Agency

The U.S. Hispanic Creative Circle has announced that entries to the 6th USH Idea Awards are now open. Agencies will have until September 15th to submit creative pieces to the festival that will be held at The Colony Theatre in Miami Beach on Thursday, October 12, 2017.

Bill Duggan penned a piece in MediaVillage.com last week continuing the ANA’s attack on ad agencies — this time over production transparency, which is the code name for unethical and possibly illegal bid-rigging activities conducted by some agencies to secure production contracts at favorable rates.  A previous transparency issue, media transparency, was investigated by ANA in 2016, and it confirmed instances of media agencies enriching themselves at client expense through rebates, kickbacks and other “non-transparent” practices, many of them not forbidden by existing contracts.  Duggan summarized ANA’s view about these two transparency issues: “The advertising industry continues to suffer from a transparency crisis, which has broken down trust between advertisers and agencies … the ad agency community now needs to acknowledge and address these issues rather than continuing to issue denials …”  By Michael Farmer

comScore published its Top Ten Burning Issues in Digital report.

Amisha Gandhi, head of influencer marketing at the software giant SAP, wanted to inject more value into the company’s Leonardo Live event centered on digital innovation and transformation. She invited five top influencers to participate in the two-day conference, which took place earlier this summer in Frankfurt, Germany, and attracted 1,500 attendees, including C-level and senior digital executives.  By Matthew Schwartz

There’s no right or wrong way to snack, but there’s little doubt that Americans are growing increasingly health conscious as they reach for a bite in between meals—or in place of one. And as consumers’ hunger for healthful options rises, it’s important for retailers and manufacturers to stay on top of consumption trends in the produce aisle.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released the “IAB Podcast Playbook,” the organization’s first-ever buyer’s guide for podcast advertising, which provides insights into audience demographics, listener behaviors, creative treatments, ad formats, delivery and targeting, and ad effectiveness measurement.

Over the past four decades, the U.S. Census has documented the growth trajectory of our Hispanic population.  While the numbers alone tell a powerful story of the value of the Hispanic market to brands, to fully understand the opportunity we have to dig deeper.  The Hispanic market is uniquely relative to past immigrant groups.  Hispanics represent a unique movement due to a combination of factors including language, duality and tenacity.

A year ago, the advertising industry was stirred by the ANA-commissioned report “An Independent Study of Media Transparency in the U.S. Advertising Industry” from K2 Intelligence.  The key finding of that report was that non-transparent business practices, including cash rebates to media agencies, are pervasive in the U.S. media ad buying ecosystem.  By Bill Duggan

Many aspects of the digital world are dominated by a single giant: Google dominates search, Facebook dominates social, and of course, Amazon dominates e-commerce. For the vast majority of brands, walking away from the giants simply isn’t an option … so digital success means dancing with these giants more effectively.

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

• I was reading the news about the attacks last week in Spain* and it was brought to my attention that some European media outlets call these type of assailants “Nike terrorists”.
• “Nike terrorist”?
• What can that possibly mean?
• Here’s what I found after some research online.
• Apparently, the term was coined by operatives in the British intelligence services.
• For various reasons, some of them surprisingly related to our marketing & advertising line of business.

In recent years, most consumer goods companies have exponentially grown their digital agendas, typically resulting in higher costs of time, energy and money. Yet for many, top-line growth remains elusive and profits are under pressure.

Consumer demand for streaming services has opened the door for new players. Snapchat has signed development deals in the past year with Walt Disney’s ESPN, Discovery, the NFL, A+E Networks, Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting, and Vice Media. Twitter recently signed on to stream several sports leagues, which is on par with its strategy to carve out their share of the live streaming category. Facebook will stream 20 MLB games for free this season. And YouTube TV is now streaming live TV for cord-cutters around the globe. But it’s not just social networks looking to capitalize on the popularity of streaming. Comcast now allows its X1 customers to stream Netflix seamlessly from their service.

From the rise of online shopping channels to ad campaigns created for an audience of one, consumer marketing has changed more in the past ten years than it did in the previous 30. Despite that level of change and disruption, if you had put a few typical marketers from the 1980s into a time machine and sent them into the marketing departments of today, they would probably feel right at home. There might be a new IT department and a few other changes, but the job titles, structures, approach to performance management—even the vocabulary—would be remarkably familiar.  By Raphael Buck, Biljana Cvetanovski, Alex Harper, and Björn Timelin

New research by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has found that global brands have made major changes or are planning to make extensive changes to their media governance practices across a wide range of areas.

On Monday, August 21, 2017, all of North America will experience an eclipse of the sun. The solar eclipse path of totality will stretch from Salem, Ore., to Charleston, S.

Emojis reportedly work in email marketing. But people who use them in the office are seen as incompetent.

Social media is deeply embedded in our culture and has emerged as a leading indicator of overall media consumption.  Its burgeoning power can be vividly seen when assessing the consumption patterns, habits and trends of Gen-Z.   By Graeme Hutton

We get this question a lot. Truth be told, there’s no one simple answer; content creators can decide to pull the plug on a program for any number of reasons. Still, many cancellations reflect a lack of audience interest—or not enough interest to support the expense of producing the show.

The New York Latino Film Festival (NYLFF), presented by HBO, will make its triumphant return October 11-15 with the support of a stellar roster of new and returning sponsors.

The Hispanic Public Relations Association (HPRA) is proud to recognize the industry’s leading pioneer and journalist of the year at the 2017 HPRA National ¡BRAVO! Awards dinner at The Lotte New York Palace Hotel in NYC on Wednesday, October 11, 2017.