Month: February 2025

The digital transformation agency Code and Theory has appointed Jessica Giles, the former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, as managing director of its newly created Media Experience Practice. Giles, who was named ADWEEK’s Editor of the Year in 2019, will oversee a team of roughly 50 to help media brands navigate evolving consumer behaviors, advancements in artificial…

Inspired Thinking Group (ITG), which offers an AI-powered content generation platform for brands, has expanded to the U.S. with the acquisition of PureRed. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. U.K.-based ITG works with clients like Samsung, Heineken, KFC, Jaguar Land Rover, and Comcast in Europe to provide what it calls “halo content”-which is proliferated…

Can stuffed animals, rose petals, and injections of an Elon Musk–approved dissociative drug help Silicon Valley leaders out of a rut? These women say yes.

Most of us grew up hearing fairy tales at bedtime and watching cartoons on TV. Jack Waley-Cohen’s childhood looked a little different. “My mum was obsessed with quizzes, and she would often not read our stories and would just ask us quiz questions and trivia questions,” recalled Whaley-Cohen, the co-founder and COO of location marketing…

There’s always a period of transition after an election, but the administration of President Donald Trump has swiftly upended most every part of the federal government. This has left agencies and brands scrambling on issues ranging from tariffs to DEI. In the February issue of ADWEEK magazine, we took a look at the new order…

Remember when a polished corporate message was all you needed to win over your audience? Those days are gone. People are skeptical of brand-speak and polished marketing campaigns, preferring real, authentic voices. The new secret to meeting your customers where they are is your employees’ personal brands. While some organizations still resist personal branding, fearing…

Did bureaucrats in the US plot to cut the crypto industry out of the banking system? An investigation begins.

The backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion seems to have reached a fever pitch after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 22 taking aim at DE&I programs on a federal level. It’s the latest indication that “DE&I” is now seen as the word “woke,” a politicized phrase that has marketers hesitant to even acknowledge “diversity,” in everything from corporate titles and hiring practices marketing messages and social impact commitments, according to three marketing execs Digiday spoke with for this story.

The word and therein values associated with diversity seem to be a point of contention and are being stripped from the concept of equity and inclusion, forgoing the goal to better represent historically marginalized communities and leaving a “watered down and blended” version of DE&I, Liv Lewis, an executive marketing communications consultant, told Digiday.

The executive order felt like a long time coming under Trump’s second term with pressure mounting from conservative activists and right-wing voices, pushing companies like Target, Walmart, Ford Motors, John Deere, Molson Coors (and the list goes on) to back away or retool their DE&I commitments. Notably, many of these commitments were created in response to the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd.

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A fraudulent AI-powered ad using actor Tom Hanks’ likeness reported in August is still being shown on YouTube, bringing into question the company’s ability to successfully bar misinformation and
deepfakes from the platform.