Table of contents for May 16, 2022 in Adweek

“Would you like to share your location?” The question is a pesky roadblock for people looking to buy groceries, get to work or date using their phones. But the answer is of great value for advertisers, helping them pinpoint potential customers and learn more about existing ones. Location data is one of the most controversial signals advertisers collect, as user privacy comes under increased scrutiny from tech companies and regulators. As brands try to locate users, sensitive information can leak into the web, to be found by domestic abusers, vigilantes and others we’d like not to know our whereabouts. Meanwhile, the laws regulating the sale of this data aren’t always clear, and tech giants like Amazon and Google collect it by default and will surrender it if subpoenaed. “[Location data]…

After a “relentless” eight years as the chief executive of budget airline EasyJet, Carolyn McCall was approached about potentially leading Britain’s largest commercial public broadcaster, ITV. Initially, she wasn’t keen on the idea. “I wanted a rest after EasyJet,” McCall said. “There’s rarely a quiet moment at ITV, but you get peaks and then it goes quiet. But with airliners, it’s peaks all of the time.” McCall is no stranger to a pivot. After earning a degree in education, she spent time as a teacher before going back to school for a master’s in politics. Her second career began at The Guardian Media Group in advertising sales in 1986, where she stayed for almost a quarter century. McCall helped launch Wired magazine, then The Guardian’s website in 1996, and ultimately…

Upfront week has always been about pomp and circumstance. Each year in mid-May, advertisers would make their pilgrimages from Madison Avenue to various stages in Manhattan, where TV networks would show off their shiniest new toys ahead of negotiations for the upcoming TV season. But then the pandemic hit in 2020, forcing media companies to cancel their annual events. And as the advertising world adjusted to virtual presentations, some marketers thought in-person upfronts were gone for good. “When Covid first happened, I thought they were done and would never come back,” Stacey Stewart, chief marketplace officer at media agency UM, said. After 2021’s virtual presentations improved on the first year’s “clunky” events, she continued, “my thought was that most of the media partners would look at it as a cost…

Targeting the right audience is every brand’s top priority. But when’s the last time your marketing team evaluated what the consumer landscape looks like after two years of seismic changes for the economy? EPiQ—the in-house research department at agency EP+Co—conducted a study to understand how the pandemic has impacted Americans’ finances and how they planned to make purchases over the next 12 months. EP+Co found four distinct groups of consumers: better job and more savings (13%); still working with stable finances (48%); still working but earning less (22%); and those who have lost jobs (18%). It’s those still in the workforce but making less, comprising roughly 40 million people, who present an opportunity for advertisers, according to Sheniqua Little, director of creative insights at EP+Co. Brands can take comfort in…

TWO YEARS BEFORE YELLOWSTONE BECAME AN UNLIKELY LINEAR SMASH HIT, THE SERIES NARROWLY ESCAPED AN EARLY DEMISE. When longtime MTV, VH1, CMT and Logo chief Chris McCarthy added Paramount Network (and several other ViacomCBS cable networks) to his purview in late 2019, the exec was tasked with turning around the network and making it profitable. Yellowstone—the lavish drama co-created by Taylor Sheridan and starring Kevin Costner as John Dutton, the patriarch of a family that controls the country’s largest contiguous ranch—was a prime candidate for cancellation. It was “an expensive project that was losing money,” recalled McCarthy, who nonetheless kept an open mind. “Because oftentimes, what is perceived to be the obvious choice is often not the best choice.” That certainly proved true in this case. Mc-Carthy—now president and CEO…

WITH EACH PASSING YEAR, MARKETERS ARE ASKING FOR MORE FROM THEIR MEDIA BUYERS. ANYTHING FROM MANAGING DATA TO CREATING CONTENT, WHILE NAVIGATING AN ENDLESS PROLIFERATION OF MEDIA CHANNELS, IS ON THE TABLE. AS A RESULT, MEDIA AGENCIES ARE RACING TO ADD NEW CAPABILITIES AND TEAMS, AND IN THE PROCESS, THEY’RE REDEFINING WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MEDIA AGENCY. BEHIND THE EVER-GROWING RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEDIA AGENCIES ARE SOME OF THE BRIGHTEST MINDS IN ADVERTISING. THIS YEAR’S MEDIA ALL-STARS REPRESENT THE MANY FACETS OF MEDIA BUYING. ADWEEK’S EXECUTIVE OF THE YEAR BUILT A 300-PERSON SHOP FROM THE GROUND UP, WHILE ADWEEK’S RISING STAR WAS THE BRAIN BEHIND THE MEDIA PLAN FOR SOME OF DOVE’S MOST IMPACTFUL ADVERTISING. ACROSS ADWEEK’S BANK OF ALLSTARS, YOU’LL FIND THE MANY AREAS OF MEDIA AGENCIES’ GROWTH…

