Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i Adweek

INTRODUCING: THE DISRUPTOR AWARDS When marketing and tech executives break loose from conventional industry norms, magic happens. Our first-ever Disruptor Awards will honor 50 pioneers crafting new ways of working and moving the industry into the future. This award honors those who prove that disruption means growth, progress, and a relentless drive to create a better, more inclusive advertising ecosystem. Entries are free, and must be in by Aug. 22. EXPERIENTIAL AWARDS OPEN FOR ENTRIES As AI continues to creep further into digital advertising, we’ve seen more interest—and budget—move toward experiential events. Now in its seventh year, ADWEEK’s 2025 Experiential Awards will highlight the activations that dazzle with interactive elements, deliver aweinspiring experiences, and find creative ways to educate consumers. Enter by Aug. 26. FOR MORE DETAILS, VISIT ADWEEK.COM.…

LINDA YACCARINO’S SUDDEN exit as CEO of X in July has left advertisers cautious amid persistent brand safety concerns and lingering doubts about the platform’s future as a dependable advertising venue. A media buyer at a digital agency, who wasn’t authorized to speak to media, said only one of their clients has consistently advertised on X, primarily to reach politically active audiences. “It didn’t seem like [Yaccarino] was actually doing the job she had hoped to: make [brands] feel more comfortable with X,” the buyer said. Following her departure, the agency has advised clients to pull back spending—especially those relying on leftover budgets, called slush funds, to test the platform. Amber Tinker, paid social and influencer director at PMG, said X’s sales team under Yaccarino was responsive and offered significant…

GOOGLE APPEARED TO be caught flat-footed when OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the market in 2022, sparking a seismic shift in how people search online. Since then, the tech titan has been working to reassert its position as the web’s de-facto king of search. In a Q2 call with investors on July 23, after announcing 12% year-over-year search revenue growth to $54.2 billion, CEO Sundar Pichai struck a confident tone. “We see AI powering an expansion in how people are searching for and accessing information, unlocking completely new kinds of questions you can ask Google,” he said. Today, Google Search still soars over its rivals, controlling almost 90% of the search market, according to Semrush’s research firm Datos. And shiny new AI-powered features built into Google Search over the last two…

Ads in AI Overviews: • Appear above, below, or within AI Overviews • Include text-based ads or product listing ads • Show up occasionally on mobile, and, as of May, also on desktop • Draw on existing Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns • Served contextually based on the user’s query and the content of the Overview, can’t be manually curated by advertisers • Available in English in the U.S. market; additional English-speaking markets coming soon Ads in AI Mode: • Appear as sponsored content below AIgenerated responses to user queries or sprinkled between user questions and followups, similar to Perplexity • Google is gathering advertiser and user feedback before scaling this experience…

AS VICE PRESIDENT of marketing and strategy for SeaPak, Megan Grinstead has sat through her share of meetings about frozen seafood and how to advertise it. But she’ll never forget the moment South Carolina-based ad agency EP+Co introduced a family of anthropomorphic otters extolling the virtues of frozen shrimp. “They put the Otterfords up on the screen and we immediately fell in love,” she recalled. It might not have been apparent at the time, but SeaPak wasn’t just greenlighting three critters who would become the face of the brand—it was making history, too. With a handful of exceptions like Flo from Progressive (created in 2008) and Martin the Geico gecko (1999), the majority of brand mascots are graybeards. Admen drew up Chester Cheetah for Cheetos, Tony the Tiger for Kellogg’s,…

WITH HIS VILLA on the island of Mauritius, a collection of more than 200 classic cars, and a penchant for skewering companies that fail to deliver the results he expects, British investor Terry Smith is no stranger to making the news. But earlier this year, Smith—often called “the British Warren Buffett”—turned more heads than usual when he announced that his company Fundsmith was dumping all its stock in Diageo, maker of Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker. “We suspect the entire drinks sector is in the early stages of being impacted negatively by weight-loss drugs,” he told investors. The billionaire stock picker was talking about medications like Ozempic and Wegovy, glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, GLP-1s for short. Initially developed to treat type 2 diabetes, the drugs have more recently demonstrated a capacity…

THE AUTHORIZED HACK Best Use of Native Advertising TELEFÓNICA || HAVAS MEDIA NETWORK MADRID Few companies make it to their 100th anniversary, so to honor Spanish telecom Telefónica, longtime partner Havas Media Network Madrid looked beyond cellphone airwaves to create a unifying brand moment. Havas rallied six of its top clients in Spain with close ties to Telefónica—Hyundai, Iberia, Fundación La Caixa, Alain Afflelou, El Pozo, and Línea Directa—to buy airtime across five major TV networks and transformed their commercials into synchronized, personalized tributes. The two-minute-long moment unfolded as seemingly ordinary ads that glitched out, with a unified voiceover gradually revealing the message. The ads aired in their own commercial blocks across Antena 3, Telecinco, DKiss, DMax, and Paramount Network minutes before midnight on April 19, the day of Telefónica’s…