Business

No one can predict when disaster will strike—but knowing what to expect if it does will buy precious time.

Last week we saw quarterly results for various blue-chip companies. Pepsi, McDonald’s, Domino’s, Amazon, American Airlines, Chipotle, T-Mobile and even Twitter managed to delight shareholders with positive results, or at least results that were deemed a break from negativity in prior quarters (Twitter!).  Sadly (if you’re one of their shareholders), that was not the case for the Coca-Cola Company and Procter & Gamble. These two pillars of the S&P 500 were punished for less-than-stellar results.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last month rendered a very important decision. This decision threatens to allow states and localities far more leeway to impose government mandated disclosures in advertising with potentially extremely adverse impacts.

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

• Sooner or later, your brand/company/product/service will fall victim of a social media lynching.
• It’s happened to Pepsi, United Airlines and Shea Moisture, among others.
• Deservedly or not.
• You can run but you can’t hide from the pitchforks.

New CEOs face enormous challenges as they start assembling a management team and setting a strategic direction in today’s volatile environment. To provide some guidance for transitioning CEOs, we looked at the experiences of exceptional CEOs, those defined as the very top performers in our data set of roughly 600 chief executives at S&P 500 companies between 2004 and 2014.

“Watch out! They are coming!” reported The Drum when Accenture and Deloitte appeared on the pitch list for Nissan-Renault’s global account review. They are “spreading their tentacles, seduced by marketing services!”  By Michael Farmer – Madison Avenue Manslaughter

Mobile advertising accounted for more than half (51%) of the record-breaking $72.5 billion spent by advertisers last year, according to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and prepared by PwC US.

More retailers filed for bankruptcy in the first three months of 2017 than in all of 2016, sparking headlines warning of a retail apocalypse and painting Amazon as the villain.

Expect the Hispanic and Latino community’s contributions to the U.S. economy to be nothing short of monumental in the coming decades. Not only is this demographic expected to make up a third of the U.S. population by 2050 — translating into immense buying power — this group is also creating businesses at 15 times the national rate, according to one report.

The aspirational purchase – buying an item because it evokes a sense of financial achievement beyond what is realistic – drove much of the retail world in recent years. Designers led the market, particularly in apparel, and consumers followed.

Everywhere we turn lately, there seems to be a new corporate crisis in the headlines. Some of the largest, most visible and successful companies are being forced to publicly apologize — while feverishly attempting to convince their customers that these unfortunate incidents are only isolated blips — without any implication of systemic organizational issues.

A new survey of corporate communications, marketing and industry leaders reveals that 76% rely on word of mouth recommendations from their peers to find PR and other communications agencies. 

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

• Business thrives in clusters.
• Promiscuity.
• Most industries operate like groups of stray cats in an alley: they might sound like they are fighting but they are in fact mating.
• A ckusterf*ck in the very best sense of the word.
• Let’s call it “clusterluck” (wink wink nudge nudge) or the sake of coining a catchy corporate jargon-friendly neologism.

NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises revealed its 2017 Upfront theme of “Shift Happens,” a nod to the changes taking place in Hispanic media.  To celebrate the Hispanic “shift” that Telemundo has identified and led in the Hispanic media industry, the Spanish-language network will hold an exclusive event for advertising clients and business partners on Monday, May 15 at The Manhattan Center’s Hammerstein Ballroom.

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

• When I started my little ad agency -ok ok, my boutique- a client of mine said to me: “An agency? Another one? In Miami? Really?”
• It wasn’t as sarcastic as it sounds.
• In fact, she was truly concerned about me.
• She thought I was a bit nutz.

Even as digital ad spending takes off, the sharp divide between the haves and have-nots keeps increasing.

Do you understand digital media enough to make good decisions?

A new index from The NPD Group’s Checkout TrackingSM shows that some of the biggest names in retailing and foodservice have become fully woven into American life – reaching an extraordinary percentage of buyers at least once a year.

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

• There’s a cottage industry around the concept of “growth hacks”.
• It is built around one premise: there always is a shortcut, an alternative way, a silver bullet.
• Growth hacks, however, must be firmly rooted in big data.
• It ain’t just throwing spaghetti to the wall to see what sticks.

By Miguel Arias – Adman

• The outcry is a bit too much.
• In all fairness, why is the premise of Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner spot stupider than the vast majority of content coming out of Hollywood, the music industry or Madison Avenue?
• If the socialsphere and the thought police applied the same level of self-righteous scrutiny to every figment of pop culture out there, no movie, music video, TV show or TV spot would ever see the light of day.
• At the very least, Pepsi tried to do something different.