Business

The defendants behind a group of California-based marketers have been permanently barred from the deceptive marketing and billing tactics they allegedly used to promote their skincare products, under court orders resolving Federal Trade Commission charges against them.

Combate Americas announced that it has named multiple-time professional world wrestling champion and former Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) star Alberto “El Presidente” Rodriguez, formerly known as Alberto Del Rio and Alberto El Patrón, as its president.

The Agency Spotter Team continues their mission to match brand decision makers’ with agencies, and they have new trends to share in this report along with a quick update.

Holiday spending is expected to reach its highest point since the Great Recession, increasing 10 percent compared with the 2015 holiday season, according to PwC’s 2016 Holiday Outlook. However, this isn’t all good news for store-based retailers, as consumers stated they increasingly prefer to receive gifts of travel and entertainment rather than traditional gifts.

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

• Rule number one of good manners: never discuss politics or religion at the dinner table.
• Then again, this is not the dinner table.
• This is a marketing & advertising publication.
• Politics has never been so deeply permeated by marketing & advertising as we’re witnessing these days.
• So here we go again.

The robots are coming for jobs, and many who believe that they’re exempt from the much ballyhooed robot job apocalypse might have reason to be far more worried.  That includes marketers.  Patricio Robles is a tech reporter at Econsultancy

According to Reuters / Yahoo Finance, Mexican broadcaster Televisa said on Wednesday it had signed content distribution deals with NBCUniversal and its Spanish-language unit Telemundo to expand its selection of films and series, boosting its streaming video service, blim.

If we follow consumers across various devices, we find they spend most of their time with TV, in its live and recorded formats. But the tale of TV time spent is actually two separate stories, as explored in a new eMarketer report, “Television Update Fall 2016: Is the Surge in TV Ad Spending a Normal Shift or a Trend?”

The typical project manager has lots of responsibility and very little authority. To make things even more challenging, the typical project plan bears little resemblance to reality. Achieving successful outcomes under these conditions is not easy. Remember and apply these guidelines, and you’ll significantly increase your odds for success.  By Dave Po-Chedley, Cambridge Consulting

The recent disclosures by Facebook that they overestimated video viewing for two years is troubling. While ANA recognizes that “mistakes do happen,” we also recognize that Facebook has not yet achieved the level of measurement transparency that marketers need and require.  By Bob Liodice, President and CEO, ANA

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

• When Al Ries and Jack Trout came up with the concept of “positioning” back in the early 80s they used 7Up as the perfect example.
• 7UP, they claimed, had carved a solid market niche for itself by “positioning” itself as the opposite of cola.
• The “uncola”.
• Cut to 2016.

NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises announced the appointment of Luis Rosero to Vice President, Government Affairs.

Facebook admitted “miscalculating” average video view times, which grossly misled advertisers on the value they could expect when buying video ads from Facebook.  This is like a car salesman telling potential customers they can expect to get 25 miles per gallon when the car actually only gets five.  The most disingenuous part of Facebook’s admission is that, despite employing the brightest engineers on the planet earth, we are supposed to believe they made an honest “math mistake.”  Facebook’s admission, on top of Dentsu announcing that it charged advertisers for buying ads that were never bought, make our industry’s failures more viewable during advertising’s conference week.  How ironic.

Telecommunications companies are the cornerstone of the digital revolution: Everything that happens over a network requires their participation. Yet, many telcos struggle to realize the digital technology advantages that their services deliver to customers. Large telecom companies invest billions of dollars in the networks and operations that make a digital lifestyle possible for their customers, but their performance can be inconsistent, which sometimes results in poor service and creates dissatisfied customers.  By Frédéric Debruyne and Jeff Melton

Hispanic consumers contributed over $63 billion in total sales to the U.S. auto industry in 2015, a trend that has continued this year.  A new IHS Markit Hispanic Consumer Report shows over the first three months of 2016, Hispanic consumers contributed nearly $15 billion to industry sales.  However, the auto industry eschews spending with Spanish media or in the Latino community, whose purchasing power has been growing 70 percent faster than Americans’ as a whole, Henry Cisneros and Sol Trujillo wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

More than 75 percent of CEOs include gender equality in their top ten business priorities, but gender outcomes across the largest companies are not changing. Women are less likely to receive the first critical promotion to manager—so far fewer end up on the path to leadership—and they are less likely to be hired into more senior positions. As a result, the higher you look in companies, the fewer women you see.

In just under two weeks, the marketing and advertising industry’s best and brightest will gather in Los Angeles for the ANA Multicultural Marketing & Diversity Conference, presented by Time Inc. One of the featured speakers at this year’s event is Brian Beitler (pictured), EVP and CMO at Lane Bryant. Last year, Lane Bryant launched its groundbreaking “Plus is Equal” campaign that helped bring female body positivity into the national conversation. With this campaign, the company has helped to pave the way for broader acceptance of a previously ignored consumer segment that represents nearly 80 percent of African-American women and 75 percent of Hispanic women. Below, Brian shares a quick look at his upcoming presentation, his take on the importance of multicultural marketing in today’s marketplace, and what he sees as the future of multicultural marketing.  By Crystal Albanese, senior manager of committees and conferences at ANA

Consumers’ grocery shopping patterns are quickly evolving as just-in-time shopping is becoming the norm. Since there are more places to shop, and more products to choose from than ever before, IRI® is taking a closer look at how retailers can find true organic growth by maximizing the value of their current shoppers in today’s fragmented marketplace

The American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4A’s) revealed findings of two new surveys about diversity. One survey found that 4A’s members reported the industry hasn’t done enough to improve diversity within its ranks, while another showed that consumers believe strides have been made in the portrayal of diversity in ads during the past five years.

The findings include surprising juxtapositions. Some tactics are clearly performing well, but only utilized by a small number of brands. Other tactics are widespread among brands, but the performance data shows little to no payoff. The report also puts concrete numbers behind strategies that marketers have believed intuitively to be effective, but never had good data to corroborate. Based on Beckon’s marketing performance analysis, third-party research and case studies from customers, the report makes recommendations to help data-driven marketers set benchmarks for success and chart a better course for action.