Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Adweek

Digital video will pass linear in ad spend in 2024, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. And with this new age of TV comes new strategies for reaching consumers. “Digital video is the future of video,” IAB CEO David Cohen said during the New-Fronts. “Understanding next-generation solutions is as relevant and as important as ever before.” Here are the three big takeaways from the IAB’s presentation, spanning 20 companies, on where the future of TV is headed. New measurement: With companies desperately trying to reach consumers in an increasingly fragmented marketplace, attention is the new key metric for success. Knowing where people are paying attention to ads and who they are (preferably through first-party data) are the big questions companies are solving for. Stay authentic: Growth in the U.S. is…

When Nancy Hall told a college advisor that she eventually wanted to be a CEO, he said that was an unrealistic goal because “only men are CEOs, and typically men that are CEOs are over 6 feet.” Because Hall was 5 feet tall, “he didn’t think that was in my future.” The incident motivated her further, and now Hall is North America CEO of media agency Mindshare. College was a pivotal time, as Hall was president of her sorority—a position that taught her how to lead a community, run meetings and solve problems. Hall initially wanted to pursue broadcast journalism because of her curiosity and drive to find answers. She also loved fashion and saw the rise of tech as an opportunity to blend technology and fashion in a way…

Upfront week has traditionally been the time of year when publishers throw glitzy events to showcase fall schedules, marketers initiate talks about budgets for the year ahead, and reporters frantically run across New York trying to succinctly capture a cacophony of announcements and news. It’s time to end this madness, or at the very least update it, according to some insiders. “I personally have been pushing for the upfront not to continue,” one buyer told ADWEEK, speaking anonymously. “It feels like it’s designed for a traditional fall schedule that doesn’t exist anymore and doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of meaningful learnings that come out of it.” ABC started upfront week in 1962 with good intentions, showcasing its fall lineup for advertisers, namely automakers, ahead of the Q4 launches of…

ADWEEK’s Media All-Stars represent the changing face of media, from small, independent agencies to integrated networks and international clientele. As AI continues to influence media buying and the industry overall, these stars are making the best of the technology and finding new ways to help clients maximize their dollars and gain market share. For the 2024 Media All-Stars, technology is a key tool to crafting the best strategy while navigating markets and audiences that are increasingly diverse, creator-led and shoppable. It’s not all about tech, however. Media Executive of the Year Valerie Davis shows that listening to employee needs helps power growth at Stagwell’s Assembly, while Rising Star Kelechi Nwankwoala, the research lead at Mindshare’s NeuroLab, measures consumers’ emotions.…

Mike Nellis has been in the political sphere since he was young, joining the College Democrats in college and the Barack Obama campaign in 2007. Nearly 20 years later, he’s been a marketer and digital strategist for the Kansas Democratic Party and Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign, culminating in the founding of Authentic, a digital-first fundraising and advertising agency for Democratic candidates and social impact organizations. In the past year, Nellis’ focus on authentic messaging, creativity, strategy and top talent raised more than $100 million for Democratic candidates. He was one of the masterminds behind Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s “Governor Barbie” campaign and raised more than $4 million for United We Dream to help cover the fees each Dreamer must pay for DACA renewals to stay in the country. In…

A media planner by trade who shifted to the world of analytics in 2020, Aleena Akmal is obsessed with optimizing brands’ marketing efforts to reach their most coveted business goals. Challenged with reaching Celebrity Cruises’ gutsy booking goals after a Covid-induced slump, Akmal’s cross-discipline team built a forecasting planning tool that created and analyzed real-time simulations to find the most effective media plan. The result? A 153% increase in bookings year over year and a fivefold boost on return on ad spend. The same approach also increased bookings at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts’ portfolio of brands. She brought it back to linear TV after four years away, and the insights gleaned through Akmal’s analysis increased paid media’s contribution by 25% compared to the previous year. When she’s not engineering forecasting…

In 2023, Kim Kelleher’s vast role at AMC Networks allowed her to rapidly innovate both the company’s advertising and its distribution functions. She enabled programmatic ad buying on three of AMC’s linear networks, allowing live linear inventory to be purchased biddably in real time—an industry first. This brought better targeting for partners such as L’Oréal and T-Mobile. Kelleher was also instrumental in launching the ad-supported version of AMC+ and driving the company’s growth on CTV platforms, where AMC Networks currently offers and sells through 100 ad-supported channel feeds on 10 different platforms. Content Room, which Kelleher helped launch in 2020, expanded across all formats and platforms last year. The original content platform launched the Novo Nordisk-sponsored docuseries Thick Skin, the Diageo-sponsored travel/memoir series You Are Here and its most lucrative…

Last year, Julie Berger traded in a 25-year career at holding companies for an indie C-suite role as Giant Spoon’s first chief media officer. Having taken roles on both agency- and supplier-side companies, Berger has experience in nearly every facet of the media space. So she was in her element running the independent agency’s media practice, which accounts for roughly a fifth of Giant Spoon’s employees and 25% of its annual revenue. Berger joined Giant Spoon from EssenceMediacom, where she led the WPP agency’s investment practice. Before WPP, she oversaw the Farmers Insurance media practice and spent a decade at IPG’s Initiative, most notably as co-lead of the West Coast investment practice. In addition to her campaign work in the past year, Berger joined the Out of Home Advertising Association…

