Month: December 2020

Belinda Smith has joined global media network m/SIX as Americas CEO, a new role at the agency. In this role, Smith will oversee the agency’s operations in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay, reporting to global CEO Jess Burley. Smith is no stranger to m/SIX. Up until recently, she served as head of global…

Facebook recently partnered with three cultural institutions (Le Grand Palais, the Palace of Versailles and The Smithsonian) to bring augmented reality effects to those organizations’ Instagram profiles. These effects allow users to view items from each institution’s collections in AR and, in some cases, to learn about them through on-screen text. This feature will be…

Snap Inc. Monday debuted Bitmoji Paint, a new multiplayer Snap Game that enables millions of Snapchatters to contribute to a single, massive collage. Snapchat users can enter Bitmoji Paint through chat via the rocket icon or via search. They will see a planet with multiple islands floating in space, and each island is a server…

Heineken USA has appointed Sid Lee as its U.S. creative agency of record. The global agency will lead the account out of its Los Angeles and New York offices. “Dos Equis is a truly iconic brand, one that has an incredible advertising heritage built over a number of years and campaigns. As such, we are…

Coming out of what may well be the greatest year of self-reflection for all of society, the ad industry had a huge opportunity to define its sense of purpose and it just blew it.

Google acknowledged Monday that multiple services and websites went down, affecting businesses and advertising. AdSense, Assistant, Docs, Gmail, and YouTube were some of the services hit by the outage
in multiple countries early this morning Pacific time. By 5 a.m. Pacific, the majority of services were back online for users.

Pinterest continued to take steps to repair what CEO Ben Silbermann referred to in June as a “broken” culture, teaming up with the NAACP to form a new Inclusion Advisory Council. The new group will meet regularly with Pinterest leadership–including Silbermann and Tyi McCray, who joined the company in August as global head of inclusion…

Experiential agency Giant Spoon, which laid off 20% of its staff earlier this year as a result of Covid-19’s impact on its business, is heading into 2021 with a new leadership hire. As vice president of strategy, Kenny Mac has been tasked with building a practice within the agency intended to help clients better reach…

“Pivot” has been named the marketing word of the year for 2020, according to an annual poll of the Association of National Advertisers’ members, the trade association disclosed this morning.
Runners-up for 2020’s top marketing industry term included “virtual,” “agility” and “resiliency.” Pivot marks the seventh annual marketing word of the year named by the ANA, which began polling its
members in 2014, the year when “programmatic” was the word-of-the-year, followed by “content marketing” (2015), “transparency” (2016), “artificial intelligence” (2017), “brand purpose” (2018), and
“personalization” (2019).

From a pandemic to murder hornets to UFO sightings, 2020 was essentially a series of moments that made us feel like we were extras in a neverending apocalypse-themed movie. And we’d be remiss to not mention that NASA reported an asteroid was headed toward Earth’s atmosphere on Nov. 2. The asteroid, named 2018 VP1, only…