcs, and what negative feelings surfaced in viewers as they watched. “We wanted to find out what people were thinking,” says Rochelle Ford, professor and chair, public relations, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communi-

cations at Syracuse University, another member of the coalition. Viewers “can be led to think that what is on reality TV is how people really behave.” In February 2016, the watch parties led to a white paper, “Reality TV: Entertaining … but No Laughing Matter.” It noted that as of 2016, most Americans were living “strikingly separate racial lives.” And it found that “for an astonishing number of people, their only exposure to people of color is through their television or computer screen.” (An average white American’s social circle is typically 91 percent Caucasian, according to U.S. Census data and research from the Public Religion Research Institute.) The behavior of reality TV cast members characterized by aggressiveness, excessive materialism and hypersexuality, it also found, influences the way African-American women are viewed both in the workplace and in social situations. And because of the ubiquity of these shows, reality TV cast members often become role models for African-American teens and young adults as they absorb attitudes toward money, sex and possessions, and adopt similar speech patterns and fashion choices, the paper notes. The paper also examined how frequently these shows use African-American stereotypes. These

“Our findings were alarming. ... Our girls were being enticed by these harmful images of AfricanAmerican women.”

“The images people see on TV or in [other media] have a tremendous editorial power.”

personas, culled from outside academic research, include the “hood rat,” the “Bible thumper” and the “angry black woman.” (See sidebar, p. 68.) “Producers, you know what? Get real. Middle-class black families exist,” says Publicis Groupe’s Williams. “I don’t know if enough white people know that there is a black middle class.” Williams points to ABC’s “Blackish” as “a good thing because it’s a program that’s a real reflection of black middle-class life and the issues facing them.” Cottage cheese vs. ice cream Many watch-party participants admitted the shows were spectacles, but also entertaining and a guilty pleasure. “It’s like having no-fat, no-fruit yogurt or cottage cheese when you want ice cream. It’s not what you want when you want to be entertained,” says Syracuse’s Ford. “If we boycott it, they’ll stop making it, but as an educated person, I can look and say, ‘But it’s funny; it’s entertaining.’ I recognize that’s part of the problem.” Lena Waithe, screenwriter for Netflix’s “Master of None” and producer of the upcoming Showtime series “The Chi,” notes that those negative tropes are often employed because they draw in audiences.

Renetta McCann, chief talent officer, Leo Burnett

Mary Breaux Wright, international president, Zeta Phi Beta

ACK WOMAN’ OMEN ANGRY Important to Important People

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TV has a long way to go in presenting positive images of African-American women, but a consortium of female executives is now doing something about it By Ann Marie Kerwin

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do to reflect experiences meaningful to it. “I’m always striving for authenticity,” says DuVernay, director, screenwriter, documentarian and founder of Array, a grassroots collective dedicated to promoting films by women and people of color. “The visibility and representation are so scarce that there is a real necessity for authenticity, that you feel these characters are multidimensional, full-bodied people. So often the representation of people of color is very one-dimensional.”

The Beyonce´ Effect

It’s not just producers and writers who are becoming more aware of how they portray African-American women. A handful of advertisers are starting to get real, too. Kimberly-Clark, for example, recently named Jessamyn Stanley as a new national brand ambassador for Kotex. Stanley is plussize, African American and, more important,

By Ann Marie Kerwin

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Reality Bites

Problematic scenes from three different “watch party” shows “Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta” (2012), VH1 Chrissy explains that her fiancé, Jim Jones, can cheat; just do it respectfully.

Pervasive negativity Next, the group fielded the survey, “From Bad Girls to Housewives: Portrayals of African-American Women in Media,” to see if the watch-party observations were shared by a more representative sample. In addition to the stats mentioned earlier, the section that surveyed African-American and Caucasion women shows that when it comes to which media best portray African-American women’s lives, unscripted TV/reality ranks the lowest, at 18 percent; movies/films rank the highest at 35 percent; social media comes in at 27 percent and advertisements/commercials 22 percent. Unscripted/reality TV was associated with the most negative perceptions. Of the survey’s respondents, 45 percent say that black women are por-

not part of a multicultural campaign. She’s the national campaign spokesperson, which Lizette Williams, multicultural marketing leader for North America at K-C, says is by design. “When we looked at [creative executions for a recent campaign], and we looked at what language and what images performed best, the African-American

“Real Housewives of Atlanta” (2008), Bravo Phaedra confronts Kendra about her spreading rumors that she is having an affair. “The Apprentice” (2004), NBC Omarosa has a fight with her teammates. Source: American Advertising Federation and Zeta Phi Beta

creative performed best across all ethnic groups,” says Williams. “We like to refer to that as the Beyoncé effect. Everyone loves her, and she is unapologetically an African-American woman. And in music, in pop culture, that message and pride is driving so much influence. By engaging all demographic groups, we can really move the needle on the business.

“The responsibility we have as marketers is to be authentic and find a respectful way to tell our story, in a way that authentically portrays her experience,” she continues. “We’re not in the business of being exploitive, nor should we be. We can have a hand in shaping how the rest of the world sees diverse communities.”

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

“It’s not just some sort of evil plan by the people in charge,” she says. “We sometimes feed into it. Some of these shows are run by African-American producers. The majority of the audience for these shows are African American, and they’re entertained by it. ... As long as there’s a market for it, people are going to want to be in that market and play up those stereotypes.” Therein lies the rub, the paper notes: High ratings signal to network executives that there’s no problem with the content, and high ratings lead to advertising dollars rewarding that content. “From a marketing standpoint, it’s not just the message we have to get right, it’s also about the medium and where we’re showing our support with our dollars,” says King. Erik Logan, president of OWN, says its executives are very sensitive to avoiding one-dimensional or stereotypical characters. “We have a very clear mission, and it’s one that our programming team and our acquisition team are locked in with,” he says. Network practice, he adds, with all storytellers—from Will Packer, producer of “Girls Trip” and head of a new production venture with OWN, to Ava DuVernay, producer of “Queen Sugar,” to Mara Brock Akil, showrunner on “Love Is”—is to educate them on who OWN’s audience is, and what the stories can

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/15/17 7:33 PM

White Paper Black Stereotypes According to the white paper “Reality TV ... Entertaining but No Laughing Matter” from the American Advertising Federation and Zeta Phi Beta, a historically black sorority, these are the most frequently cited African-American female stereotypes and their definitions. These are the tropes the group hopes to banish: “The Hood Rat” Usually loud and boisterous, depicted as crazy and irrational. She’s consistently shown screaming, cursing in public and instigating fights. “The Bitch” Combination “hyper-independent black woman” and “angry black woman.” Seen as an emasculating woman who speaks to (or about) people with little tact or regard for their feelings.

Porsha Williams in an episode of ‘Real Housewives of Atlanta.’

Circle of influence The third peg of the group’s initiative consists of countermeasures to help broaden the types of characters seen on TV, and to make sure those images, both positive and negative, are understood in context. To further that goal, a roundtable is being organized on the West Coast to raise awareness among those who create programming. “The images people see on TV or in [other media] have a tremendous editorial power,” says Renetta McCann, chief talent officer at Leo Burnett, and another member of the group. “They frame one’s perception of that event or a type of person.” The group has begun to advocate for media literacy education, as well as to push to revive a 2010 House of Representatives bill, Support the Healthy Media for Youth Act, which would provide grants for media literacy programs. “Media literacy will help people to better see the realism of these characters in shows, in ads and reported by the news,” says AAF COO Connie Frazier, who has been with the group since the start. “We also want to have more conversations with people in decision-making positions so it becomes part of their thought process.” “We want to work our circle of influence to reach those in media production and the other pool of people who have the ability to write scripts, to green-light something, so we can get a whole lot of other images out there to counteract the negative ones and create balance,” adds Syracuse’s Ford.

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Hope online Thanks to the proliferation of platforms and distribution channels, more people of color have found outlets for their own stories, and the more stories that are out there, the better the balance becomes. “What we see happening in the digital space is very exciting. Creators of color who may not have had an opportunity to get into writers’ rooms have created their own lane and blown up,” says Dana Gills, Lionsgate creative director, motion picture group, who’s affiliated with the consortium. “Where you come from influences the types of stories we tell. Authenticity travels across color and across economic lines.” Gills points to “Insecure” star Issa Rae, who came to prominence with her YouTube series “Awkward Black Girl.” “She found her own path and authenticity of voice, and that went well beyond her social circle,” says Gills. “I’m a firm believer that authenticity is what allows these stories to go broad and to appeal to a wide audience.” But change takes time, and the women backing this initiative are also ready to commit to its progress long-term. “It takes a village to ensure that the depictions of a community are realistic and reflect true experiences,” says E.T. Franklin, exec VP-managing director, Spark Foundry, a watch-party host. “On the ad and marketing side, it takes a village to watch how dollars are spent and how allocations are made and what recommendations filter up to clients. It takes cooperation on the media side from folks who are producing and green-lighting shows and writing and developing storylines and character arcs. And it also takes the audience to be responsive in a measurable and vocal way as to what is working and what is wanted. It will take all sides.”

