Month: March 2018

BARCELONA, Spain–It’s been two years since Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrived in Barcelona, Spain at Mobile World Congress to a packed auditorium of technology execs and journalists. At the time, he said 5G wasn’t nearly as important as connecting the rest of the world with the internet. However, fast forward two years to this past…

Twitter is trying to get a better handle on the “overall health of the public conversation,” and the social network is actively seeking suggestions for metrics it should incorporate. Nonprofit research organization Cortico developed four indicators to measure conversational health– shared attention, shared reality, variety of opinion and receptivity–and Twitter is looking to expand on…

While consumers are using smart home speakers to listen to music and answer questions, they’re also increasingly using them to buy things. Voice shopping is already a $2 billion business and on its
way to $40 billion within four years.

McDonald’s branding is so iconic that it communicates just as well in very minimalist form, as the company’s extremely stripped-down advertising in France has long proven. Now, in Canada, the fast-food chain is applying the same approach to out-of-home ads–with surprisingly useful results. A new campaign from Cossette crops the iconically curvy Golden Arches to…

Seacrest is involved in so many projects that it’s possible to envision half of the TV business collapsing like a Jenga tower if he is removed.

Despite a call by the world’s largest marketer to “reunite” media and creative, don’t expect the world’s largest agency holding company to do that, at least not in the traditional way. “I think it is
very difficult to merge back creative agencies with media agencies to that extent,” WPP Chairman-CEO Martin Sorrell said during a quarterly presentation to investors Thursday, “because there will
always be an argument about who’s in control.”

Account-based marketing is gaining popularity with business-to-business companies seeking to streamline their customer-acquisition processes by assertively and surgically pursuing high-value accounts. Rather than the usual practice of “casting a wide net” to gain a small percentage of attracted leads, ABM flips the funnel, calling for laser focus on landing specific accounts that you identify as…

Marketers are moving away from thinking about channels and more about the consumers’ journey and location. While being agnostic about the medium is helpful in planning, the marriage of data and OOH
can be a powerful force – a less intrusive, more targeted way of reaching customers.

Two essential pieces of intelligence about the media economy were unveiled during WPP’s quarterly presentation to investors Thursday. The first one provides some insight about why the ad industry’s
expansion has been lagging the growth of the overall economy, and the second one explains how digital ad spending is accelerating an expansion of the global e-commerce marketplace. With the exception
of 2016, when advertising matched economic growth, the ad industry’s expansion has been lagging the global economy by about one percentage point, according to data presented by GroupM Futures
Director Adam Smith.

Toyota said it would spend nearly $3 billion to build software for autonomous cars, the latest sign that Japan’s biggest car maker is pushing to get the cars into the hands of consumers.