Brown-West has spent her 18 years in media creating opportunities that never existed before. Her first job was helping Massachusetts-based MPG Newspapers grow an online presence, and she “fell in love with learning about this new thing called the internet,” she said. At Tinuiti, where Brown-West manages over $3 billion in media spend for clients like e.l.f. Cosmetics and Etsy, she helped the independent performance marketing agency access opportunities often reserved for holding companies. Under her leadership, Tinuiti became the first independent agency to be named an official marketing partner at TikTok and Reddit, which helped the agency win clients by giving them more access to the coveted platforms. Brown-West also has been instrumental in holding Tinuiti’s feet to the fire on diversity, helping create dedicated diversity and inclusion roles…

Before retail media was a buzzword, Flaccavento helped spearhead the creation of an advertising network for Target Roundel, starting in 2016. After several years, Target brought its retail media in-house, ended the engagement and hired many former Merkle employees full time. Flaccavento stayed, however, sensing an opportunity: Many of Merkle’s buy-side clients were clamoring for an understanding of retail media just as retailers were eager to build advertising engines. In 2019, Flaccavento launched Merkle’s New Stream Media division to help retailers design media offerings. Today, New Stream Media is a $20 million business with a win rate of more than 80% that generated $100 million in revenue for retail media networks in 2021, a figure that is expected to double this year. But Flaccavento, who has a 90-person team, is…

Francisco started in market and media research, but became fascinated by analytics and how to drive impact through media and measurement. Now she is spearheading the charge to create a centralized audience and data strategy practice at MediaCom. Francisco is more than just a numbers person, however, as she constantly searches for ways to bring a human element to data and platforms, driving curiosity and creativity into the data and information process. “I always say data plus technology should be in service of telling the human story,” said Francisco, one of few Latina women of color in the data business. She was not exposed to the tech field in her younger days but wants to change that for the next generation, and she speaks often about inclusion in the industry.…

One of Crossmedia’s first 10 employees, Plonchak rose over 16 years from planning and buying media in the mid-2000s to COO this year. She was the agency’s first and youngest-ever woman partner. In 2008, Plonchak spearheaded Crossmedia’s digital activations and taught herself digital advertising by calling ad server support desks. She eventually established Crossmedia’s first programmatic desk, which now employs 120 people. Today, Plonchak oversees high-level agency operations and technology decisions. Last year, she managed the agency’s migration from one buying system to another, which drove a 75% reduction in technology costs and required new workflows, processes and technology integrations. As COO, she’s working on formalizing the agency’s goals and has established the agency’s objectives and key results framework. “How do you formalize goals for an organization that has operated…

A tenured media leader who once sold entertainment firm BNC to IPG and later led its merger with PMK, Nyman has more than 30 years of industry experience. In 2018, he launched Acceleration Community of Companies (ACC), a single P&L agency collective where multiple agencies can utilize one invoice to bill a client. ACC now includes four agency brands and 250 employees serving high-profile clients including Amazon, Delta, Google, Meta, HBO, Netflix, Nike, Pepsi and T-Mobile. ACC’s services span from branding and creative to data and insights to experiential to cannabis industry-specific communications. Last year, ACC grew 64% compared to 2020 and its collaboration revenue, which represents when agencies work together on accounts, totaled 12% of net fees. “We view that as one of our significant scorecards that we’re going…

In 1949, a teenager named Robert Moog was leafing through the pages of Electronics World magazine when he came across the schematic for a musical instrument called the theremin. Instantly recognizable for its ethereal, mournful voice, the theremin features two antennas that generate electromagnetic fields. Placed between the aerials, human hands act as capacitors and cause the interrupted fields to express themselves with variable pitch and volume. In this way, the hands can be moved around to create melodies. Never heard one? Actually, you probably have. The theremin’s creepy whine has appeared everywhere from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound to Rush’s Clockwork Angels album to The Simpsons. Invented over a century ago, the theremin is still in production at Moog Music, and it has a story as unique as the sounds…

Consumers protesting corporations is nothing new in America. But a diverse company portfolio can be risky when it runs afoul of activists. Fifty years ago this month, antiwar activists took aim at Wonder Bread. Headquartered on Park Avenue in New York, the International Telephone and Telegraph company manufactured air navigation and communication equipment that the Defense Department was using in the Vietnam war. But ITT had also gone on an acquisition binge that included Sheraton hotels, Avis car rental and Continental Baking—makers of the famously squishy sliced bread. That link was an open invitation to protesters who—as part of a nationwide demonstration against President Richard Nixon’s mining North Vietnamese ports—carried signs suggesting that buying Wonder Bread was tantamount to funding a government war machine. ITT would divest its bakery division…