“The Desperate Single” Combination “hyperindependent black woman,” “tragic mulatto” and “Jezebel.” Often portrayed as unlovable and in need of a man, thus she settles for mediocre men to compensate for loneliness and lack of self-confidence. “The Bible-Thumper” A woman who quotes the Bible, assesses and then judges people, often hypocritically, for their “ungodly” behavior. “The Angry Black Woman” An upset, irate, aggressive, loud and rude woman, whose damaged self-concept makes her lash out at others (verbally, nonverbally, physically and psychologically) to cover her own pain. “The Tragic Mulatto” A usually light-skinned African-American woman depicted as one destined to have tragedies befall her. “The Mammy” Has her roots in slavery, when she was caricatured as content, even happy, to be a slave or in an undesirable situation. Her wide grin, hearty laughter and loyal servitude are presented as evidence of her humanity despite Jim Crow, discrimination, segregation or otherwise deplorable system under which she lives.

“Real Housewives of Atlanta” via YouTube

trayed as “argumentative” in unscripted/reality TV programs; 37 percent say they’re shown as “lazy”; 34 percent “fake”; and 32 percent “corrupt.” Additionally, African-American women are 56 percent more likely than Caucasian women to believe these portrayals are unfairly negative.

“The Jezebel” A promiscuous, emotionally damaged, hypersexual predator.

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

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AD AGE COMES OF AGE

The Ad Age issue that you are holding in your hands represents our biggest change in the last two decades. Don’t believe us? Take a dive into our

archives and see how our design and our stories have led Ad Age to where we are today—still important to important people.­

By Judann Pollack

Jan. 11, 1930 Advertising Age prints its first issue early in the Great Depression. The mission of the “National Newspaper of Advertising” is to “present the news of advertising, a business of widespread interests and ramifications, involving expenditures of $2 billion a year.” Our first cover features a woman, with a story on a federal expert advising food advertisers to “get a housewife’s view.”

April 22, 1985 Coca-Cola introduces New Coke, perhaps the biggest marketing whoops of all time. Our cover story is one of the first to break the news. Just three months later, we report that Coke is retrenching and introducing Coke Classic.

Feb. 15, 1993 As the ad world becomes more global, Ad Age begins a new publication, Advertising Age International, which reports on events like this issue’s cover story on marketers targeting Vietnam. Eventually, a separate magazine no longer makes sense, and AAI folds into Ad Age in the late 1990s.

Jan. 4, 1943 Ad Age’s contribution to the war effort is a V for victory symbol flanking our logo. The bulletin in the top corner also hints at the coming collapse of the 15 percent commission that was to come, with a story in which Foote, Cone & Belding founder Fairfax Cone denounces reports that client American Tobacco is paying below the going rate.

April 28, 1986 The combination of Doyle Dane Bernbach, Needham Harper & Steers and Batten Barton Durstine & Osborn into Omnicom reshapes the ad agency world forever, in what becomes known as “The Big Bang.” Ad Age had the story first, but in those analog days we could not publish until Monday. Word leaked that we had the scoop, forcing the agencies involved to hold a press conference over the weekend confirming it.

Oct. 17, 1994 As ad scandals go, this is one of the biggest. Campbell Soup wants to make an ad showing how good its soup looks, so in 1968 it put marbles in the bottom of the bowl to lift up the “particulates”—noodles and stuff. That landed the company in the soup with the FTC. This Advertising Age cover story, which we publish more than two decades later, offers the inside scoop from a BBDO creative director who was then on the account.

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Oct. 15, 1945 A printer’s strike paralyzes Chicago—but not Ad Age. Unable to print the Oct. 8 paper, Ad Age instead handtypes an eight-page “pony issue,” the smallest in our history. The following week, Oct. 15, we get back up on the horse with a 32-page issue, also typed and replicated by “photo-lithography.”

Aug. 8, 1987 Ad Age documents a terrible tragedy—the death of five prominent ad executives in a river rafting trip on the Chilko River in British Columbia, Canada, including then-Procter & Gamble VP of Advertising Robert Goldstein. Columnist Jim Brady’s dispatch is titled “A Long Way Away to Die.”

April 24, 1995 This cover is a watershed in Ad Age history. Our turn into popular culture goes way too far when we try to make some sense of Timothy McVeigh’s attack on Oklahoma City’s federal building. The result: A Time magazine-style package opining that it’s the end of innocence for a country heretofore untouched by terrorism (complete with the lyrics of the title song “Oklahoma” interspersed throughout the story) is roundly booed by readers. They want us to stick to what we do best—report on advertising—and we resume doing just that.

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Jan. 4, 1954 The ad times are clearly changing. The industry gears up for the advent of color television. And those warnings that cigarettes may cause cancer? They might just be true, which could wreak havoc on one of advertising’s mainstay categories. Even then, Ad Age was highlighting important people who make news. One pick is Henry Ford II, who spent an astounding $2 million on advertising. Readers get a lot for the 15-cent cover price.

Feb. 19, 1990 The Berlin Wall falls and once again Jim Brady is on the spot, giving readers a look at East Germany in its wake and the business potential of this new market. The headline reads in part, “Euphoria Fading, Now the Labor Pains of Change Begin.”

1999 Does that design sensibility look familiar? It should. For our special issue looking back at the ad century, we entice “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening to do this incredible cover.

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Nov. 28, 1965 Ad Age produces its first issue with color—at least 16 pages out of 109. Our story reads, “A tinted tide of revenue is rising, and it may become a flood.”

May 21, 1990 “Murdoch Shops TV Guide.” Our lead story rattles the publication’s then-owner Rupert Murdoch so much that he bets Rance Crain, then Ad Age editor-in-chief, $1 million that it was incorrect. We’re still waiting for Rupert to pay up.

March 26, 1990 The Ad Age logo morphs yet again, with a new chunky style. So cyber! And speaking of change, those guys on the cover? Yes, that’s the almost unrecognizable team of Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein with then-partner Andy Berlin, who later struck out on his own.

March 28, 2005 For our 75th anniversary, we revisit some of our greatest hits in the “75 Years of Ideas” issue. Where else on one cover can you see former Y&R Chairman Ed Ney, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, soap star Susan Lucci, Joe Camel, Rosie the Riveter, MTV’s Moonman and the Pets.com sock puppet?

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Dec. 11, 1972 Color also seeps into the Ad Age logo and, by 1972, we adopt the signature blue that remains our hallmark through today’s relaunch. This issue also marks the (first) death of Life magazine.

Nov. 12, 1990 Talk about an epic sp fakes an ad in which truck runs over one o company’s models an not crush the car, but rivals. It was later dis the Volvos were reinf withstand the pressu the others were struc altered to make them triggering a Federal T Commission investig a legendary ad scand automaker and its ag end up paying a $150

April 5, 2010 After a quarter-century of infuriating some creatives (or, as he was fond of calling them, the black shirts) and delighting others with his barbed and trenchant humor, Ad Age’s longtime ad reviewer Bob Garfield hangs up his whip.

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Jan. 16, 1984 It seems Apple is going to introduce a computer called a Macintosh with some futuristic ad called “1984,” according to our cover story. Little did we know it would become one of the most famous commercials of all time.

12, 1990 about an epic split. Volvo s an ad in which a monster k runs over one of the pany’s models and does rush the car, but crumples s. It was later discovered olvos were reinforced to stand the pressure while thers were structurally ed to make them collapse, ering a Federal Trade mission investigation and endary ad scandal. The maker and its agency each up paying a $150,000 fine.

Jan. 14, 1991 No one is right 100 percent of the time, and we are really wrong with our assessment that the “Gulf War Could Delay Super Bowl.” We’re still cringing from that one.

Sept. 10, 2012 Ad Age’s last major redesign shrinks its size from tabloid format and shows that we are on top of the trends: We run a story on media rebates four years before the issue becomes a huge bone of contention between the Association of National Advertisers and the 4A’s that still sticks in the industry’s craw today.

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Jan. 31, 1985 Can’t get enough Ad Age? We publish twice a week in 1985, on Monday and Thursday. This issue talks about the addition of new features to Thursday, with its scripted logo, which began life nine months earlier. Ad Age Thursday is later retired, though the date of its folding appears to be lost in our archives.

Jan. 13, 1992 In this historic editorial, Ad Age takes a stand in a heated debate by demanding that then-R.J. Reynolds Tobacco’s popular brand mascot, Joe Camel, be permanently marched out into the desert. Our assertion that Old Joe does tempt kids into smoking makes us very unpopular with tobacco marketers and the agencies that subsist on their business. And that was before weed marketing.

May 12, 2014 Touted as the merger that will reshape the ad world forever, the pending marriage of Publicis and Omnicom screams from business publication headlines and dominates industry conversations for weeks. And then it fails to happen. We struggle to come up with the perfect headline. We nail it.

