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“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Andreas Goeldi, chief technology officer at Pixability. The digital advertising industry needs to move away from the incendiary headlines toward a more nuanced perspective of brand safety. Marketers should not view the issue as… Continue reading »

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A year ago, a team of creatives came to a head of talent at a major agency saying that they felt like their boss, a creative, was creating a hostile work environment. Pressed for details, this group said that they felt there was “excessive” feedback that went beyond criticism, which they dubbed as “bullying.” The head of talent decided to make some adjustments and move the team to a different account.

A few months later, a handful of the same people came back, claiming similar issues with their new boss.

“I didn’t know what to do,” said this head of talent. “In a way, I felt like I was now unable to do my job. But I had to take it seriously. Because we have to take all of this very seriously now.”

As harassment takes center stage in the national conversation, there is another part of modern work that seems to be gaining more attention: workplace bullying.

Last week, the agency trade group 4A’s launched an “enlightened workplace” certification program. Driven mostly by the current conversation around sexual harassment, the program also aims to support agencies to eliminate, among other things, bullying and intimidation in the workplace. The program will provide self-evaluation tools and training for execs and HR leaders on covering difficult conversations and issues with power, status, gender and race relations.

Over in the U.K., NABS, an employee support organization for advertising and media has an “advice” line that, according to internal figures, has seen a 25 percent uptick in people calling about work bullying.

“I firmly believe there are two camps of creatives,” said the head of talent. “There are ones who love and appreciate feedback and there are others who can’t stand that anything they’re doing is being judged. In this case, I think it was mostly the latter. If someone is calling you an ‘idiot,’ of course it’s bullying. But otherwise, we are getting to the point where we’re just teaching people to be victims.”

It’s tough to make the distinction between bullying and harassment. For many, they’re part of the same bucket. But bullying can be tougher to identify, and also harder to solve for. Harassment is targeted, based on attributes like sexual orientation, gender or race. But bullying isn’t. Secondly, harassment is illegal, which means in many cases those being harassed have the option to go to an external agency — governmental, for example. Bullying is a little more of a gray area, and victims often find HR is the only place to turn. And there seem to be certain things unique and peculiar to agencies that make bullying more commonplace.

Bullying can include excessive name-calling, humiliation beyond feedback when it comes to giving critiques of work or even, in some cases, swearing or using foul language. It can also mean gossip, creating feelings of isolation by banding together against someone else, insults or arbitrary criticism. There are also non-verbal cues like the silent treatment. It can also include stealing credit or plagiarism, something that is common in creative industries, especially at agencies. Unlike in harassment cases, bullies don’t have to be in a position of power.

One agency employee who asked not to be named said that bullying in creatively driven industries often manifests itself through ego. Ego is a critical part of the industry. In an industry fueled by awards, those awards provide very important — and critical — validation that your work is good and is matters. For this employee, she’s often found that she’s talked over or not taken seriously, by both men and women. To her, that comes close to bullying, especially when it’s done simply to make the bully feel more important.

It’s hard to measure creativity, especially in advertising, so the number of awards you get is important. And usually, said this agency employee, those with the most awards tend to be the biggest bullies.

That means there is a lot of internal competition within agencies. “You’re trying to make sure your ideas win and that you’re attached to a winning piece of business,” she said. “So people can get aggressive, especially those at big agencies with those big personalities.”

“The approach we have taken is not a quick solve but one to address the underlying issues that enable these behaviors,” said Keesha Jean-Baptiste, 4A’s svp of talent engagement and inclusion, in a statement. (The 4A’s couldn’t make an executive available for comment on bullying specifically.) While the spotlight has been on sexual harassment, we know racism, ageism, ableism and homophobia are just as pervasive. We need work cultures where everyone is socially conscious, culturally competent and empathetic to one another’s experiences.”

Gerry Graf, chief creative officer and founder at Barton F. Graf, said that rejection is the most common thread in the industry — and especially among creatives. “Ninety percent of a creative’s life is rejection,” he said. Graf said that between having ideas killed by creative partners, creative directors, group creative directors and, eventually, clients, rejection is a common and necessary part of the business.

The issue is to identify bullying — one person’s bullying is often just another person’s candid feedback. “There are instances where someone might feel like their higher-ups don’t like their ideas or think they’re not good and feeling like they’re being bullied if their ideas are being killed,” said one agency employee, who said she often has people mimicking her accent.

