Business

In a survey of 120 CMOs worldwide by marketing consultancy NewBase, 43% of respondents said they outsource their programmatic efforts. No other marketing function had an outsource rate this high.

Let’s face it. We love it when smartasses get theirs. For example: Sir Martin Sorrell. Sorry, your lordship, but I always thought you were a pontificating and pretentious dickhead, and I’m kind of rooting for the team digging up dirt on you. Let’s see if you doth protest too much.  Or Jeff Bezos. OK, granted Trump doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about regarding Amazon. And we apparently love the company. But just how much sympathy do we really have for the world’s richest man? Couldn’t he stand to be taken down a few pegs?  And don’t get me started on Bill Gates.

AccuWeather announced new additions to the team of broadcasters and journalists at its AccuWeather Network-the only “All Weather, All the Time”.

NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises announced the official inauguration of Telemundo Center, its new global headquarters in Miami, FL. Telemundo Center sets the new standard for Hispanic media as the only next-generation, multimedia production facility with news, sports, entertainment, studios, international and digital all under one roof.

Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has introduced a new bill – S. 2478, the End Taxpayer Subsidies for Drug Ads Act – to change the tax code for prescription drugs, effectively eliminating the advertising costs deduction for direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising produced by pharmaceutical companies. After a threatened attempt to remove these deductions as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, McCaskill is reviving the effort she started last year.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Our limbs are ours because we can feel them.
• We can feel WITH and THROUGH them.
• We can sense the sand and the water embracing our toes in the warm summer surf.
• We can touch the sleek texture of the screen as we frantically scroll down through myriad messages on our inseparable mobile devices.

Attention. Human-viewable. Audience. Fraud-free. Sales.

When you first start out in your career, you might fall back on a mental habit from your early educational experience: distinguishing between days to work hard and learn, and days to relax and have fun. But if you want to get ahead in the advertising world, you’ll quickly discover that the only way to hone your skills and stand out is to approach every day—and every stage of your career—as a school day.

In this report, we highlight topics covered at the March event including the importance of engaging the dialogue regarding consumer safety, advertising assurance, and the ongoing challenges the industry faces.

The performance-management process at many companies continues to struggle, but not for lack of efforts to make things better.

The growing Hispanic population in the U.S. and their proclivity for home cooking is helping fuel consolidation among Hispanic grocers. The latest being Bodega Latina’s purchase of Fiesta Mart.

If I had received Wall Street analyst Brian Wieser’s most recent note to investors a day earlier, I would have thought it was an April Fool’s prank, but the fact that it is datelined April 2nd, affirms that it starts off with Wieser’s perennial sense of humor: A mock exchange between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining his infamous “dumb as f***s” quip to a Senators at a Congressional hearing on consumer data privacy slated for later this month.  by Joe Mandese

In an open letter to CMOs, Tom Roach, Managing Partner at BBH, shares data-points designed to prove that a strong brand is a company’s most valuable asset, and asks that his letter be forwarded to the CEO. If you check out the letter you will find that four of the proof points come from work done by Kantar Millward Brown.  by Nigel Hollis

Association of National Advertisers (ANA) client-side marketers are making strong progress in achieving gender balance among CMOs, but in stark contrast there remains significant work to do in attaining ethnic diversity.

NGL Collective announced the addition of Christy Kaplan as Sales Director to lead its sales efforts on the West Coast.

Lieberman and FRC announced that Raul Lopez has recently joined as Senior Vice President of its newly created Multicultural Market Research practice.

  By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• The question is not “if” but “when.
• When will our minds be seamlessly integrated with software to operate hardware?
• Remote limbs, organs, machinery.
• Fleets of self-driving vehicles.
• Aircraft.
• Armies.
• Or… other minds.
• What will happen the day we find ourselves surrounded by artificial intelligence?

The current situation surrounding Cambridge Analytica and Facebook over the use of potentially sensitive consumer data is substantial. Embedded in the wide-ranging commentary surrounding this incident has been a hard-hitting debate about the direction our industry must take.  By Bob Liodice, CEO, ANA

Traditional and online retailing are increasingly intertwined as customers seamlessly shop across touchpoints and the industry uses both platforms to better serve them, according to the annual State of Retailing Online study released by the National Retail Federation and Forrester.

“I told you so.” It’s unlikely that Tim Cook — maybe the most respected exec in Silicon Valley — would use such callow words.  Yet that’s exactly what he’s telling anyone who ever doubted that consumer data mining would result in scandals like the one currently engulfing Facebook.