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As many retailers hurtle toward disaster, Walmart seems to have corrected course. Instead of swerving between its base and more-affluent consumers—or between bricks and clicks—it’s investing in a balanced business model. (Just don’t call it ‘reinvention’) By Jack Neff Illustrations by Doug Chayka

This is not a story about rebranding. Walmart U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Tony Rogers is clear about that. Although the country’s largest retailer has evolved its marketing, product mix, private-label offerings, agency and vendor relationships, strategy and more, Rogers is adamant that there’s no fundamental change in how Walmart operates. “As business and technology advance and customer habits continue to change, it requires any brand to pause and refresh or redefine as necessary,” he says. That adaptability has helped Walmart reverse the streak of same-store sales declines that marked 2013 and 2014. Today it boasts 12 straight quarters of same-store sales growth at gradually accelerating rates. To survive the retail carnage that pushed Sears and Kmart toward irrelevance and dragged down success stories like Target and Kroger, the $485 billion behemoth remade itself as a unified onlineoffline proposition. It has rolled out drive-thru pickup of grocery orders to 1,000 of its more than 4,000 U.S. stores and has installed automated kiosks at about 100 stores where people can collect orders inside. It’s using technology more smartly to maximize checkout orders at Walmart.com. For customers who shop in person, the chain has improved its quality with revamped produce sections and higher-end exclusive or private-label apparel, food and nonfood items. Plus, it’s sprucing up the appearance of its stores. But through all of this, Walmart hasn’t lost sight

of its signature low-price proposition—it’s simply honed it into a more resonant pitch: We don’t just save you money, we allow you to live better. It’s a message that fits the more balanced course it found during the past three years under CEO Doug McMillon, after more than a decade lurching between trying to win upscale customers and hunkering down on its low-income base. But what might most separate it from Sears is that Walmart knows change is expensive, and sometimes you have to lose money to make it. Walmart won’t be the next Kmart because it’s more willing to take some short-term financial hits for long-term results, says Brandon Fletcher, an analyst with Bernstein Research and a former VP of global business process at Walmart. “Walmart management recognizes that the big retailers of the past made decisions to preserve the models they created,” says Fletcher. “Walmart has decided it wants to be a retailer for the long haul, even if that means being a little suboptimal in its returns. Walmart is [also] willing to invest in a new business model, even one that it’s kind of bad at and will take them a while to get good at.” The price/convenience equation Walmart’s vaunted lower prices have made life harder for such rivals as Target, Kroger and Dollar General, even if the primary intended targets were Amazon and hard discounters like Aldi and Lidl. In a presentation to corporate officers in May, Rogers outlined Walmart’s marketing strategy, but empha-

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Illustration by Doug Chayka

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Ad Age  September 25, 2017

sized this point: “None of this matters unless we have price leadership. We’re always maniacal about not letting people get distracted from price.” But price is a game no retailer wins all the time. Avoiding the fate of failed retailers rests at least as heavily on delivering the second half of Walmart’s slogan, “Save Money. Live Better,” with a bigger focus on convenience and quality. “I don’t know that they have a solid response yet to Lidl and Aldi,” says Leon Nicholas, senior VP for retail insights at Kantar Retail. ’Clean, fast and friendly’ Rogers’ biggest surprise when he came back to the U.S. last year from a two-year stint as CMO for Walmart in China was “how much convenience had been elevated as a driver for consumer behavior,” he says. That’s partially based on expectations raised by online shopping and other digital services. But Rogers says the demand for more shopping convenience also stems from sobering factors specific to the U.S.: both parents working in 60 percent of two-parent households, people working an average of five hours longer a month than a few years ago, and people tethered to work via smartphones, which put them in contact with their jobs on average 13.5 hours a day, or, as Rogers puts it, “nearly all their waking hours.” Walmart reaches every demographic in the U.S., says Rogers, but to win on convenience, the retailer is focusing more on a segment it calls “busy families.” They’re “the most intense combination of being busy and money-challenged,” he says. “They have the highest bar in terms of delivering on price, quality and convenience. If you can deliver on this subset, you can probably deliver on everybody.” This group is “a little higher-income than we’ve defined our customer in the past,” Rogers adds. But that doesn’t mean Walmart is going upscale as much as it’s targeting a segment that’s more suburban and multicultural than its prior core. “They’ve found the right balance between promotion and everyday low price,” says Don Stuart, managing partner of Cadent Consulting Group. The company has removed some of the clutter of bargain-bin store-floor displays, for example, but hasn’t

done away with them entirely. Most shoppers give Walmart credit for having the lowest prices most of the time, Stuart says—or at least being close enough that it’s not worth the effort to shop around. Walmart U.S. CEO Greg Foran, an Australian who joined McMillon’s team early on, was accustomed to operating in a duopoly market down under, with less price competition and more significance to the store experience, says Fletcher, of Bernstein Research. So Foran is focused on making sure checkout lines aren’t longer than three deep and generally keeping the store experience “clean, fast and friendly.” Walmart has improved customer satisfaction as a result, according to its own measures and external sources such as the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which tracked a major lift this year. Add to clean-fast-friendly the three-legged stool of price-convenience-quality. Winning on those last three is key for Walmart to succeed across the biggest customer base in America, as Rogers sees it. Just based on trading area, Walmart skews a lot more Middle American or red state than its more coastal, blue state competitors Amazon and Costco. But Rogers is convinced that Walmart’s demos look pretty much the same as America’s. He identifies three very different groups of shoppers who are particularly interested in Walmart’s defining proposition of saving money: people living paycheck to paycheck, others scrimping on basics to pay for highend purchases such as iPhones and well-off consumers who got that way in part by frugality. Linking online and offline Though Amazon is on track to pass Walmart as the biggest U.S. retailer sometime in the next decade, Walmart’s e-commerce growth rate is outpacing Amazon’s. Walmart also recently inked a deal with Google to provide products for its online shopping mall Google Express, escalating its Amazon counterattack. Winning in e-commerce is crucial for all segments of shoppers, who all want convenience. To try to buttress an online presence still dwarfed by Amazon, Walmart has enlisted its huge portfolio of stores. As of this year, Walmart finally appears to

be breaking through in making “bricks and clicks” work together in a way that meaningfully affects online sales growth. Free two-day delivery on millions of items without an Amazon Prime-like annual fee was one key to sparking a surge in e-commerce sales, up 63 percent in the first quarter and 60 percent in the second quarter, according to Walmart’s second-quarter earnings announcement Aug. 17. (Amazon’s e-commerce growth, meanwhile, hovered in the 20 percent range.) Discounts for store delivery on nearly a million items are also helping, Walmart said on its earnings call. And the chain put advertising weight usually reserved for the brickand-mortar stores behind the efforts, according to Rogers. It wasn’t easy to convince executives to put the bulk of Walmart’s advertising this winter behind a dot-com initiative, but it happened in part because of an effort to unify Walmart’s e-commerce and general marketing teams last year. In a similar vein, Walmart is uniting tech teams in its Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters; San Bruno, California; Hoboken, New Jersey; and India under the @WalmartLabs banner and expanding staffing not just in Silicon Valley but also in lower-cost outposts. Walmart is also using tech to tweak its pricing strategy. Under Walmart e-commerce chief Marc Lore, who was CEO of Jet.com before Walmart acquired it in September 2016, the retailer is experimenting with bringing Jet’s more complex pricing model, which bestows steeper discounts on larger orders. Shoppers might get a lower price on Walmart.com, for example, by adding baby wipes to a basket that includes diapers. The whole variety of inducements looks to be working. TABS Analytics, which calculates market share based upon online tracking surveys of 2,000 consumers, suggests Walmart has doubled its online share of vitamins to 9.1 percent between April 2016 and April 2017. And it gained ground in baby care, where it has been weak relative to its market share in other categories, says TABS CEO Kurt Jetta. Walmart’s online market share in the diaper category rose 0.9 percentage points to 5.1 percent, for example. Amazon’s share fell 0.1 point

Illustration by Doug Chayka

Walmart is doubling down on “busy families,” says Chief Marketing Officer Tony Rogers. “If you can deliver on this subset, you can probably deliver on everybody.”