Writing in Campaign, Quiet Storm founder Trevor Robinson said that agencies in a way particularly have created structures where “backstabbing” is rewarded, and there is an undercurrent that actually rewards bullying.

Bullying can more readily happen in high-pressure environments — and agencies are one of those. “I often feel I’m only as good as my last piece of work or campaign,” said one junior creative. That means, said this person, that he has to do what he can to advance. For him, that often results in his feeling that he’s being bullied when he’s being rejected.

Another agency employee said bullying is a generational issue. “There’s some degree of, ‘well I put up with it when I was younger’ kind of stuff that I’ve personally had people say to me in my career,” said this person. “Like, it sucked then and it sucks now. And I’m like, ‘well, maybe it doesn’t have to suck.’”

“At the end of the day, programs and announcements and initiatives are great, but it comes down from the top about what is enforced and what is not,” said an executive who is signed on to the 4A’s training program. “Often there is no real action or real consequences to bad behavior. You’re usually just marked as a difficult person.”

Digiday spoke to 10 agency millennials for this story to ask if they’d ever felt bullied at work. All of them requested anonymity. Two female millennials said they felt bullied by other women in a high school, “clique-ish” way. “It’s one thing to give feedback in a blunt way,” said another. “It’s another to get it in an open office environment in front of your colleagues.” One person said that when he went to HR, he was told to talk to the person bullying him directly, which made the situation worse.

“Bullying is definitely present, and it’s in a very high school-like way.” he said. “The schoolyard has been replaced by the office.”

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At the Digiday Hot Topic UK: Future of TV event last week in New York City, we sat down with over 60 media, television, and advertising executives from major companies to better understand the over-the-top TV landscape. Check out our earlier research on Facebook Watch’s potential to overcome YouTube here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick Takeaways:

• HBO leads all TV networks in OTT according to 52 percent of respondents
• YouTube TV edges out Hulu TV as the online TV service with the most promise

As Over-the-top, or OTT, viewing has become mainstream with major players Netflix and Amazon acquiring millions of subscribers, the race is on for TV networks to establish their own OTT products before it’s too late. According to respondents of a Digiday survey, over half of all respondents believe that HBO Now is the TV network performing best in the OTT space.

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Just a month after Facebook said it’d show less news in its news feed, news publishers are already feeling the brunt, multiple data sources show.

Chartbeat data showed Facebook traffic to publishers declined 6 percent since the beginning of January, said Josh Schwartz, chief of product, engineering and data at Chartbeat. Facebook had already been sending less traffic to publishers, with referrals down 15 percent in 2017, according to Chartbeat, which measures traffic to around 50,000 publishers globally, with a skew towards news publishers. (All told, Facebook now makes up about 30 percent of Chartbeat publishers’ referral traffic to Google’s 40 percent.)

The declines are not a surprise. Facebook has said as much, warning that news as a percentage of news feed content will go from 5 percent to 4 percent. That would imply publishers can broadly expect a 20 percent drop.

Women’s lifestyle publisher PopSugar has an in-house tool called TrendRank that monitors social activity across 700 publishers in 17 categories. Overall, Facebook traffic to publishers has been flat, but traffic in the news category, which includes major news publishers The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and BuzzFeed, was down 14 percent after a sharper drop in the months prior, according to the tool, said Chris George, evp of product marketing and sales strategy at PopSugar.

Other categories that saw declines were tech and fitness, which could be seasonal (interest in them tends to spike during CES and New Year’s resolution season and then decline). But the news decline seems to fulfill Facebook’s pledge to deprioritize content that doesn’t share well.

A third source, True Anthem, a social media analytics company that serves several hundred publishers, mostly U.S., looked at its client base over the past 90 days and found that overall reach has increased since Facebook’s January announcement. But all categories aren’t performing equally. Digital-only publishers, a category that includes BuzzFeed and Upworthy, were down 11.3 percent while local news grew 25.8 percent and magazines grew 3.6 percent, said Chris Hart, CEO of True Anthem.

Facebook hasn’t responded to a request for comment; we’ll update this story when they do.

A breakdown of True Anthem’s numbers shows that the main driver of overall reach is an increase in viral reach — reflecting posts that have been commented on or shared. That suggests two things: Facebook is favoring posts that get a lot of interaction and publishers have responded in kind, posting stories that they know will get a lot of shares and comments, Hart said.

Engagement is playing an increasingly important role in driving organic reach, agreed Jennifer Lindenauer, chief marketing officer at Upworthy, which she said had its highest average page views per post per month in January than it’s seen in a long time.

