Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2023 i Adweek

Disney acquires Twitter With the platform’s future looking uncertain, some see Disney CEO Bob Iger stepping in. “[Twitter] is going to be a fire sale soon,” said senior marketer Lou Paskalis. Iger almost bought Twitter in 2016 but was put off by “nastiness” on the platform. Safari takes market share Conversations in the Web Developer Forum community strongly suggest that Apple is making a tremendous effort to improve the developer experience for its web browser, Safari. However, there’s a big hurdle: Apple’s ATT Privacy efforts mean Safari users have lower CPM. Regulators come for Google The rising concern over data governance will make way for “an in-depth look at what amount advertisers pay for ads and where that money flows,” said Joshua Lowcock of UM Worldwide. Expect a crackdown on…

Music wasn’t something Steve Keller thought he could make a career out of. The self-proclaimed audio alchemist (official title: sonic strategy director) at SXM Media’s in-house creative agency Studio Resonate built up an encyclopedic knowledge of music as a young man but used it only as “a fairly effective dating tool.” “The plan was to go on to grad school and get a master’s or Ph.D. to work either in clinical or social psychology,” Keller said. After a year of saving up money, in part by playing guitar in coffee shops, Keller chose a new path, moving to Nashville in 1986. He would stay in Music City for 30 years, working with record labels of notable country singers like Tim McGraw, Wynonna Judd and Neil Diamond to make dance remixes…

JANUARY Ad Net Zero launches its U.S.-based chapter with John Osborn at the helm. FEBRUARY After a yearlong delay, the FTC is updating its guidance on environmental claims. It’s accepting public comment, which can be submitted through its website, on proposed changes to the “Green Guides” through Feb. 21. APRIL Adweek’s annual Sustainability Summit will be held virtually on April 20. JUNE Rule changes to the UN-backed Race to Zero campaign take effect, including new requirements on client disclosure and advertised emissions. Award submissions for the Cannes Lions, held from June 19-23, must demonstrate progress on sustainability and include the CO2 emissions related to production, which are new requirements for 2023. SEPTEMBER Climate Week descends upon New York from Sept. 18-24. NOVEMBER The UN’s yearly climate event, COP28, will be…

22.9% Marketers currently report using AI and machine learning for around 8.6% of their work, but that number is expected to climb to 22.9% in the next three years. 1.4 Marketers mostly report using blockchain close to “not at all”—an average of 1.4 on a seven-point scale where seven is “regularly.” That number has remained consistent from February 2020. 10.1% After months of growth during the Covid-19 pandemic, CMOs expect digital marketing budget growth to slow in the next year from a growth rate of around 15% down to 10.1%. PATRICK KULP IS AN ADWEEK SENIOR REPORTER COVERING EMERGING TECH. HE REPORTS ON CREATIVE INNOVATION, AR, VR, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE FUTURE OF 5G. @PATRICKKULP…

As the industry kicks off 2023 under a cloud of economic uncertainty, no one is affected more directly than marketers. They are not only tasked with deciding what and where to spend under decreased budgets—which will impact the rest of the advertising ecosystem—but must also determine how to best guide their brands to grow their respective businesses. To hear directly from those marketing leaders and learn how, where and why they will be making strategy decisions in the new year, Adweek assembled a cross-section of CMOs from big and small companies, upstarts and legacy organizations, and a mix of b-to-b and b-to-c brands for a spirited roundtable to share their insights about everything from tackling productivity amid economic uncertainty to collaborating with C-suite peers to their biggest challenges and opportunities…

At a European conference in 2018, an exec at a leading subscription news publisher candidly shared offstage that the company’s advertisers were feeling snubbed by the publisher’s loud proclamations of being a subscription-first company—because it seemed as if the clients’ wishes were less important than the subscribers’. Fast-forward a few years, and subscriptions have become a more stable revenue line for a sustainable media company. Now, most publishers have some form of membership or reader revenue offer. For publishers to thrive in 2023—a challenging economic period, with ad revenue falling—they need to have reconciled the coexistence of advertising and subscription business lines in order to grow both. “How to balance advertising and subscriptions, how to use the value of a subscriber audience as a lure for advertisers—they’ve got more data…

Adweek: You came to Netflix and quickly launched the streamer’s ad-supported tier. How are you navigating things, and what are your thoughts on the launch? A huge amount of credit goes to the teams at Netflix and Microsoft. It was only six months from our announcement of an ads plan to when the service launched, and the hardworking teams at both companies made it happen. While it is still early days, I am very excited about the launch, both from a product perspective as well as from the eagerness of our advertising partners to participate at the outset. What’s the value of an ad-supported tier, and how does that fit into Netflix’s future? Netflix has always been about consumer choice, and we offer a range of plans so members can pick…

UPS runs a quarterly survey that evaluates brand relevance using three key components: 1 Consideration for the brand. 2 Momentum of the brand. 3 How the brand is performing in ESG (environmental, social and governance). “We think that’s a really important set of measurements for us to say, ‘How are we doing?’” UPS’ Chris Byrne said. “Without that kind of ongoing measurement, you’re not knowing if your activities and your campaigns are successful.” UPS also uses Morning Consult to quickly do custom surveys with high sample sizes because it delivers a “pretty robust set of insights across brands,” Byrne added.…