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to 7.1 percent. Target also did well, up 1.1 points to 4.3 percent. However, Walmart also gained in offline diaper share, rising 0.5 points to 18.1 percent, while Target fell 1.1 points offline to 11.9 percent, giving up its online gains. Kantar’s Nicholas says Lore’s impact since Walmart acquired his Jet.com operation for a steep $3.3 billion last year is impressive. However, he says it has come at a cost that includes Lore making 10 times more than McMillon last year (thanks to a restricted-stock payout). “It would have been cheaper,” says Nicholas, to get more aggressive on e-commerce five years earlier. Mixing up the product mix With rivals like Aldi, Lidl and Costco competing largely based on their private-label programs, Walmart is putting more resources into its own brands, too, and not just the lowest-cost tiers but also higher-end products. In June media presentations, executives from Chief Merchandising Officer Steve Bratspies on down went to great lengths to highlight Walmart’s increased emphasis on quality, including extensive testing that goes into its bargain-priced sportswear and towels. Latriece Watkins, senior VP of consumables and over-the-counter, showcased private-label products aimed not just at the biggest mass brands, but also emerging players such as L’Oréal USA’s Matrix salon brand. “Aspirational products at disruptive prices” was how Scott McCall, senior VP of home and seasonal, described Walmart’s product development effort. This includes some Walmart “exclusives,” such as a Keurig K-Cup coffee maker hitting stores now priced at $59—$30 or more below prices elsewhere—and Yankee Candles priced around $10 less than they sell for elsewhere. Walmart has significantly staffed up development for its own baby-care brands in the past 18 months, executives said, focusing on everything from pouch meals to baby wipes and strollers, with products priced 25 percent to 50 percent below branded rivals. Winning in packaged goods is key to winning online and offline with those “busy families,” says Rogers. And families with newborns are among the most prized, not to mention the busiest. They eat at home more and buy more of just about everything as they establish households. “Walmart.com was built on big-ticket purchases like TVs,” says Rogers. “What’s happening now is a much more balanced approach where consumables play a much bigger role in customer acquisition.” Everyday low agency pricing? While Walmart has seldom hesitated to throw its weight around to get better prices, it’s starting to use its power in new ways. One example was consolidating most of its creative advertising account in July 2016 with Publicis Groupe via a new entity, Department W. Saatchi & Saatchi is the central agency, but 14 agencies participate, including three that worked on Walmart’s holiday advertising last year. “Our mindset was all those advertising agencies are owned by these holding companies,” says Rogers. “There should be some benefit to us in the holding-company model. I want to have access to all the talent within Publicis.” The unification effort is paying off in a marketing campaign built around rock anthems that Rogers feels is giving Walmart a more recognizable look—or, really, sound. “We’re excited about how for the first

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time in a long time we have a style and approach to advertising we think can belong to us,” he says. In one recent example, Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” pulses over a back-to-school spot in which kids imagine themselves as superheroes on their first day of school. In what appears to be a first for the retail industry, Walmart also recently conducted a review to streamline the army of third-party field merchandisers that help place displays and products in its stores, culling the firms involved to five from more than 30. It was an audacious move because outside marketers, such as P&G and Unilever, pay the firms for their efforts, not Walmart. But Walmart was able to engineer a roster that made the process more efficient in its stores, a spokesman says. It also ensured that each supplier had an in-store marketing force dedicated specifically to the chain. The expectation is that the resulting supply-chain savings get passed back to Walmart. But it also meant forcing big suppliers like Unilever to switch vendors. “Right now they’re in a fairly enviable position in that they’re indispensable for shoppers and suppliers,” says Cadent’s Stuart. “Suppliers may not be happy with how they do business in every case, but they can’t walk away. ” Bratspies has acknowledged that Walmart’s efforts to get more efficient may mean some added tension with suppliers. Then again, suppliers have plenty of grumbles about other retailers. Walmart as startup Even as Walmart wields its bigness in new ways, it’s playing with small flanker brands in e-commerce. Counting Jet.com, it has acquired six small e-commerce players whose customers often weren’t big on Walmart, including Hayneedle, Shoebuy, ModCloth, Moosejaw and Bonobos. Perhaps one true sign of a shift is that Walmart says it’s not imposing itself on these brands. Rogers describes Walmart’s approach to the newly acquired online retailers this way: “Imagine if you get purchased by the world’s largest company and you have access to those resources, and yet they aren’t really going to change you. All they want is for you to be better versions of yourselves.” Walmart has learned from startups that Wall Street will let you be “suboptimal” on profit as long as you grow. Righting the ship on store operations has also bought Walmart permission to make big and so far money-losing bets on e-commerce, where even Amazon is at best thinly profitable. Amazon eked out a 2.3 percent operating margin in North America in the first half. But take away cloud computing and Amazon remains a roughly $150 billion-a-year startup losing money quarter after quarter. Walmart remains more than three times Amazon’s size by global sales. And Walmart’s $13.6 billion in after-tax profit last year stacks up nicely against Amazon’s $1 billion in pre-tax profit on retail. Whatever you call it—reinvention or something else—Walmart is “not going down the path of generational decline like Sears and Kmart,” Nicholas says. But he still isn’t convinced that Walmart has the bricks part of the bricks-and-clicks equation completely figured out—that the work is done. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t still too many stores,” he says,” and that the stores themselves aren’t still too big for where we see America’s shopping patterns headed.”

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

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Andrew Springer doesn’t sleep much, not since he started overseeing production of NBC News’ twice-daily Snapchat Show, “Stay Tuned,” in July. Springer gets to 30 Rock, NBC’s Manhattan headquarters, around 2:30 a.m. to review the morning’s script with producers who’ve been up tracking events like President Trump’s overnight tweets. They begin taping the first high-octane episode at 3:30 a.m., post it at 7 a.m.—and start the next one at noon, to go up at 4 p.m. One afternoon in August, Springer and a half-dozen producers and assistants buzz around one of the hosts, Gadi Schwartz, as he reports on a motorcycle chase in California and a 16-year-old running for mayor in Kentucky. The team interrupts a few times, asking Schwartz to change his pacing, to try a line differently, to smile. Schwartz sounds more like a friend talking current events at the bar than an anchor reading a teleprompter. He speaks to a TV camera turned on its side, to match Snapchat’s vertical format. “Stay Tuned” is a 24/7 operation, with 30 people working full time to crank out two hyperactive videos on weekdays and an episode a day on weekends. Their product bears no resemblance to a typical NBC News broadcast. Lest there be a moment for viewers to consider skipping ahead or quitting, producers frequently cut the screen in half and stuff it with footage and text. All told, it takes about eight hours to produce, shoot and edit a single episode. Run time: about two minutes. “It is really highly produced,” says Springer, executive producer of “Stay Tuned” and director of social media strategy at NBC News, during Ad Age’s visit to the show. The set is a sliver of NBC’s newsroom dubbed “Town Square”; its office space is annexed from the network’s election-season Decision Desk area. “Everything has to be really thought out,” he says. It’s pretty high-polish for a mad dash to the future by NBC, along with networks from Discovery to E! on similar quests. And it’s markedly different from the spray-and-pray strategy that prevailed when TV tried digital before, dumping snips of existing shows across every and any platform. Snapchat isn’t looking to recreate the TV model, the way Facebook and Twitter are going after longer-form and live video. Much of what appears on Snapchat may resemble TV’s glory days, with interrupting commercials and content that always fills the

screen. (Schwartz would even find himself knee-deep in water a few weeks later, covering the devastation of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma alongside his broadcast and cable news counterparts.) But Snapchat takes only original content. Executives at the messaging app are also decidedly picky about who gets real estate in its high-traffic Discover section, which TV networks share with publishers including BuzzFeed, Mashable, GQ and Cosmopolitan. So, one year into its first partnerships with TV networks to produce made-for-Snapchat content, it is forcing traditional programmers to rethink mobile video. TV executives have to try something, and with feeling. The Big Four broadcasters lost 17 percent of their total prime-time audience in the last five years, falling to an average of 6.3 million viewers in the 2016-17 season from 7.6 million in 2011-12. Among 18-to-49-year-olds, more ominously, the plunge was one third. Each new season brings another significant drop, largely at the hands of digital rivals such as Snapchat itself. So even as Wall Street worries about Snapchat’s slowing user growth and relentless imitation by Instagram, networks hope it can bring them the same young people steadily watching less TV and entice them to check out longer shows on bigger screens. It’s TV’s chance to show everyone what successful transformation looks like. If it, you know, succeeds. “This is much tougher than just shooting and uploading,” says Tom Fishman, senior VP for audience growth and engagement at MTV Digital, which produced new versions of the former MTV series “Cribs” and “Girl Code” for Snapchat this summer. That’s partly because Snapchat heavily involves itself, giving copious notes on what its users like and what they tap the screen to skip. “Snap is discerning about the way they want to present the portfolio of content offerings,” Fishman says. “There’s a lot of back and forth with Snap. This is very intentionally more highly produced.” Snapchat has no quarrel with that take. “We are unashamedly pretty difficult,” says Nick Bell, Snapchat’s head of content and a former News Corp. executive. Snapchat isn’t necessarily rewriting jokes, he says, but it’s not above telling producers to move up the punch line. If it’s ultimately to Snapchat’s benefit that its content keeps users coming back, Bell argues that Snapchat can recapture TV viewers for the networks as well, calling the platform “where you fall in love.” Under this theory, your mobile phone becomes the first place you

Traditional networks hunt lost viewers with new rapid-fire shows on Snapchat By Jeanine Poggi Photography by David Hall