Despite working in advertising for less than 15 years, Amy Porter’s body of work is expansive. Porter started her career in media with Deutsch in 2011 before making her ascent through the who’s who of media agencies, including Digitas, MEC, OMD and Assembly. She was on teams that launched the PlayStation Vita device, the Taco Bell app and numerous theatrical releases from Fox, Paramount and Walt Disney Studios. That strategic expertise and work ethic took her to RPA in 2019, where she became a patient leader with an innovative, forward-thinking approach to the media landscape. In 2023, she co-led the creation of the Digital Media Solutions Group and now oversees $370 million of media budget for accounts such as American Honda, Acura, Viking Cruises and La-Z-Boy. Porter is generous with…

Santia Nance has a knack for designing creative media activations that engage multicultural audiences. Her work drives incremental value for brands like the NBA, DoorDash and Verizon’s prepaid brands, including TracFone Wireless Inc. Her media plans led to a 10-point bump in top-of-mind awareness and tune-in intent for NBA games. When the NBA’s 67-game in-season tournament kicked off, Nance planned activations across linear, CTV, social, print, programmatic and sports-endemic sites. She also partnered with People magazine, TMZ and shows like The Voice to reach the NBA’s female audience. For the last decade, Nance has also applied her expertise to criminal justice reform. She co-founded the organizations Sistas in Prison Reform and Brilliance Behind Bars, and she’s also working to end prison profiteering by developing new legislation alongside Virginia lawmakers.…

Stuck at home during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, a whopping 70% of Americans began cooking for themselves—a 50% jump over the prior year. For the sake of those whose culinary acumen didn’t rise above scrambled eggs and turkey sandwiches, New York Times Cooking editor Sam Sifton penned a piece that recommended a new brand of Sichuan chili sauce that, he said, you could confidently spoon over anything—a sauce so complex and robust that “you could spread that concoction on a mitten and be very happy with your meal.” The brand was Fly by Jing, at that time a year-old direct-to-consumer upstart buoyed by $120,000 in Kickstarter capital. But the Times story changed that: Fly by Jing recorded more sales that week than it had in all of 2019. Today,…

No matter where you are in America, it’s not very hard to get your hands on a bagel, especially with national bakery brands like Thomas’, Sara Lee and Pepperidge Farm selling them. Though bagels have historically been a culinary staple of New York, some of their hottest growth markets now include Alabama, Georgia and Texas, per IRI data. But when did these boiled-and-baked dough rings start to play in Peoria? According to ADWEEK—which celebrates its 45th anniversary this year—it was 1984. That’s when Kraft purchased frozen bagel brand Lender’s, and when our columnist George Lazarus identified bagels as a national snack in the offing, even if only 7 out of 10 Americans had ever tried one. “Recent developments,” he wrote, “suggest that bagels are an attractive business for growth potential.”…

Kelechi Nwankwoala is the research lead at NeuroLab, the GroupM agency Mindshare’s consumer neuroscience lab, where he measures consumers’ emotions using methods like electroencephalogram, facial expression analysis and implicit association tests. Nwankwoala led a global research study in collaboration with Snap, which drew insights from a panel of 28,000 adult participants across 14 markets that now impact the way Mindshare’s clients invest across social platforms. As a result, Mindshare’s CPG, travel and financial services clients rely on Nwankwoala’s datasets to hone their media planning, and other GroupM agencies benefit too. “For me, it comes down to empathy,” he told ADWEEK. “All of marketing really is about resonating with a particular person, treating them empathetically, figuring out what moves them [and wondering], ‘How are they going to respond?’” Nwankwoala is ADWEEK’s…

Since her promotion to vice president in 2022, Monica Pugliano has been instrumental in growing Innocean USA’s general accounts media department with her experience in insights-driven media transformation. She has taken several historically traditional media clients including Wienerschnitzel, UC Davis Health, John Hancock and Liberty Mutual into the digital age with a diversified media mix that grew market share and sales for each client. The most notable was the TaylorMade account, for which Pugliano and her team used data about the modern golfer demographic to find white space in the market despite constrained budgets. Pugliano has also been an advocate for empowering women to hold a variety of roles in agency leadership. She restructured her department to support growth, and over the past year, it has seen 12 new business…

At the head of OMG’s cross-cultural media strategy and investment Center of Excellence, Michael Roca challenges how the media industry thinks about investing in diverse-owned media suppliers. He’s helped OMG more than double its investments in diverse-owned media suppliers since 2020. Last year, investments in these properties were up 13% from 2022. He’s shifting away from quotas and toward process to get these results: “Quotas have done nothing to advance the interests of diverse publishers, and in many cases are never fulfilled,” he told ADWEEK. Media agency holding groups usually rely on those quotas to plan and measure their diverse funding investments, but they regularly fall short of their investment goals. Roca’s process makes equitable investments part of media plans from their genesis instead of adding them later. The group…

