Innholdsfortegnelse for October 10, 2022 i Adweek

Mick McConnell’s marketing career began with a stack of rejection letters from some of the top architectural firms in New York. The now-North America CEO of agency Superunion had the misfortune of graduating from architecture school into an early 1990s recession and found that few firms were hiring. So he was willing to do the job that was needed. McConnell landed a marketing role at the Kansas City, Mo., office of engineering and architecture giant Ellerbe Becket, which became a blessing in disguise. “I got hooked right away into marketing and pitches and that kind of realm,” he said. The position ended up being the start of a wide-ranging and singular career at the junction of marketing, architecture and design. A subsequent job at another architecture firm led McConnell back…

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. With nearly 50 million Americans changing jobs this year, the Great Resignation is quickly becoming the Great Migration. People aren’t simply starting new roles; they’re choosing new ways of working. For marketers, changing jobs should be like launching an exciting new campaign. Instead, it feels like leaping from a ledge. Half of all new hires will fail, be fired or quit within 18 months. And advertising agencies maintain a 30% turnover rate, the highest out of all industries. So why is it so hard to start a new job? It’s rarely about intelligence. Emotion is the primary source of organizational truth, but also the least understood.…

TO HER OPPONENTS on TikTok (often straight men lambasting women for their looks), her comebacks are cutting and calculating. But to Drew Afualo’s fans, they’re warranted and mostly hilarious. Afualo’s witty responses to displays of fatphobia, transphobia, sexism and racism have gotten the reactionary content creator 7.8 million followers on TikTok. This puts her ahead of public figures like Kim Kardashian, who has 4.7 million, and Afualo’s videos often receive an average of more than 2 million views. “My platform is literally built off of making terrible men uncomfortable,” said Afualo, Adweek’s Digital & Tech Creator of the Year. In February, Afualo launched her own podcast, The Comment Section, through content company Brat TV. The show invites TikTok stars like Jackie Aina and Antoni Bumba to discuss the most noteworthy…

WHEN GRID LAUNCHED in January under the editorial vision of Laura McGann, the publisher sought to solve one of the most fundamental questions of modern journalism—how to best tell a story—by approaching it from a different perspective. For McGann, who had wrestled with complex narratives for years while running newsrooms at Vox and Politico, the most effective reporting often called attention to the structural factors that animate an issue. So, at Grid, where she serves as executive editor, McGann—Adweek’s Media Editor of the Year—has oriented the entire organization around that thesis. While the degree to which Grid has woven these concepts into its fabric is rare, the practices themselves are commonplace in mature newsrooms. In fact, the inspiration for the core tenets of Grid came from moments of heightened collaboration…

TIME HAS A PARTICULARLY fixed canvas for its covers: Its entire message must be outlined by a red border. Despite these parameters, the magazine managed to depict a particularly nuanced rendering of the war in Ukraine where a double cover for its March 17 issue showed both the horror of war and the courage of Ukrainian people. The cover came out days after journalist Brent Renaud, on assignment from Time to cover the refugee crisis, was fatally shot in the fighting, giving the issue particular poignancy. One cover, titled “The Resilience of Ukraine,” features an image of a young girl from the photography street artist JR, superimposed above a drone-taken photograph of hundreds of her fellow Ukrainians in the city of Lviv. The second cover, called “The Agony of Ukraine,”…

The Definitive Guide to Public Relations Coups—if there were such a book—would surely record a groundbreaking event in 1966. That spring, a publicist from Milton Bradley placed a call to NBC and got a new game called Twister onto The Tonight Show. The episode aired the evening of May 3. With Ed McMahon and fashion designer Oleg Cassini looking on, Johnny Carson and Eva Gabor took off their shoes, looked down at a plastic mat of green, yellow, blue and red dots, then followed the instructions. “The referee spins the spinner, then calls out the body part and color. Each player must try to place the called-out body part on a vacant circle of the called-out color.” Within minutes, the dapper host and the Hungarian coquette (in a décolleté, no…

Autumn is in full swing, and while the weather might be crisp outside, we’re turning the temperature up with our annual Hot List issue. Even before I settled into my new role overseeing the magazine, I had been focused on this week’s issue for many months. That’s because the Hot List has long been one of my top projects to work on each year, and I always relish the opportunity to celebrate the year’s standouts in TV, media and digital/tech. Our team—including media editor Lucinda Southern—has assembled another rich list of honorees for 2022, filled with the most talked about brands, people and platforms from the last year. We’ve got everything from innovative stalwarts like The New York Times to disruptive upstarts like BeReal, as well as a couple of…