TV SNAPS TO ATTENTION Illustrations by Tam Nguyen

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Picture this It’s hard for anyone over 30 to imagine these Snapchat Shows becoming the next must-see TV. In August, on the first episode of E!’s “Ask Kylie,” in which Kylie Jenner answers fan questions in an oblique promotion for her TV show, Jenner revealed how she deals with anxiety. (Answer: She jumps on a trampoline in her mom’s backyard.) It’s not exactly “This Is Us.” But that’s intentional. “‘Nightly News’ is the delicious steak dinner you have, the ‘Today’ show is like the breakfast and we are the protein shake,” Schwartz says. For Snapchat’s young, core demographic—75 percent of the 173 million daily users are between 13 and 24 years old—its on-screen faces are fast becoming familiar. “I’ve never had a friend see me when I’m on MSNBC,” says Savannah Sellers, Schwartz’s co-host on “Stay Tuned.” “And then a couple of days on Snapchat, they’re like, ‘What the heck, you’re on Snapchat.’” The same is true for Peter Hamby, a former CNN reporter who decamped to host “Good Luck America,” a political show produced by Snapchat. His mom was disappointed when he left the cable news behemoth. But as they walked down the street together six months later, several people approached Hamby and identified him as “that Snapchat guy.” Hamby’s mother was shocked by his new brand of celebrity, he says. TV executives are less intrigued by the anecdotes than the data. NBC’s companion series for “The Voice” on Snapchat averaged 45 percent more viewers in its second season than the first, topping 4 million. E!’s celebrity-news show “The Rundown” has tripled viewers to 7.5 million since its introduction last September. A&E’s “Second Chance,” which reunites exes to see if romance reignites, doubled viewers to 8 million between its April debut and its season finale eight weeks later. Three episodes of Shark Week video this 84

summer averaged 12 million viewers for Discovery. And the first month of “Stay Tuned” drew a total of 29 million people. Those “viewers” can’t be compared with TV ratings, which represent the average tune-in throughout an episode; Snapchat counts a view as soon as someone taps an episode to begin, even if she stops a second later. But TV producers say Snapchat also shares with networks incredibly specific data that shows every single person watching, when they watch and when they don’t. “It’s a different demo than on our networks, and that makes us very excited,” says Maggie Suniewick, president of NBC Universal’s digital enterprises. “We are in a world where there are certain people that aren’t going to watch the prime-time shows.” It’s an audience advertisers are eager to find as well. WPP CEO Martin Sorrell has said his agency holding company plans to double Snapchat spending this year to about $200 million. Revenue at Snapchat parent Snap Inc. soared 153 percent in the second quarter to $181.7 million. That was below analyst expectations, however, and includes more than Snapchat Shows. WPP’s outlay will also be a pale shadow of the check it writes to Facebook—“a flea on the elephant’s backside,” as the colorful Sorrell put it to CNBC last month. Then consider the $70 billion marketers still spend on TV every year. “There’s a lot of interest and some demand, but inventory at this point certainly suggests room for negotiation,” says Doug Rozen, chief digital and innovation officer at Omnicom Group media agency OMD Worldwide. Some potential advertisers are put off by the need to make ads specifically for the platform. Others just don’t “get” Snapchat, an app that’s famously opaque for those who aren’t regular users. Then there are other ways for marketers to use Snapchat without buying into Snapchat Shows. NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” for example, has a Snapchat account that users can follow instead of a series. That helps Dunkin’ Brands extend the reach of its TV sponsorship. “This allows us to augment parts of the audience that may or may not be watching our partnerships live,” says Nick Dunham, director of media and partnerships at Dunkin’. Recruiting more marketers is central to making TV work for Snapchat, and vice versa. Staffing a “Stay Tuned” isn’t cheap, after all. Snapchat Show ads are usually sold by both the networks and Snapchat, with revenue divided between them. Networks sometimes bundle them with other inventory, as in one $400,000 package that included ads in a Snapchat Show plus traditional TV or other elements. Prices vary widely.

(From l.): ‘Stay Tuned’ Executive Producer Andrew Springer; NBC News Social News Gathering Senior Editor Emmanuelle Saliba; and hosts Gadi Schwartz and Savannah Sellers.

Photograph by David Hall

encounter programming from NBC News, A&E, Viceland and the other TV programmers making Snapchat Shows. And when you get home, you turn on a big-screen, surround-sound version. “Maybe common sense doesn’t always win, but in my view there’s no better place to watch content for a long period of time than the TV,” Bell says. Another possibility is that TV networks’ efforts could ultimately work mostly in Snapchat’s favor, making it a sticky content hub that doesn’t drive younger viewers anywhere else. And even that scenario remains unproven.

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

NEW LOOK SAME GREAT PUBLICATION CONGRATULATIONS, AD AGE, ON YOUR REINVENTION AND CONTINUING TO BE AN INDUSTRY MAINSTAY

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“With cable, it introduced 24/7 programming and changed the idea of dayparts. It’s that same reinventing for new habits. It’s a land grab right now and all about marking your territory.” Fred Graver, Discovery Communications

‘Stay Tuned’ aims to combine NBC News traditions with a Snapchat sensibility.

Echoes Fred Graver was one of MTV’s first freelance copywriters, hired by Judy McGrath, its future CEO. Today he leads digital content creation for Discovery Communications. And TV on Snapchat looks a lot to him like the early days of cable. “With cable, it introduced 24/7 programming and changed the idea of dayparts,” says Graver, who’s working on a Snapchat series based on the TV show “MythBusters.” “It’s that same reinventing for new habits. It’s a land grab right now and all about marking your territory.” That, and marketing it. Merely choosing the “tile” images and headlines to lure users can be laborious. Graver and his team liked the title “Sharks That Are Just Not Into You,” for example, for a Shark Week episode about sharks that won’t attack humans. Then they ran it through Snapchat software that creates four tiles with different images and headlines. The system publishes all four to an equal number of people so programmers can see, within hours, which does best and what types of people click on each. The best two go out wide. In the case of that Shark Week episode, a bit at the end about what to do if you are attacked proved powerful. The winning headline was, “How to Survive a Shark Attack.” Snapchat knows “every single person watching, when they watch and when they don’t,” Graver says. “What was really helpful is Snapchat is willing to share what they know about the audience and guide us.” While Snapchat doesn’t believe it will ever be the place for a 44-minute drama, more variety is on the way. TV on Snapchat so far comprises nonfiction and unscripted series like “Stay Tuned” and CNN’s “The Update.” And those two are sometimes the only Snapchat Shows posted on a given day. By the end of the year, Snapchat is aiming for three Snapchat Shows a day or more—in86

cluding its first scripted efforts. One will be an animated comedy based on standup routines. (“If we tried to repurpose this on another platform, it would look absurd,” says Steve Beslow, general manager at Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco Digital, the company behind it.) The field is far from clear, of course. It’s more like a destination battleground. Facebook has just rolled out a “Watch” section for shows such as A&E’s “Bae or Bail,” about couples facing their fears. YouTube last month hired two TV veterans to bolster its subscription service, Red, and ordered 10 episodes of “Cobra Kai,” a half-hour comedy spun off from “The Karate Kid.” Twitter is pitching advertisers on its live NFL talk show and a news network from Bloomberg. Amazon is streaming 10 NFL games on Thursday nights this season and another on Christmas. But TV has to find its future. When NBC Universal CEO Steve Burke first sat down with Snapchat, he had a challenge on his mind: how to get more value from the Olympics, which he had agreed to carry through 2032 at a cost of $7.7 billion. “He was pretty bold and said, ‘We paid a lot of money for these rights ... but one of our concerns is less young people are watching on traditional linear,’” Bell recalls. “‘How do we make sure we maintain the value?’” True to Burke’s unease, the 2016 Olympics’ prime-time audience fell 15 percent from 2012, according to Nielsen. But NBC’s Olympics coverage on Snapchat reached 35 million people, Bell says. It’s too early to say how exactly TV and Snapchat will interact, whether Snapchat is a second-screen fad, a test bed for bigger-screen shows, a nick-of-time lifeline to TV’s lost audiences or something even better, like a spacious new home for TV and its big-spending advertisers. At a minimum, Snapchat is giving TV networks the freedom to think beyond the confines of prime time and repurpose their existing shows for digital. Maybe it even lends TV content a new—or is it old-fashioned?—sense of urgency. A way to retrieve back episodes is likely at some point, but for the moment, each installment disappears 48 hours after it hits. Is Snapchat creating appointment viewing for a new generation? That’s the hope of executives like NBC Universal’s Suniewick. “For the first time,” she says, “we are getting to a place where digital content is a must-watch.”

Photograph by David Hall, Illustration by Tam Nguyen

Ads in “Stay Tuned” have promoted brands including Sony, Airbnb, Go-Gurt, Perrier, Xfinity Mobile and the author and motivational speaker Grant Cardone. Marketers can also back entire series, as Match.com did for “Hungry Hearts,” a new Snapchat dating show from the Viceland cable channel starring rapper Action Bronson. For brands aching over lost cachet with younger consumers, Snapchat offers a new chance, says Kieley Taylor, who leads paid social at WPP’s GroupM.