“We’re seeing a lot of our values-aligned content rise to the top — stories that reflect where our audience stands on an important, topical issue, but can also spark interesting conversations and dialogue in the comments,” she said. At the end of the day, though, publishers get paid on traffic, not engagement.

Some news publishers said they took the brunt of the decline in Facebook traffic last year and that recent trends may be flat or down but aren’t alarming. But they’re still holding their breath. One major publisher described the past few weeks of Facebook referral levels as “business as usual. There hasn’t been a major impact on us to date. But we are watching closely.”

Another, Nick Ascheim, svp of digital for NBC News and MSNBC, said that last year, the publisher saw quarter-on-quarter declines in Facebook traffic of 20-25 percent, during which the publisher also was posting less to Facebook. (That’s across NBC News, MSNBC and Today.) So far this year, he said, the decline is closer to 10 percent.

Ascheim said the silver lining is that traffic from other sources like Google and Apple News is on the rise and the number of loyal visitors are up, whereas Facebook traffic tended to be one-and-done. “But it’s hard to know if it’s anything,” he said of the easing in Facebook traffic declines, “because they say they’re not finished rolling out the changes.”

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News UK has come up with a novel way to compete with Facebook: Encourage advertisers to run Facebook ads on News properties like The Sun and The Times.

It’s doing this through a tool that lets advertisers upload the creative assets they would typically post to social platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Once uploaded into the tool’s dashboard, an exact replica of the creative will automatically resize to fit the dimensions of the top ad slot on the Times’ mobile site and The Sun’s desktop and mobile sites. The height of the post will vary depending on the type of social post: whether it is video, photo or text tweet.

Two advertisers have started using the tool: a fashion retailer and a broadcaster client, though News UK wouldn’t name them. Up to 80 million impressions are available for advertisers across the new main news brand’s digital properties, along with the Dream Team fantasy football brand and its TalkSport properties, according to the publisher. People can follow or like the posts as they show on the sites.

Brands using the tool can also choose to have their creative assets for social repurposed as endorsed posts on News UK’s Twitter and Instagram feeds for additional reach. That won’t extend to Facebook due to the platform’s recent changes to its branded-content guidelines.

“With all the concerns around brand safety, the hoaxes and fake news that brands expose themselves to when they pick a user-generated content platform, this can be a solution to that where they can amplify and endorse their posts in brand-safe environments,”said Rebecca Reeve-Kendall, social partnerships lead at News UK.

Brands can also push campaigns live within 24 hours by using the tool, instead of facing the lengthy signoffs usually involved when multiple agency partners must approve social campaign assets, according to Reeve-Kendall. For now, News UK will offer Social Amp as a managed service, but in time, it will consider providing it as a self-serve option for advertisers.

Advertisers have been more sharply focused on brand safety after the YouTube boycott last year brought the issue back into the mainstream spotlight. That concern, plus the market frustration at Facebook’s ever-changing algorithm, which has seen both publishers’ and advertisers’ reach drop, was inspiration for introducing the tool, which is powered by tech solutions provider Polar, according to Ben Walmsley, News UK’s digital commercial director.

“The timing of this is very important,” said Walmsley. “We’re at this juncture with Facebook where brands and publishers have built up large audiences, which are suddenly getting harder to reach because Facebook is aggressively turning the dial against them. That’s [the constant algorithm changes] not sitting well with clients or publishers, and we want to offer an alternative, differentiated channel,” Walmsley said.

The latest Facebook algorithm change, which deprioritzes publishers’ and brands’ posts in favor of those from family and friends, has caused anguish among publishers that rely on Facebook for referral traffic. Advertisers have become accustomed to seeing their organic reach fall on Facebook due to algorithm changes, since as early as 2012, according to agencies. As a result, they’ve been working on ways to diversify their strategies for a while.

Aydin Moghaddam, head of paid search at performance agency Roast, said the agency won’t likely steer away major paid-social budgets in the short term because most brands haven’t seen a significant drop in organic reach or jump in paid-social costs since Facebook announced its latest news-feed changes in January. However, that could change. “For the long term, this is a smart play by News UK,” he said.

Agencies have welcomed News UK’s efforts to provide an offer that enables them to reuse existing creative assets rather than having to create new ones. Given the uncertainty around the constant algorithm changes, having more alternatives in the market is a benefit, according to Paul Greenwood, head of research and innovation at digital agency We Are Social. But for some, the granularity of targeting on Facebook to such a wide audience makes paying for social ads on Facebook a no-brainer.