AS TELEVISION AUDIENCE viewing patterns have been upended during the past few years, Hollywood has adapted some new conventional wisdom when it comes to the state of TV: Linear hits don’t exist anymore, especially on basic cable. Series don’t grow their audiences several seasons in. It’s no longer possible to make shows that appeal to both the heartland and the coasts. And nothing beats the NFL in the ratings. Then again, as Taylor Sheridan noted to Adweek earlier this year, “That’s why I’m not in Hollywood!” His outsider status (he’s lived in Texas for the past decade) emboldened Sheridan, Adweek’s TV Creator of the Year, to co-create Yellowstone—the Paramount Network drama that stars Kevin Costner as John Dutton, the patriarch of a family that controls the country’s largest contiguous ranch—and…

IT’S ONLY OCTOBER, and The Trade Desk has seemingly made news this year on every pressing topic in ad tech. As buyers were puzzling over how to make their supply paths more efficient, demand-side platform The Trade Desk cut out multiple middlemen, announcing in February it was removing Google’s Open Bidding as a source of supply and launching a pathway for advertisers to buy directly from publishers, sans supply-side platforms. Then, when Google announced further delays to the deprecation of third-party cookies until 2024, The Trade Desk made steady headway on ushering its alternative, UID2, inking partnerships with Amazon and Procter & Gamble. And as retail media and CTV became the buzziest part of the media budget, The Trade Desk forged partnerships with Walmart, grocery chain Albertsons, HBO Max and…

IN ITS FIRST YEAR, Group Black—launched in June 2021 with a mission to transform the face of Black-media ownership and investment across three core pillars—has been responsible for facilitating $500 million in ad spend commitments toward Black-owned media, from advertisers like P&G to agencies like GroupM and Dentsu. And given that there’s only around $2 billion of Black-owned media inventory today, it’s easy to understand why that speed is impressive. “It’s a very serious and meaningful amount of progress to be made in a short space of time,” Group Black CEO and co-founder Travis Montaque said, in order to “drive the industry toward making the kind of change we want to see.” Currently, brands invest approximately 0.5% of their budgets in Black-owned media, said Montaque—Adweek’s Media Executive of the Year—with some…

IN A YEAR that began by signaling a coming “vibe shift,” New York Magazine enjoyed another period of growth. Its subscription revenue was up 47% year over year by the end of 2021, and it continued on that trajectory this year as The Cut entered the commerce space, further diversifying revenue. New York Magazine launched at least three new podcast series, spanning a culture series from Vulture, Into It; a new interview show with tech journalist Kara Swisher; and an investigative series about the potential for abuse with psychedelic therapy, Cover Story: Power Trip. It’s added several newsletters to its roster of 26, including daily evening culture newsletter Dinner Party and weekly food newsletter The Year I Ate New York. While media outlets could not ignore the giant stories of the…

IMAGINE YOU HAVE a red Solo cup in hand at a summer barbecue alongside some of your favorite people, enjoying casual conversations about today’s culture and trends. Now imagine that in audio. More Sauce’s three ongoing podcasts from SXM Media subsidiary Stitcher aim to give its audience that feeling. The label’s podcasts talk all things sex, music, politics and religion on shows including Lovers and Friends with author and sexologist Shan Boodram; Reality With the King hosted by reality TV producer Carlos King, who worked on Real Housewives of Atlanta and New Jersey; and Rory and Mal hosted by Rory Farrell and Jamil “Mal” Clay, who signed with SXM months after departing their previous gig at the Joe Budden Podcast late last year. The podcast industry is scarce with diverse…

Type in a prompt like “email,” and several entirely original stock images of computers and messaging will be created instantaneously. A few more clicks and inputs will generate a host of text snippets suggested for ad copy. That’s how a new tool from a startup called Omneky lets brands—usually growth-hungry apps and ecommerce sites—pair artificial intelligence-generated photorealistic images with passable machine-made copy and post the results directly to social and video platforms. The platform, which taps a popular open-source AI art generator called Stable Diffusion, is one of the first to tailor this cutting-edge technology specifically to brands in this way, but it likely won’t be the last. As AI-powered image generation technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past year, its output has transformed from garbled abstractions…

In the space of three days in late 2021, the cannabis industry in the U.S. brought in north of $290 million, setting records for Thanksgiving Eve—better known in weed circles as Green Wednesday—Black Friday and the Thursday before Christmas, per researcher Akerna. Last year was not an anomaly. Fourth quarter has traditionally been a boon to the legal cannabis market, mirroring mainstream American retail and boosting the bottom line of a yearslong national rush. With history as a guide, it would seem that there’s every reason to be optimistic about the upcoming season. But there’s also cause for concern, with legacy states struggling, inflation raging, wholesale prices dropping and federal legalization lagging. Add to that heap of systemic problems a dearth of venture capital, a glut of flower, sky-high taxes and…