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

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9/5/17 3:50 PM

REDDIT REDUX? New design, advertising staff and measures against vile content: The most vibrant destination in digital might actually be ready for business By George Slefo Illustrations by Daniel Hertzberg

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A day before Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and tennis superstar Serena Williams welcomed the birth of their first child, Ohanian was tackling errands at his home outside San Francisco, preparing for parental leave. “Thank you for making this time work with your schedule,” he said, apparently as nice and likable as the gossip sites say (though he and Williams did keep their daughter’s due date secret, he said, “so I don’t have to punch a photographer at the hospital”). Now he just has to convince marketers that Reddit is as friendly as he is. After a $200 million investment in July from big-name venture capitalists such as Andreessen Horowitz, tripling Reddit’s valuation to $1.8 billion, and with a major redesign due by year-end, it’s time for the company to live up its potential. It has long called itself the front page of the internet, but it’s home to more than that: news that’s blowing up or is about to, style you need to know, users voting headlines and comments up or down, passionate arguments, discoveries from the reaches of the web and some very unsettling conversation threads. Cash in hand, Reddit feels it now has a plan to satisfy brands that its more toxic elements won’t brush up against their ads. “What Reddit is saying to people is it’s not a place where a bunch of trolls hang out—no, no no,” says Zain Jaffer, CEO of the ad-tech company Vungle. “It’s saying this is going to be a place that captures ad dollars.” If it can pull that off, it might have a shot in the sweepstakes to become a significant advertising alternative to Google and Facebook. But it’s been clearing its throat on this subject for a long time. (See “Can Reddit Grow Up?,” The New York Times, 2014; “Reddit Is Finally Mounting a War Against Trolls,” Business Insider, 2015; and “How Reddit Plans to Become a ‘Real’ Business,” Fortune, 2016.) Today its “subreddits” on topics such as news, fatherhood and cooking still keep company with sections such as “Incels,” where men discuss how much they hate women and some members say the government should subsidize their visits to prostitutes. “When we talk about the darker side of the internet, that population is a vanishingly small amount

of our own users—less than .1 percent,” says Steve Huffman, Reddit’s CEO and other co-founder. “It is not something that really affects our business.” That’s debatable. “Maybe it’s a perception issue, but I have unwavering faith that nothing super-controversial will stay up on YouTube for very long,” says Steve Piluso, head of media and integration at planning and buying agency Media Storm. “But I do see stories on Mashable about something horrible that came from Reddit.” Facebook, Google and others are “a lot more public about banning hate groups,” adds David Buklarewicz, executive VP at media agency Marc USA. “They’re laying out action plans and steps to tackle that. I haven’t seen anything overt from Reddit as far as ‘This is what we’re doing to combat the problem.’” When Reddit has eliminated controversial sections such as r/fatpeoplehate in 2015, users have complained from both sides—that Reddit’s either doing too much or still not doing enough. Reddit says it will soon update its terms of service to more clearly define harassment, hate speech and other unwelcome conduct, then ban users and subreddits that repeatedly violate those terms. “It’s frustrating because I know what Reddit is and I know the positive impact it has on people’s lives,” Huffman says. “But I also know that the company has been through a lot and we haven’t been very effective at what we do and why we do it.” Huffman says Reddit has been deliberately quiet about fighting hate groups on the site (“They thrive on attention,” he argues), but has been in the fight nonetheless. “Take the events that happened in Charlottesville,” he says, referring to the clashes between white supremacists and counter-protesters in Virginia last month. “Facebook, Google had to ban a lot of groups that we banned a year ago. We’ve been on the front lines with these sorts of questions and debates for years now.” Yet if Reddit wants a chunk of the $73 billion digital ad market, it has to not only put forward a neighborly face but build its relations with agencies from virtually nothing. Many media buyers say they’re unaware that Reddit shows ads only on “whitelisted” sections where thriving communities exist and the chances of anything unsavory popping up

Ad Age  September 25, 2017

9/15/17 6:49 PM

HEY, AD AGE. THIS NEW REDESIGN IS A-LIST MATERIAL.

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“What Reddit is saying to people is it’s not a place where a bunch of trolls hang out—no, no, no. It’s saying this is going to be a place that captures ad dollars.” Zain Jaffer, Vungle

are vastly diminished. And you can’t blame them for not knowing. Asked whether Reddit has staff whose sole job is to build bridges with agencies, Huffman says, “Yes-ish.” “I’m 90 percent certain we do,” he adds. “We had a handful of people doing that as a tactic as part of their job.” In reality, Reddit doesn’t have anything remotely close to the outreach teams employed by Google, Facebook or even many publishers. Those outfits have poached savvy executives from the “buy side” of advertising—agencies, marketers and ad-tech purveyors catering to buyers—to drum up business. Huffman admits Reddit doesn’t have enough employees like that, but says it’s hiring similar people on both coasts to “cultivate senior-level management at agencies.” Part of that new $200 million will fund adding 50 staffers to its roster of 250, and the company just signed a lease in “Silicon Beach” in Santa Monica, California, to house more employees. “The extra capital and having a full team will allow us to do things that, frankly, weren’t on the table for us before,” Huffman says. “We can play a lot more offense than we have in the past and attract more market share, attack things we’ve previously put on the back burner.” That includes going after Google’s YouTube through a scheme to tap Reddit’s legion of highly engaged regulars to create videos. Reddit will eventually explore running pre-roll and interruptive ads in video, sharing revenue with makers, but is waiting to fully roll out its video tools and make sure it’s got the user experience right, Huffman says. Reddit brags that it has 330 million monthly active users, up 40 percent from a year earlier, which is slightly ahead of the 328 million Twitter recently reported but far behind YouTube’s 1.5 billion. Strikingly, Reddit says it’s aiming for 1 billion, a figure that sounds more aspirational than in arm’s reach. Expanding users is vital to the ad pitch because 90

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“Redditors” are fragmented across the whitelisted subreddits. The gaming area has nearly 17 million subscribers with tens of thousands active at any given time. “Daddit,” on fatherly things, has 69,000 subscribers, with only 1,400 or so on at a given time. All of which puts a lot of pressure on the impending redesign. Visitors seeking the latest theories about “Game of Thrones,” for example, can get lost in the Netscape-era design—a river of headlines with small images, spartan navigation tabs such as “top” and “wiki,” and a top row of smaller labels including “funny” and “todayilearned.” “I think I’m allowed to shit on it because I made it,” Huffman says of the current desktop site, the source of about 80 percent of Reddit’s traffic. “The redesign will have a lot of tactical features like giving people their own home on Reddit so they can create their own communities and audiences, and maybe find a way to fit in with other communities.” Search will get an overdue upgrade. And moderators will also get tools to customize the look of subreddits and convene discussions more easily. That will help convert “drive-by” web surfers into devoted users—in theory. Huffman says the numbers already show “strong signs of life,” and that eventually reaching 1 billion users would enable unrivaled targeting and engagement. Face of the internet Huffman is known for taking playful shots at Ohanian. They met as freshman hall mates at the University of Virginia, roomed together the next year and founded Reddit as seniors in 2005. Asked about Ohanian’s relationship with Williams, one of the top celebrities in sports, Huffman says, “As his college buddy who knew him when he had a literal neckbeard, I continue to be amused by the whole situation.” But Ohanian, 35, has a serious part to play in making Reddit the business many people think it could become. The company, which is majority owned

by Condé Nast parent Advance Communications, declines to say whether it is profitable, though signs suggest that it isn’t where it wants to be. “Alexis’ job is to evangelize Reddit,” says Huffman, who is 34 and recently returned from his ninth Burning Man excursion. “He is very charming and comfortable in front of an audience. We have him in a role right now that is playing to his strengths.” In the last year, Ohanian has spoken at highprofile events, appeared on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and NPR’s “How I Built This,” and gone to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as judges considered the company’s first entry into the awards, for a Secret Santa gift exchange on Reddit sponsored by FedEx. (Williams, his fiancée, has done her part, posting video of their baby on Reddit this month using Reddit’s new built-in video uploading tool.) Ohanian says Reddit has unique advantages such as rich data on users who are easily targeted by interests and eager to engage. “The discussion and conversations on Reddit are our lifeblood and where the best content is,” he says. “And that applies to our ads, where we have ad campaigns that actually get engagement in minutes and not seconds.” In addition to FedEx, brands including Amazon, Coca-Cola, Toyota and Halo Top are buying in. Halo Top CEO Justin Woolverton says he’s been a longtime Reddit user—so much so that in the company’s early days, Woolverton had “TL;DR: Ice Cream You Can Feel Good Eating” printed on the bottom of his pint cups. “I was so proud of the TL;DR because I was a Redditor,” he says. “I was like, ‘Man, no package has a TL:DR’ ... but we eventually got rid of it because it wasn’t cool anymore.” For non-users, though, Reddit can still be intimidating, Woolverton allows. “It can be like, ‘Where is my comment, what are these upvotes and downvotes?’ Knowing Reddit made me feel more comfortable to say, ‘Hey, let’s put money into this.’” Ad Age September 25, 2017