Crossmedia employees want to work with Erin Gambolati, according to the agency’s head of marketing, Ray Valcich. Gambolati oversees the agency’s Tommy Hilfiger, Lincoln Financial Group (LFG) and Newell Brands accounts and knows how to retain happy employees. Her team’s retention rate of 95% is the agency’s highest. Clients are satisfied, too. Gambolati joined the LFG account in early 2023, and by midyear, client satisfaction scores were up by 30%. She recently reorganized and reenergized Tommy Hilfiger’s agency team and led onboarding for Newell Brands’ more than 40 sub-brands across all paid media channels. Gambolati is a passionate mentor to early-career employees and founded Crossmedia’s in-house training program, XMU. She also helped develop its XM Kickstart training program for remote employees hired during the pandemic. Since 2013, she’s volunteered with…

Pack away the cookie-crumbling metaphors until 2025, as Google has once again delayed the death of the third-party tracking cookie in its Chrome browser. This is the cookie’s third reprieve since Google first promised to phase them out in 2020. The next year, it pushed the date back to 2023, then delayed it again to 2024. Google has now pushed deprecation to early 2025. U.K. regulators have expressed concerns over the ability of Google’s Privacy Sandbox to protect user privacy and ensure its capabilities are not anticompetitive. According to Google, it recognizes that “there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem.”…

Stephanie McCarty has been a chief marketing officer for a little over five years, but the job she has today isn’t the same one she took in 2018. “I feel like I play marketer part of the day, chief financial officer part of the day and chief technology officer part of the day,” said McCarty, CMO of home builder Taylor Morrison. At times, she added, “I have to think like a CEO.” The good relationship she has with the chief executive, McCarty explained, has given her a “granular-level” understanding of the company’s growth objectives and strategic goals—which leads to more informed marketing decisions. “If you can operate through the lens of a CEO first, you’ll never fail as a marketer,” she said. Welcome to the life of today’s CMO. No…

Four years of consolidation completely reshaped Stagwell’s media offering, leaving Assembly the group’s only standalone media agency brand. When Valerie Davis became the shop’s North America chief executive in 2021, Assembly was fresh off a merger with its former sister agency, ForwardPMX. Now that it had a bigger workforce, Assembly had to reshape its culture. That drew Davis to the job. She was a so-called boomerang employee who came back to Stagwell after a stint at IPG Mediabrands. Since then, she’s presided over Assembly’s growth stage and some of its largest account wins, like Carter’s, T. Rowe Price, Vera Bradley and Brooks Running. “We’re born out of a lot of acquisitions, of smaller agencies coming together,” Davis told ADWEEK. “Larger agencies do cool things and they win big brands, but…

Daniel Romano looks at every moment in life as an opportunity to learn. At performance marketing agency Good Moose, he encourages his teams to stay ahead of the technology curve by testing new products and methodologies. Even the way Romano runs his agency is by innovative design. Good Moose clients own 100% of their contract—unlike other agency holding company models—and the agency operates on a month-to-month basis. But it’s Romano’s investment in his people that saw Good Moose achieve 28% growth and onboard clients including payroll platform Velocity Global and viral skin care brand Summer Fridays in 2023. He knows successful agencies showcase unique individuals with diverse ideas, and he walks the walk. In fact, 73% of Good Moose’s employees identify as female, and 57% are non-white. That diverse talent…

Talia Arnold has been instrumental in the rapid rise of Exverus Media. The co-founder and managing director at the Los Angeles-based agency helped take it from a shop of less than five to a 40-person, full-service media agency that balances career with family and promotes diversity in its ranks. Arnold oversaw the development of Exverus’ AI initiative, and her team takes AI-based sales measurements from across all media channels for brands who spend $2 million-$50 million in paid media. She led a democratization of data-driven measurement and also headed up the launch of Exverus’ in-house programmatic trade desk and its retail media division, Retail Media Partners. Arnold’s managerial oversight and client relations on major accounts including Coca-Cola, MasterClass, Premier Protein and New Belgium & Bell’s Brewery led Exverus Media to…

Shruti Tiwari has helped bridge the gap between brand creativity and media presence at Ogilvy. Since taking her position in 2018, Tiwari has grown her department to over 150 specialists across three global centers, thanks to her ability to foster a connected culture—evidenced by a 100% retention rate over the past year. Under Tiwari’s guidance, her team has elevated Ogilvy’s global approach to actionable and addressable advertising solutions. In 2023, she and her team helped a materials company client see a 45% improvement in cost per lead and 70% share of voice, while they boosted a luxury jewelry brand’s digital sales 80%. Tiwari’s prowess in audience-first strategies helped secure the Verizon B2B account, which spotlights the agency’s ability to deliver highly personalized marketing campaigns. She has also significantly expanded Ogilvy’s…