Month: March 2018

Amazon may not want brands to think they have anything to be afraid of, but in 2017, it pulled the trigger.

That year, the company’s private-label business skyrocketed, with Amazon now owning the trademarks for a total of 41 brands across the apparel, shoes, accessories, grocery, household and pharmacy categories, up from 12 in 2016. Amazon doesn’t break out what percentage of its sales come from private-label brands versus wholesale retailers versus vendors, but a report from e-commerce analytics firm One Click Retail estimated in December that Amazon’s private-label brands drove about $470 million in sales last year.

The post Amazon’s invisible brands: How the company is changing the private-label industry appeared first on Digiday.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk took to Twitter to lobby President Donald Trump on China’s trade stance on auto makers, saying the Middle Kingdom’s current rules “make things very difficult.”

Uber is in advanced talks to turn over most of its Southeast Asia operations to local rival Grab, ending a costly fight for market share in the fast-growing region.

Agencies of all sizes made a point of recognizing International Women’s Day today as movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp increasingly move from the entertainment and media worlds to the ad industry. Some agencies, including the New York office of creative shop Stink Studios, encouraged female employees to stay at home to show their male counterparts…

A lawsuit brought by a former executive at Hyundai’s Innocean Worldwide accuses the agency and its chief creative officer of sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination. According to the suit filed on Jan. 11 in the Superior Court of Orange County, Calif., onetime Innocean director of content Victoria Guenier said she suffered repeated harassment…

YouTube announced that the YouTube Studio tool it began testing in beta last June as an alternative to Creator Studio will become the default experience for several creators “over the coming weeks,” and three new metrics will be introduced, along with a new dashboard. Creators will still have the option to go back to the…

Lauren Leff has joined the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) as vice president, marketing & communications, a new role that puts her in charge of the bureau’s internal and external communications. Leff
is a long-time marketing exec with experience in the media industry, including roles at National CineMedia (NCM), MSNBC, CNBC and Showtime Networks. She joins the VAB from senior vice president at
Kite Kill PR, overseeing accounts including Salon Media Group, Branded Entertainment Network (BEN), Trusted Media Brands and cross-device marketing technology company, Tapad.

Unilever, which has taken repeated steps to combat increasing pressure on the consumer-products space, announced in its 2017 annual report last month that it had cut marketing expenses by about 30 percent after taking more of its ad work in-house and reducing the roles of its external agencies. “In marketing, we are creating more of…

As another upfront season begins, most big media companies involved are in the midst of a mega-deal that has either just closed (Discovery-Scripps), is in progress (Disney-Fox and AT&T-Time Warner) or is possibly in the works (CBS-Viacom), while many of the remaining entities could soon be in play as a response to these other mergers….

Luxury retailer Barneys New York seeks to tell a story shoppers will remember in its new VR experience. In partnership with electronics company Samsung and contemporary dance troupe the Martha Graham Dance Company, Barneys released its 11-minute movie, Mantle, which was filmed with 360-degree camera technology. The film incorporates four principal dancers, whom Barneys says…