9/15/17 8:31 PM

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THE MARKETER’S PARADOX:

If my ROI is going up, why are my sales in decline? By Julie Fleischer, VP-product marketing, Neustar

Today’s marketers are facing a paradox: We have better intelligence and tools for driving growth than ever before. Data-driven digital marketing, programmatic and audience buying are proven to be delivering results. But if return on investment [ROI] is going up, why are sales in decline? 92

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There are some simple causes and effects: Media inflation continues to increase across all channels, while reach has declined for most every channel and publisher. Rising costs combined with declining reach drives up Cost-PerPoint [CPP], which means creative needs to be exponentially more effective to deliver the same results (and that’s before attenuation of media attention is factored in). In most cases, even the best creative cannot offset the decline in efficiency. It’s just math. And as the math suggests, in most cases we’d expect to see a decline in payback. Yet most channel-specific measurements show a positive ROI. Why? A combination of factors is at play. Many ROI analyses today are fundamentally flawed. Some of the most common problems with today’s analytic tools, or the deployment or interpretation of them, include: • Myopia (The value-added study problem): Many analyses seek to evaluate a single channel against a hold-out

sample and therefore overattribute sales impact to that single channel. • Misinterpretation (The user error problem): It’s critical to know what you are measuring and evaluate results accordingly. Different types of metrics should not be compared: e.g., shortterm versus long-term ROI, upper-funnel versus lower-funnel tactics, new penetration versus buy rate or marginal returns versus last dollar spent. • Limitations in scope (The blind spot problem): Many “360” studies leave out difficult-to-measure factors, limiting their explanatory power. This includes issues like the exclusion of walled-garden data and its impact, inability to read non-addressable media, or omission of critical endogenous factors like competitive activity or consumer confidence. • Monolithism (The one-size-fits-all problem): Many approaches read all targets/customer segments the same way, even though channel allocations

Ad Age September 25, 2017

9/11/17 11:28 AM

Publishing Partner

and tactics are planned at the segment/target level. This may also be true at the market level, with different markets using different models, so no direct comparisons can be made. • Inaccurate or flawed (The “It’s just wrong” problem): Be wary of analyses that don’t measure what they purport to measure—for example, return on advertising spend [ROAS] models that claim any sale in the payout model versus only incremental sales. • Non-neutral (The vested interest problem): Watch out for analytics that aren’t conducted by an independent third party, creating analytic biases that color results. • Backward-looking only (The rearview mirror problem): Beware analyses that explain the past, but do not provide any forward-looking planning or decision-making capabilities, so the application of learnings is of limited use. • Diminishing Returns Effect (The what-comes-up-must-come-down problem): ROI can rise while the rate of sales growth drops. After a certain investment level, marketing effectiveness declines. But that doesn’t mean you should stop investing. Profits may still rise … just not as fast. Even with strong analytic models, it’s easy to misread results. In a marketing mix model, you may see switching between competitors as Brand A steals share from Brand B in month one, only to have Brand B win it back in month two. Although there is neither category growth nor topline growth for either brand in this model, both would count it as positive ROI. From the brand’s point of view it actually won some sales, even though in reality it was a zero-sum game. Before the tyranny of ROI, marketers understood the need to evaluate campaign payback alongside other metrics— brand health, penetration and switching analyses, elasticity, etc.—to get a sense of their overall brand performance. Today, the art of understanding the basket of measures required to manage a business is being lost as the science of quantifying financial impact has taken hold. Marketing analytic acumen must become a requisite for marketing talent. It is no longer good enough to rely on a marketing analytics function to own measurement, without the deep understanding

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of their marketing counterparts. The only way to effectively grow a business is to learn what works and doesn’t work. Learning requires feedback. Analytics must accurately and reliably provide that feedback to drive decision-making. And marketers must understand the core building blocks of advanced analytics. This includes a comprehensive understanding of topics, such as: • Defining problems and choosing the right measurement metrics to answer them • Understanding attribution and what it means • Data essentials for measurement and analytics • Short-term versus long-term measurement • How to calculate marketing ROI • Connected analytics: Bridging offline and online • Marketing mix model and multi-touch attribution: top down versus bottom up, how to use each and how and why to connect them • The building blocks of data and modeling In response to the skills gap created by advances in analytics, the Association of National Advertisers has launched the Analytics Center of Excellence [ACE], connected by Neustar, to create standards and governance for marketers around marketing analytics. The goal of ANA ACE is to help brands develop, refine and expand their marketing measurement capabilities to grow revenue, improve pricing power, lower customer acquisition/retention costs and build enterprise value. Better curriculum and comprehensive training in the use of advanced analytics will help close the widening gap between fast-growing enterprise investment in analytics and brands’ ability to apply analytical insights for better decision-making and results. Most importantly, it will help ensure that marketers are driving sales. A marketer’s job is to profitably drive growth. If the business isn’t growing faster than the competition, it is losing share. If it is not acquiring new customers, it is losing ground. And if it isn’t doing it profitably, it is losing margin (and probably losing marketers their jobs). With better analytics, marketers will be able to build their businesses profitably, so that sales and ROI both go in the same direction.

About the Author Julie Fleischer is VP-product marketing for marketing solutions at Neustar, where she is responsible for driving the go-to-market strategy, positioning, messaging and execution for Neustar’s award-winning marketing solutions portfolio. Previously, Ms. Fleischer was the managing director at OMD, where she led the CPG and retail businesses; while at Kraft Foods, she earned industry-wide recognition as an evangelist for data accountability and the critical interrelationship between data, content and technology. She is a sought-after brand advocate and well-respected media, advertising and marketing thought leader with more than 20 years of industry experience.

About Neustar

Neustar, Inc. (NYSE: NSR) helps grow and guard businesses in a connected world. Neustar OneID® connects online and offline first-, second- and third-party data with trusted identity to unify a singular view of the customer across channels and devices. Neustar Marketing Solutions’ award-winning product portfolio includes data onboarding, identity data management platform, customer segmentation, audience targeting, and MarketShare measurement and analytics. Visit analytics.neustar for more information.

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Opinion THE THREE SADDEST AMERICAN BRANDS RIGHT NOW The golden arches droop, a big box gets squarer and a real estate group (can you guess which one?) loses its luster By Simon Dumenco

Simon Dumenco, aka the Media Guy, is an Ad Age editor-at-large. Follow him on Twitter at @simondumenco.

Important to Important People

What does it take to really, truly reimagine a brand? And which major American brands most urgently need to be reimagined? Here are my thoughts— and my (sad, pathetic) shortlist: McDonald’s In the course of writing this column, I visited the three McDonald’s within a half-mile walking distance of Media Guy HQ in downtown Manhattan. There had been four, but over the summer one shut down; right across the street from it, a Shake Shack is about to open. McDonald’s and/or its franchisee apparently saw the writing on the wall in my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Here’s the thing about McDonald’s: It used to stand for “food, folks and fun.” Now it’s sad and gross and feels like it’s managed solely against margins, to the detriment of both employees and customers. Based on my repeat visits to those NYC McDonald’s—plus stops over the summer at McD’s in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and D.C.—the chain’s workers are ill-equipped to deal with corporate management’s expansion of its menu to include trendy sandwiches and “crafted” coffee drinks. Quite simply, McDonald’s is trying to will itself into becoming a Panera-meets-Starbucks, but it’s going about it backasswards. A McDonald’s Pico Guacamole Artisan Grilled Chicken sandwich sounds good in theory, but ordering it is way too complicated (because of a surfeit of other options including something called “Signature Sriracha”) and an obvious time suck on the assembly line (er, kitchen). From what I’ve seen, the overtaxed, underpaid employees radiate stress and unhappiness. I’m all in favor of the menu makeover, but now McDonald’s needs to invest in the humans (most working at or near minimum wage) who are tasked with preparing and selling all these theoretically upscaled options.