THOUGH SUMMER is typically for socializing and taking scenic vacations, creator, writer and star Quinta Brunson spent the months in preproduction for the highly anticipated second season of her ABC runaway hit, workplace comedy Abbott Elementary. Things are much different for the in-demand showrunner this time around. Between her ensemble’s collective popularity and an expanded order of 22 episodes (compared to 13 in Season 1), neither the show nor the celebrated mind behind it has anything left to prove. Good thing, since she and her writers are taking the opportunity to play with pacing and format following the show’s breakout success earlier this year. “There are episodes this season that could exist at any point in time or just for fun,” she told Adweek. “The goal for Season 2 was…

WHILE GAME OF THRONES fans are still (impatiently) waiting for George R. R. Martin to finish writing the fantasy novel series the show was based on, A Song of Ice and Fire, gamers are ecstatic the author took the time to work with FromSoftware president and CEO Hidetaka Miyazaki on action roleplaying game Elden Ring. “Ye dead who yet live, your grace long lost, follow the path to the Lands Between beyond the foggy sea to stand before the Elden Ring. And become the Elden Lord.” That challenge did not go unheeded. Marketed by Bandai Namco Entertainment, Elden Ring was released Feb. 25 and surged from more than 12 million units sold worldwide as of March to 16.6 million currently. Simultaneously releasing it in 14 languages helped move the needle. “It’s…

GRIST MADE WAVES last month by promoting editor in chief Nikhil Swaminathan to CEO, but it has been making waves for more than 20 years in its quest to help reshape the climate narrative from doom and gloom to equity and justice. Its recent package on infectious diseases, which garnered almost 176,000 readers, described the concerns of experts that rising temperatures are creating the ideal conditions for new diseases to emerge, spread and impact human health. The nonprofit publisher said it currently reached almost 1 million readers last month on its site, growing from 632,000 last January. Grist introduced an environmentally-focused indigenous affairs desk, and in August, it took home the National Edward R. Murrow Award for overall excellence for a small digital news organization. Grist currently tallies 56 employees…

PANDEMIC FATIGUE may have set in among many Americans, but publisher Stat has already proven itself indispensable in covering the world of health care, especially to its audience of industry professionals. The Boston Globe Media-owned outlet is on track to hit nearly $20 million in revenue this year after generating $10 million in 2020, according to the publisher. Stat is using those gains to expand its reporting staff from nearly 50 to 90 by the end of this year and to introduce a slew of new offerings, including more than 130 new products it’s already launched, events and initiatives such as its civic collaboration event series Stat Open Doors and new awards recognizing scientific discoveries and young professionals in the field. That progress will help Stat keep its revenue sources…

HOTTEST IN TRAVEL LONELY PLANET (RED VENTURES) HOTTEST IN TECH THE MARKUP HOTTEST IN NEWS THE WASHINGTON POST HOTTEST IN FOOD NYT COOKING (THE NEW YORK TIMES) HOTTEST NEW LAUNCH PUCK HOTTEST IN BUSINESS NEWS THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (NEWS CORP.) HOTTEST IN FASHION VOGUE (CONDÉ NAST) HOTTEST IN HOME AND LIFESTYLE ELLE DECOR (HEARST) HOTTEST IN LOCAL NEWS AXIOS LOCAL HOTTEST MEDIA MERGER THE NEW YORK TIMES X THE ATHLETIC HOTTEST IN EVENTS THE ATLANTIC HOTTEST IN CELEBRITY/ENTERTAINMENT VANITY FAIR (CONDÉ NAST) HOTTEST IN ECOMMERCE GOOD HOUSEKEEPING (HEARST) HOTTEST IN SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES THE NEW YORK TIMES…

Amid all the prognosticating about artificial intelligence, there’s an anxious quip that AI will eventually put us media types (publicists and reporters especially) out of a job. These worries aren’t unfounded. In the early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution cost countless farmhands their livelihoods. Automation in the mid-1900s made telephone switchboard and elevator operators obsolete. Then, in 1953, came Garco—the world’s first robot PR guy. In this promo shot for the sci-fi flick Gog, actor Sally Mansfield looks on as Garco “bats out a hot press release.” Chess and lively conversation were among the automaton’s other reported skills. Too bad it was all baloney. A tinkerer named Harvey Chapman had built Garco out of old airplane parts, using a radio transmitter and an electromechanical control arm to give his invention “personality.”…