Creative

A recent study shows that 55% of U.S. Hispanics identify as bicultural. It’s important now more than ever to represent bicultural Latinos and tell their stories. Verizon is at the forefront of this storytelling with their most recent dedicated and original Spanish/bilingual ad for Verizon Fios starring American actor Gaten Matarazzo (known for his role as “Dustin Hendersen” in “Stranger Things” (2017), the thrilling Netflix sci-fi drama) and actor Marcel Ruiz (known for his role of “Alex Alvarez,” in the Netflix’s 2017 reboot of “One Day at a Time”), portraying bicultural families in a fun and creative way with relatable family dynamics.

Ascential, parent of The Cannes Festival of Creativity is restructuring its Lions awards program, eliminating more than 100 subcategories in the process. The Lions festival will also be shorter — by three days — going forward.  The company has been under pressure to restructure from holding companies and agencies that have concluded the annual awards program had become too bloated with awards that made little sense, were too expensive and were generally too complicated a process.

Category winners in the 17th annual Association of National Advertisers’ Multicultural Excellence Awards competition were announced.

The Creative Board of FUSION, the cable network of Fusion Media Group (FMG), announced an open call for scripted and unscripted television projects. This initiative builds on the commitment by FUSION and its Creative Board to generate new opportunities for young storytellers who span different ethnicities, races, sexual orientations, genders and religions. The open call is aimed at helping to level the playing field for underrepresented creative talent, with or without agency representation, who want to tell stories that are otherwise going unheard.

NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises announced the expansion of Fluency Studios with the launch of “Fluency Plus,” a new, bilingual digital production studio.

At a time when immigration is at the forefront of cultural conversation, Johnnie Walker is launching a new spot titled “Citizenship*,” which brings attention to the diverse backgrounds that represents the rich fabric of America today. The new creative, which is part of the brand’s ongoing Keep Walking America campaign, showcases the journey to becoming an American citizen.

Cubavera, Perry Ellis International’s Latin menswear brand, celebrates Latin culture with the launch of the Wear Your Heritage web series. The campaign focuses on sharing the individual #SoyLatino stories of influential celebrities, athletes and community leaders and unveils what it is that connects them to their Hispanic culture.

Cubavera, Perry Ellis International’s Latin menswear brand, celebrates Latin culture with the launch of the Wear Your Heritage web series. The campaign focuses on sharing the individual #SoyLatino stories of influential celebrities, athletes and community leaders and unveils what it is that connects them to their Hispanic culture.

More than 20 companies were named as winners in 12 separate categories. Grand Prize winners in each category will be announced at an awards ceremony during the ANA’s 19th annual Multicultural Marketing & Diversity Conference, November 5–7 in Miami Beach. The ceremony culminates with the “Best in Show” announcement, honoring the year’s best campaign chosen from the Grand Prize category winners.

Gender stereotyping in advertisements is a common tactic used for many brands and products to portray their target audience. Whether it’s the strong, luxurious shampoo that only features women with beautiful, long hair in their commercials or the newest camping gear that only shows a male on the packaging. Brands are consciously choosing to highlight and promote to one gender over the other. Are consumers aware of this gender stereotyping? Do they like having products for one gender over the other? Should the advertising industry even contribute to gender stereotyping?

Picture this, you’re a senior marketing executive and your Hispanic ad agency has just presented a creative idea for your next campaign. You like the direction but suddenly you ask the question: “Have you seen what our General Market agency presented? Why wouldn’t that work for Hispanic? What’s not Hispanic about it?”  Pressured to find synergies and budget efficiencies year over year, the temptation to adopt a “one size fits all” approach that may not only save production and agency fees, but could also save valuable time by reducing the number of meetings is a reality facing many marketers in America.  By Isaac Mizrahi – Co President, Chief Operating Officer of ALMA

Last week Kantar Millward Brown hosted a webinar titled ‘Create Digital Ads that Drive Brand Growth’. Tip number one was to “Make people feel something” and tip number two is the closely related “Stand out at the start”. Yes, with digital video you have to engage those emotions quickly.  by Nigel Hollis

While computer scientists have been touting artificial intelligence (AI) for more than half a century, the technology is just starting to reveal its potential. In spite of the hype, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and natural language processing have quietly become entrenched in many people’s daily routines.

The Circulo Creativo announced the winners of their 2017 USH Ideas Awards competition.  Coral Gables based ALMA walk away with the largest cache of awards in multiple categories, along with Anomaly, LatinWorks, We Believers, WING and other shops.

The Círculo Creativo has announced María “Maru” Bernal, VP Creative Director at Lápiz, and Norberto “Norbi” Zylberberg, CCO & Founder at Socialisssima, as the entity’s new Vice Presidents.

For every ad campaign they execute, brand and agency leaders have to decide on an array of variables: how much to spend on creative development and testing; whether to seek high reach or more precise targets; the context for the message; and how to add an element of recency to deliver the ad prior to the next expected purchase. But it wasn’t too long ago that creative was the most important part of the mix by far. It was a pretty simple formula: Good creative sold products, bad creative didn’t. In 2006, Project Apollo found that 65% of a brand’s sales lift from advertising came from the creative.

One morning recently, an impromptu discussion broke out in the office about what makes for great advertising. We discussed a few of our favorite recent ads and, as one can imagine, the range of suggestions about which was best was broad. Short form and long form. Funny and sentimental. Product-driven and brand-focused. Rational and emotional. While they ranged in length and objective, one thing was clear: They were “must-watch” ads—not filler in between program breaks, but great creative that we want to talk about, share and watch—over and over again.  By Carl Marci, Chief Neuroscientist

It’s a big marketing move for SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment as it seeks to build its share of Hispanic vacationers and local visitors through direct Spanish-language communication — something never done before on a major level. BY Adam R Jacobson, for HispanicAd      

Lüerzer’s Archive, one of the world’s leading advertising publications, will be featuring two campaigns created by Y&R Miami. The five print pieces belong to campaigns created for Dell monitors and Alienware computers.

Publicis Groupe’s decision to save money by not entering any advertising awards shows next year seemed to have elicited more puzzlement than empathy in the media reports filed from the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, where CEO Arthur Sadoun dropped the bombshell in June.  By Thom Forbes