Agency

In 2012 a leading retailer began looking for a new chief marketing officer. The job description made the opening sound exciting: The new CMO would play a big, important role, leading the company’s efforts to boost revenues and profits. It seemed like the kind of opportunity any would-be CMO might desire.  By Kimberly A. Whitler and Neil Morgan

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

• Memes, memes and more memes.
• Clogging the arteries of the interwebs like cholesterol of maximum viscosity.
• Fails, hacktivism, dancing cats, surfing cats, grumpy cats, juvenile jokes, moronic hastily photoshopped visual puns, fake news, post truth, hatchet jobs, idle defamation, character assassination, trolling, trolling and more trolling, tabloid dirt, celebrity sex tapes, hacked private footage of bedroom activity, stolen selfies, cybernecking.
• Guilty pleasures. Schadenfreude. Braindead escapism. Ironic consumption.

Advertisers are wrong about fraud: It’s a problem that can’t be completely solved. We are not going to eradicate it, the same way we are not going to wipe out robbery or eliminate illness. A more realistic — and effective — approach is to manage fraud, both by taking measures to prevent it, and by working to detect it once it occurs so that we can mitigate its most detrimental effects.

Marketing leaders and agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to keep pace with growing demands to localize and adapt their creative strategies. Facing a widening range of digital and physical channels that each require rapid adaptation in order to remain relevant to individual geographic, cultural and customer audiences, too many organizations are failing to take the necessary steps to improve their capacity and agility, according to a new study by the CMO Council.

America is in the midst of seismic changes. Unprecedented demographic shifts.  Rising educational attainment. Migration of young talent to urban centers. A technology revolution reshaping our economy and empowering consumers in ways previously unimaginable. What does this mean for the face of tomorrow’s consumer market? Are we witnessing the emergence of a new mass market?

This iteration of the report focuses on the distinctive media palates across generations –  and, most notably, Generation Z. While generations like the Baby Boomers and Millennials are well known and add their own unique value to the media landscape, the lesser studied Generation Z is quickly maturing into adulthood and will soon make their presence known.

We don’t see many Big Ideas any more.  Content may be king, but content is forgettable, millions of tiny ideas in a million different places.  Can anything new be said about a product?  Or an industry, like the advertising industry?  Well, I’m not a creative — more like a dreaded management consultant.  Nevertheless, here’s a cross-industry Big Idea, free for the asking: Ad agencies are just like cruise ships!  Don’t dismiss this out of hand. Read on!

Well, not entirely free. Let me explain. Recently, I had lunch with a procurement manager from a technology company that we’re pitching, and she gave me some insights from the other side on what it feels like to work with an agency.  

Millions of Americans gathered to celebrate LGBTQ Pride last month, which also marked two years since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of nationwide marriage equality.  That historic June 2015 ruling legalized the new definition of family.  In today’s media landscape, brands need to follow suit.  If they want to be successful, companies can no longer ignore the LGBTQ community in their advertising.

The agreement will further extend Ogilvy’s US Hispanic service offering and strengthen MARCA’s current capabilities in digital, social media, and analytics.

About a million immigrants receive U.S. green cards each year, but fewer than half are new arrivals from other countries. The majority already live in the United States on temporary visas, according to recently released U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that show that the two groups have different profiles.

There was, for once, big news at the annual advertising festival in Cannes, France, but it had nothing to do with who won the grand prizes.  Er, um, pardonnez-moi, grand prix.  Ratherm the 2017 event — formally, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity — will be remembered for a startling announcement midway through by Arthur Sadoun, the new Chairman and CEO of the giant Publicis Groupe agency company, that he was bidding adieu for the next year to Cannes Lions, along with other awards shows and events such as CES and South by Southwest.

The News Media Alliance – representing almost 2,000 news organizations – called on Congress to allow publishers to negotiate collectively with dominant online platforms. The objective is to permit publishers to have concrete discussions with the two dominant distributors of online news content, Google and Facebook, on business model solutions to secure the long-term availability of local journalism produced by America’s newsrooms.

reVolver Podcasts appointed Joe Uva as non-executive chairman of the board to lead the company’s managers on all governance matters, and to help the company with its strategy and business development.

Every cloud has a silver lining. And when it comes to the current status of the retail industry, which ranges from “bleak to promising,” that silver lining consists of Hispanic millennials. In fact, regardless of the state of retail at large, Hispanic millennials – especially Latinas – are the new now of retail, and their impact on your bottom line may be more than you realize.  By Alberto Navas

After reading the award-winning essays for the Admap Prize 2017 (inspired by Kantar, I should note) my eye was caught by the title Pre-Suasion toward the end of the same issue. Pre-Suasion turns out to be the title of a new book by Professor Robert Cialdini and the review suggests that the central theme fits well with the need to make a lasting impression.  by Nigel Hollis

Days after one influential financial institution issued a “double downgrade” of WPP, another has downgraded the valuations of the entire publicly traded ad sector it covers, including Interpublic, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP.

Pan-American Life Insurance Group (PALIG) announced that it has acquired Hola Doctor Inc. (HolaDoctor). The acquisition is a significant strategic initiative by PALIG that both expands its presence in the U.S. Hispanic market and strengthens its position as a healthcare leader in Latin America.

According to a recent study, African-Americans and Latinos are grossly under-represented in the financial services industry and the representation of these groups is expected to drastically decline if hiring and retention efforts are not made a priority by banks and other financial institutions.

Univision Communications Inc. (UCI) announced that Keith Turner, president of Advertising Sales & Marketing, will retire at the end of the year. The Company will announce leadership transition plans in the coming weeks.