My suggestion: Hire a key operational exec away from Costco—a discounter known for both maintaining low prices and taking great care of its workers. Put employees first and start making going to McDonald’s feel like less of a cranky clusterfuck. Kmart Earlier this month Kmart announced that it’s changing the name of its plussize clothing section to “Fabulously Sized.” OK, fine. (Points to Kmart for trying something—unlike its corporate sibling Sears, which seems to be in an irreversible coma.) If only the clothing itself—or any of Kmart’s merchandise—were fabulous. Since Kmart’s deal with Martha Stewart fell apart in 2009, there’s been a vacuum of buzzworthy merch at the discounter. You know what a Kmart-exclusive fashion label is these days? Jaclyn Smith. Do you know who the hell Jaclyn Smith even is? She was famous for being one of the stars (i.e., one of the not-Farrah Fawcett ones) of the cheesy 1970s ABC crime-fighting drama, “Charlie’s Angels.” A newer celebrity Kmart co-venture is the Adam Levine Collection. The beanpole Maroon 5 rocker tends to wear stuff as a judge on NBC’s “The Voice” that looks nothing like his namesake Kmart duds. (I checked out some tacky Adam Levine men’s shirts at Kmart, and they looked to be straight out of the late, not-great International Male catalog.) There’s got to be some middle ground in the marketplace between, say, Target’s Victoria Beckham collection and H&M’s uber-hip collaborations, such as the upcoming H&M x Erdem. What Kmart lacks these days is not only a sense of direction but of (yes, I’ll say it) authenticity. (Does Adam Levine make you think of fashion? Of course not.) Instead of locking itself into multiyear set-it-and-forget-it deals with random celebrities, the retailer should

be doing short-term capsule/curated collections with actually relevant rising Instagram and Snapchat style stars who can bring a sense of fast fashion and pop-up-shopping relevance to Kmart’s game. Trump Yes, I’m going there—I’m grouping the once high-flying Trump “luxury” brand (for those that liked a certain sort of gaudy, gilded, ostentatious luxury) with McDonald’s and Kmart. Which, of course, is rather unfair to McDonald’s and Kmart (neither of which, we can presume, would ever side with white supremacists). There are signs that within the Trump Organization itself there’s an awareness of just how tarnished the brand has become. For instance, the Trump Hotels group has been working on two secondary brands—Scion and American Idea—that conspicuously omit the Trump name. And the owners of the Trump International Hotel and Tower Toronto recently paid a reported $6 million for an early exit from a long-term licensing deal so they could de-Trump and rebrand as the St. Regis Toronto. But of course, the biggest problem with the Trump brand is the guy at the core of it—Donald Trump. Which reminds me of an old lightbulb joke. How many psychiatrists does it to take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to change. The first Kmart store opened in 1962. Ray Kroc opened the first franchised McDonald’s in 1955. Donald Trump was born in 1946. In other words, the oldest lightbulb in this batch—and frankly, not the brightest—is 71. Of course Trump doesn’t want to change. And so the Trump brand, circa 2017, has come to stand for nothing so much as anxiety, uncertainty ... and limbo.

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Opinion

HOW I WOULD REBRAND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY Grassroots and big tents: For the Dems to win back Washington in 2018, they’ll need to rebrand with the progressive voter at the core of the party’s DNA By Laura Olin Illustration by Phillip Wrigglesworth

American two-party politics has become a fight for the soul of the country in a way that is, like much of 2017, no longer remotely subtle. One side is for white patriarchal supremacy, either overtly or through complicit silence: benefiting straight white men with power, opportunities and space in public life to the exclusion of all others. The other side is for literally everyone else. And in rebranding, Democrats could take a page from the Twitter user who, after white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, juxtaposed an image of them with an image of the Statue of Liberty. The caption: “Pick a torch.” We’re in a battle for the viability of multicultural democracy, and it’s time for Democrats to be clear about that in the way we talk about the historic nature of this fight. It’s how we’ll get the big tent we need, filled with people who are united in prioritizing this fight over all others—because if we lose this battle, the specifics of health care policies or climate change stances will not matter one bit. Losing the House, governorships and state legislatures in 2018 will mean we’re in a poor position to re-draw gerrymandered district lines in 2020 and fight against racist voter suppression tactics that make it ever-harder for Democrats to win

Laura Olin, a digital consultant, ran President Obama’s social media campaign during the 2012 election

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elections in the first place. Being clear about the moment is important. But to make the Democratic brand succeed, we also need to do one other thing we didn’t do successfully enough in 2016: Make the Democratic Party a true movement again, with millions of brand representatives—not just a handful. Or, Lord help us, just one messiah figure everyone’s supposed to get behind as the one true representative of what the party stands for. The problem with messiah figures is that they can be brought down to earth, leaving you with nothing (sorry, John Edwards supporters). They can hijack your party and set it on fire (Donald Trump). They can run into term limits (Barack Obama). So, who should be the face of the Democratic Party instead? The 66 million people who voted to stop Trump in 2016, plus millions more. We can embrace the grassroots movement brand and model of organization that helped Obama win over millions in 2008 explicitly because it made people feel like they were, as volunteers and supporters, an equal and important part of something larger than themselves. That means doing more to conduct the Democratic Party as a chance for people to connect with others in their community and figure out how to best fight fascism in their own towns. If 2008 was the “Movement for Change,” maybe 2018 will be the Movement for Freedom. They’re called grassroots movements because they grow from the bottom up, and Democrats have only won in recent years when we’ve been incredibly explicit and consistent about that in both our tactics and our messaging. The next great Democratic brand is what Democrats make of it. That’s up to you. Don’t like what your local group is doing? Join it and change it. Pick a torch.

HOW I WOULD REBRAND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY The GOP has failed the middle class while alienating a generation of young voters who view the party as old, angry and rigid. Here’s how to fix it By Mindy Finn

Over the last decade, the Republican Party has been America’s top-selling brand. But many now see it as a lemon: a flashy coat of paint hiding an anemic, sputtering engine. As of May 2017, only 39 percent of Americans approved of the GOP, while 54 percent disapproved, according to Gallup. Millennials, likely the largest voting demographic in 2020, rate Republicans worse than any other group. If Republicans want to build a party for the future, they desperately need to rebrand. While the brand of the current GOP is easily recognized, often in the form of a bright red hat, politics is more than merchandising. No flashy new logo or pithy slogan can repair the damage done. The GOP needs a return to patriotism, not as a slogan, but as a meaningful commitment to the ideals of liberty and equality, while transcending the Lincoln and Reagan Republicanism tropes of yesteryear. First, the Republican Party must embrace radical inclusion—the idea that we are equal because we are human, no matter our class, color or creed. This is the self-evident truth on which our founders relied when they declared our independence. It must also be the prime principle in defining our new nation. The U.S. population will become “majority minority” in 2044, according to Census data. The GOP shouldn’t fight that change, but rather protect those principles core to the American brand;

Mindy Finn, a cofounder of Stand Up Republic, was a 2016 candidate for vice president as Evan McMullin’s running mate

equal rights and treatment for all. Second, American ingenuity must be integral to our prosperity. The Republican Party must embrace technological progress that improves lives in every aspect, whether it’s health care, transportation, energy or even education, where new models like apprenticeship programs and virtual schooling can prepare the workforce for the jobs of tomorrow. Regressive policies that give way to fear will only choke economic progress and disadvantage American competitiveness in the world. Next, to unleash innovation, the Party must truly embrace economic freedom to expand the middle class. Republicans have long advocated for limited government, and reducing regulatory and tax code barriers will help new, creative solutions thrive. The GOP should replace anti-government dogma with a call for smart government that partners with the private sector on evidence-based solutions tailored to specific communities, towns and cities. The next generation of voters has grown up with on-demand services in the palms of their hands. They’ll have no patience for today’s plodding, intrusive and unreliable governance. Neither should we. Finally, the party must kickstart a new era of civic engagement to strengthen our families, communities and country. The party must reject the politics of blame. Millennials don’t think highly of political figures, but they do harbor an altruistic spirit and long to serve causes greater than their Instagram feeds. Technology won’t replace the classic pillars of happiness: family, community, faith and/or vocation. The Republican rebrand must be a rededication to a better future for all; something more profound than any legislative win. The brand should offer a welcome hand, inspiration, opportunity and the gift of a cause greater than oneself. It’s an offering the founders and millennials alike would embrace. 97

Classic Ad Review

LISTERINE AND THE HALITOSIS HALLELUJAH By Barbara Lippert

“Edna’s case was really a pathetic one,” the copy reads. “Like every woman, her primary ambition was to marry. ... As her birthdays crept gradually toward that tragic thirty mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever.” Amping up the pitiful, Edna is in tears. Why, Edna, why? Halitosis, of course. And “even your closest friends won’t tell you.” Thus, this 1925 Listerine ad catapulted “Often a bridesmaid but never a bride” into the American consciousness as a shorthand for the-last-girlpicked-for-anything, the one who craves the spotlight but never gets it. Listerine was formulated in 1879, but it was decades later that the creator’s son, Gerard Lambert, read the term “halitosis” in a medical journal and had his eureka moment. Certainly, 1920s America was primed to worry about a new social scourge, however manufactured: Immigrants had brought smells from alien foods, and foreign germs and habits. Meanwhile, people began working and living in closer quarters. Indoor plumbing became widespread. Aided by advertisers, the American bathroom became a shrine to personal hygiene. Bad breath became big business: According to the Listerine website, sales went from $115,000 a year in 1921 to $4 million a year by 1927. By the late 1920s, Listerine was the country’s third-largest print advertiser. Now a Johnson & Johnson product, Listerine is part of an “oral hygiene” category that has exploded into a $6 billion industry. Its most recent global campaign, begun in 2016, makes use of the line, “Bring Out the Bold.” But today’s ads will never have the same rocket power as the one lambasting poor Edna. Back then it was possible to believe that we could change our futures with a swish.

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Ad Age  September 25, 2017

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Sources: 2016 Survey, Pew Research Center; GfK MRI, Spring 2016.

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