Innovate or die, the saying goes—and it’s as true in the fortune cookie business as in the tech sector. When the San Francisco Chronicle shot this photo in 1977, the Lotus Bakery on Market Street was at its peak, supplying Chinese restaurants across the city with the requisite crunchy vanilla cookie containing a paper strip that supposedly predicts one’s future. (Never mind that the fortunes are so general as to be pointless.) Lotus had revolutionized the business by introducing automation as early as 1946. But its signature contraption still required workers to grab the hot cookies and drop them by hand into the folding apparatus. By the early 1990s, faster and fully automated machinery had taken over, with the largest operation belonging to Wonton Food of Brooklyn. Today, Lotus’ old…

Four years ago, The Hershey Company, which says it spends between $350 million-$450 million annually on advertising, decided it wanted more from its digital media because the company was tired of ads running too frequently, not showing up in premium environments and—worst of all—ending up adjacent to unsavory, long-tail publishers. The solution was to buy more media through programmatic, direct channels. The Hershey Company is working toward buying 80% of its addressable media via private marketplace deals and only 20% on the open exchange, a goal it plans to hit by the end of 2023 (as of now, more than 70% of deals are via PMPs), said Vinny Rinaldi, head of media and analytics at the company. The chocolate maker isn’t alone in this shift. In 2020, PMP spending overtook…

Bloomberg Media, entering its ninth consecutive quarter of ad revenue growth and nearing half a million subscribers, is one publisher aggressively pushing what it calls its audience-first strategy for 2023. CEO Scott Havens spoke with Adweek about the impact of Bloomberg’s move away from open marketplace programmatic ads, his revenue outlook for 2023 and his clients’ top priorities this year. The below has been edited and condensed for clarity. Adweek: How have clients responded to your announcement to cut open marketplace programmatic ads? The response has been quite positive in supporting our move. Many media companies wish they didn’t have such acute pressure on revenue numbers and could do the same. As we move away from the legacy third-party cookie-based ad ecosystem and put a higher value on first-party data…

Applications are now open for Adweek’s 2023 Media Agency of the Year award, which recognizes excellence across categories including Breakthrough, Global and U.S. Agencies had much to contend with this year. The media landscape became more fragmented, and many media shops expanded their creative work while others launched creative practices. Retail media and connected TV investments also ballooned. In 2023, Adweek will consider media agencies’ account wins and losses since December 2021, account expansions, revenue growth, strategic moves, level of commitment to expanding diversity, equity and inclusion, sustainability and the work itself. To fill out an application by Jan. 17, visit adweek.com.…

As 2023 kicks off, the marketing industry is on the cusp of several major tipping points that will begin to define its role in the climate crisis. Inflationary pressures are squeezing budgets. As a result, some experts report sustainability initiatives are stalled, while other industry leaders urge peers to keep climate top of mind. And as the industry struggles to agree on measurement standards and the scope of marketers’ responsibility when it comes to emissions, regulatory action will start to demand reporting on several climate measures. How the advertising industry responds to climate change this year will determine, to a large extent, whether or not it is actually serious about addressing the climate crisis. The existential question facing not just the marketing ecosystem, but also the broader economy, is if…

Between the speedy rise of TikTok, the expansion of Instagram and the proliferation of rising social media platforms in the wake of Twitter’s continued chaos, it really has never been easier for brands to directly connect with consumers. Creators are a massive reason why this kind of connection is even possible, leading brands directly to today’s most fervent group of shoppers while helping them maintain cultural relevancy. In return, many creators are hoping to drift away from the transactional, one-off paid projects in exchange for more collaborative, lasting partnerships that help them grow their own personal brands. Enter the creator economy, the current era of media where individual creativity is not only a viable source of revenue but also an increasingly necessary bridge between brands and new audiences. As of…

It’s still unclear how the current economic uncertainty will shake out and whether there will be any parallels to the 2008 recession. Leaders are hesitant to draw comparisons to 2008 for a variety of reasons, the largest being the extent the industry has changed since then. But they agreed there are indeed some parallels—namely, a need for marketers to adapt their strategies on the fly and embrace ROI-driven marketing to make every invested dollar count. Holding companies are better prepared to deliver on those needs now than they were 14 years ago, but it remains to be seen how much their ability to target consumers will actually help margins and prevent layoffs. Here’s what chiefs at several top holding companies had to say. (Interviews have been edited for clarity and…

Last October, Marc Pritchard, P&G’s chief brand officer and one of the most influential people in marketing, delivered a message that some marketers have embraced for years. At the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, Pritchard explained two things to the several thousand attendees. First, marketers need to see multicultural marketing as mainstream marketing. No longer should brands silo audiences with messages that don’t align with a brand’s mass marketing communications; instead, multicultural messages should heavily influence a brand’s mass messaging. Second, Pritchard would be investing heavily in Black-owned media to amplify those outlets and better reach the consumers who are driving growth for brands. While brands like P&G lead with this in mind, many don’t. Those who don’t are missing opportunities to reach the next generation of consumers, who grow…

According to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 41% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, losing weight usually tops the list. So it’s little surprise that January and February are heady months for WeightWatchers, also known as WW. “It’s a fresh start to the year. People start to think about their goals in life,” global CMO Amanda Tolleson told Adweek. “Our peak season is definitely post-Christmas through Q1.” But this is also peak season for all competitors of WW. And there are many of them: gyms, home exercise equipment makers, diet shakes, meal delivery services and so on. WW is one star in a constellation of weight loss brands that make up a $3.8 billion industry in this country, according to market research firm IBISWorld. That means…