Adweek March 2024

Out of a global workforce of 3.38 billion people, almost half (1.57 billion) are freelance, according to the World Bank. Those part-timers now include senior marketers. Being a fractional CMO is attractive to very experienced marketers, who can decide how and when they work, which better aligns with their personal and career interests. “There’s value in honing your skills as a CPG marketer, but also in applying a fresh perspective to an entirely different category. A fractional CMO role can allow you to do exactly that: take on a new challenge in some of your time and have a big impact on an organization without it becoming your only focus,” explained marketing guru Jerry Daykin. Meanwhile, startups that were previously unable to afford a highly experienced marketer are finding they…

Wendy’s recently announced it is rolling out digital menu boards and dynamic pricing to offer discounts during off-peak hours. What social media heard, however, is that prices would be higher during rush times, and people reacted accordingly. The idea of different prices at different times is not new—hotels, airlines, movie theaters and ride shares have been doing it for a while—but years of record inflation, which has been felt especially keenly in food prices, means QSRs have to implement this tactic more mindfully.…

Each year, ADWEEK’s Creative 100 honors the industry’s most innovative professionals—visionary talent who over the past year have broken ground across advertising, marketing, social media, TV and streaming, filmmaking, visual art and more. Anyone who wishes to nominate a potential honoree can do so, with the final list curated by our editors. But be sure to check that your nominee wasn’t previously recognized because the Creative 100 doesn’t repeat names. This year’s categories: Agency Creative Leaders Rising Agency Creative Talent Brand Innovators Media, TV, Streaming Innovators Directors Influencers and Celebrities Visual Artists The deadline for submissions is April 9. Winners will be recognized in ADWEEK’s June issue. For details, visit adweek.com.…

Thanks to his background in theoretical physics, Jonathan Roberts may be one of the few people alive who can credibly claim to understand ad tech. Before joining About.com in 2013, the University of Oxford academic spent more than a decade as a researcher, making dark matter predictions for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and cosmic ray predictions for the AMS particle physics detector on the International Space Station. He now serves as the chief innovation officer for Dotdash Meredith, overseeing research, data science and open-market revenue operations. Over the past year, he has played an instrumental role in spearheading the development of D/Cipher, the sophisticated contextual advertising product that helped the behemoth media company grow its digital ad revenue nearly 10% last quarter. Roberts has taken an unorthodox route…

Sarah Freund is very much in the prime of her career as director of media at Brill Media. But she’s already living the life of a snowbird: summers in her native northern Michigan close to family, and the rest of the year in Hawaii, where she’s taken up the practice of hula dancing. “My parents actually originally met in Oahu, but they didn’t take me here as a child,” Freund said. She came to the islands for the first time after college to do a work-exchange program on an organic farm and “just fell in love with it.” Shortly after getting married, she and her husband bought property there in 2017. Enchanted by the beauty and power of hula, Freund began taking lessons in 2020 with a friend who was…

Many of Americans’ favorite brands—think Oreo, Dove, Tide and Snickers, for example—rely on the availability of cheap, disposable packaging made mostly of plastics. Experts say shifting away from single-use plastic packaging is necessary, but it’ll require systemic, expensive changes to how Americans get their snacks—and most of their groceries, personal care products and cleaning supplies. To spur this, activists and environmental groups are pushing legislation that would require brands to pay for the trash they generate through single-use packaging. The goal of the legislation is to encourage less packaging over time and incentivize a shift to refill and reuse. Major brands and plastic producers say they’re supportive of this legislation on the condition that “advanced recycling,” which they say would create a circular system for plastics, be defined as a…