What’s something new and innovative you’ve worked on recently? A campaign we call “Carryout Tips.” The hook: We’re going to tip you for being your own delivery driver. Tipping your pizza delivery driver is a practice as old as pizza delivery itself. But when faced with a desire to grow our carryout business, as well as a nationwide labor shortage, we flipped the script by tipping our own customers $3 for delivering their pizza to themselves. The campaign has more than 2 billion earned media impressions. What emerging innovation are you most excited about, and how do you think it will change the future of marketing? We are on the tipping point of being a 100% voice-led, hands-free world—from audio technology controlling tasks at home to wallet-free transactions in grocery,…

Like many agencies, Crossmedia had to cut salaries during the pandemic. Though it did help the agency avoid layoffs, CEO Kamran Asghar pledged to reimburse employees for the salary reduction if he could. And on the heels of massive growth last summer, he did just that. “People really stuck with us, and we made good on our promise,” said Asghar, who not only leads Crossmedia, but also owns a majority stake in the company. For Asghar, the agency’s success is personal. He takes the time to learn each of his 300 U.S. employees’ names, for example, and personally serves patties on “Burger Days” at Crossmedia’s Chelsea office, which is burger-themed in honor of all the time Asghar spent at burger joints building the nascent agency. (Before the German agency had…

Dorné’s first task as CMO in 2019 was to tie together four disparate agencies under a new brand, Tinuiti. But a fresh new brand meant starting from scratch when it came to awareness. The challenge for Tinuiti was writ large when, during a pitch for a big-name retail brand in 2021, a rival landed the deal because the client CMO had “never heard” of Tinuiti. That spurred the agency’s first brand campaign, “Rethink. Performance,” which challenged CMOs to shift their perspectives on some of the industry’s key issues like data privacy and walled gardens. The campaign, which ran across OTT, social, search and email, drove a roughly 119% increase in site visitors and a more than 12% boost in searches for “Tinuiti,” plus an increase in brand lift on LinkedIn…

Marshall understands that client acquisition means nothing if retention does not follow. After leading UM’s Diversity, Equity and Belonging council, Marshall was elevated to chief diversity officer in 2021. He reimagines the talent pipeline through initiatives like Breaking Media, a mentorship and education program with Vox Media targeting historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutes (HSIs), while also offering internal resources like “Uniquely Me,” a social campaign that celebrates the “various, unique and beautiful cultures that make up the UM community,” according to Marshall. “A strong sense of belonging also allows us to confidently bring in more diverse talent,” Marshall said. “To that end, we’ve continued to look for new and creative ways to attract talent to UM.” Those efforts have led to an increase in the agency’s…

REMEMBER YOUR PURPOSE Before expanding [to new channels], it’s important to figure out who you are and why you exist. Magnolia Bakery is a neighborhood bakery; we will always be one. You walk into [the location on] Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side, and it feels familiar. It feels cozy. Like you’ve been there before. The challenge now is how to replicate that online. How do we do it for people that may never meet us, that may never step foot in a bakery? It should feel familiar enough, like someone might not really notice. That’s powerful. BRING TRUST TO WORK RELATIONSHIPS [Communication] doesn’t have to be a Zoom, email or Slack message. There were many times I’d call my partner on the agency side or say, “Hey, can…

Michelle Morgan has finally learned to love her hair unconditionally, and she is using her influence to remind other women that the way they want to show up in the workplace is no one’s business but their own. “As a Black woman, I’ve struggled with my natural hair, so it was ironic to be put on this account [working on The Crown Act] and really go through this journey myself,” said Morgan, who specializes in paid media campaigns. Dove is part of The Crown Coalition, a national alliance that advocated for The Crown (Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair) Act, which prohibits discrimination based on hairstyle and texture, to be signed into California law in 2019. The brand, which has made a name for itself in the…

In her role at WPP’s GroupM, Day manages audience insights, strategy and measurement practices for Google and Nickelodeon. For Google, she leverages data to educate brand teams on the nuances of diverse users across product lines including Pixel, Chromebook and Chrome, and is dedicated to making sure members of diverse communities feel seen, heard and included. “I have the great opportunity to really bring unique voices and demonstrate multidimensional stories of these audiences to the forefront through inclusive audience insights,” Day said. “[Those insights] really help to shape strategies that subsequently influence how our clients show up and really authentically connect with diverse communities in a way that’s not only relevant, but also impactful.” As a member of Google’s “Insights Squad” powered by Media Futures Group, Google’s bespoke agency, Day…

For too long, advertising has held a homogenized attitude toward multicultural groups. Pushing for a smarter, more nuanced approach during his 14-year tenure at Walton Isaacson, Thompson spearheaded multicultural ad targeting to drive business results for brands like Lexus, Pepsi and Amazon. Thompson has led dedicated media planning for Black and Hispanic markets in regions that previously had no dedicated multicultural spending. As a result, Lexus has seen a 50% and 43% volume growth in Black and Hispanic markets, respectively. For Lexus, Thompson has led the transition of its existing multicultural data management platform solution to a consumer data platform solution powered by the access to first-party customer data. A voracious host and participant in roundtables, webcasts and podcasts, Thompson has hosted five webinars from four of his ad-tech partners…