“We’ll always advise [clients] to use a range of distribution options that will involve publishers, and I like that News UK is doing something different. But if they [News UK] could expand this out across multiple publishers, it would be much more powerful in terms of pulling social budgets,” said Greenwood.

The post News UK to advertisers: Run your Facebook ads on our sites appeared first on Digiday.

As newspaper publishers increase their focus on consumer revenue, many have ditched or downplayed pageviews in favor of metrics that lead more to loyalty and converting their readers into subscribers.

At Hearst Newspapers’ two largest ad-supported sites, SF Gate and Chron.com, the focus has shifted from unique visitors to growing the share of readers that visit at least 10 times per month. As of last summer, The Boston Globe now pays more attention to what kinds of stories convert subscribers and what that subscriber base reads, rather than focusing solely on top-line audience size.

“There’s been a movement away from pageviews as a key performance indicator,” said Devin Smith, a senior manager of audience development at The Boston Globe. “They’re often viewed as a vanity metric.”

For most of digital’s history, publishers have focused on growing scale to support advertising, even if that led to chasing or aggregating stories about things that happened far outside their core areas. But with digital display advertising in a systemic decline and publishers losing out on new digital ad dollars to Google and Facebook, publishers have focused on growing subscribers and looking at the metrics that lead people to convert. The Dallas Morning News, for example, now focuses more on returning visitors and the amount of time its readers spend on site. (The Morning News stopped tracking pageview growth as a key priority after it put up its metered paywall in the spring of 2016.)

“Publishers are now looking at their content with a much more intentional focus,” said Melissa Chowning, founder of audience development consulting firm Twenty-First Digital. “They’re more emulating what content marketers have done for years.”

The implications of changing metrics ripples out to editorial strategy. Publishers including The Seattle Times are identifying which stories lead to the most new subscriber conversions, then adjusting editorial strategies accordingly.

At the Seattle Times, the pageview retains some importance for the ad side, but the newsroom is more focused on tying the activity to the outcome, said Sharon Chan, vp of innovation, product and development at the Seattle Times. Local politics and sports have driven the strong conversions in the past, so in spring 2017, editors worked with consumer marketing and ran tests – putting more content on the homepage, upping the frequency of their posts, adding or subtracting video – to figure out which increased subscriber conversion rates.

The Times recently updated an internal dashboard that shows which articles lead to the most digital subscription conversions. Now, the entire newsroom can access its contents, and the paper’s editors are encouraged to take responsibility for driving conversions with their coverage. The dashboard is the Times’s latest step in a major push to grow digital subscriptions, which increased 55 percent in 2017 to over 33,000.

Last summer, the Hearst-owned SF Gate, an ad-supported complement to the San Francisco Chronicle’s paywalled site, began focusing less on pageviews than on growing the share of readers that visited the site 10 times per month because those people are 25 times more likely to become a subscriber than someone who doesn’t, Hearst Newspapers’ president of digital Rob Barrett said. Growing loyal readership also drove more pageviews overall.

“If you do the math, increasing the number of those visitors will also drive you to higher pageview growth than if you just go for one-and-dones,” Barrett said. “We think that’s a future-proof way to drive pageview growth and at the same time it feeds our pool of potential subscribers.”

Twenty-First Digital founder Chowning said prioritizing loyalty has moved local publishers away from national news content that’s likely to get a lot of reach on Facebook and more toward content that clearly articulates the publisher’s value. The Seattle Times, for example, has concluded that it takes 25 times more visits from Facebook to convert a reader than it does to convert a reader visiting their site via its newsletters. “We’re not going to get away from Facebook,” Chan said. “But we want to do things smartly.”

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Twitch is flying under the radar in the U.K. as it prepares to push its ad business into Europe.

Despite the brand’s European headquarters in London being more than four years old, little is known about the team behind the site people go to to watch other people play games live. VP Steve Ford is the face of Twitch’s commercial operation in Europe, overseeing a sales team that doubled in size last year and “nearly doubled” revenue in the same period versus 2016. Like its commercial operation, Twitch keeps its commercial figures under wraps. But there are signs to suggest it is starting to gain traction on media plans outside of the U.S.

Searches are currently underway for commercial executives to join the team in London, including a director for a team that will broker deals with high-profile creators and creator networks across EMEA. Furthermore, it is building a sales team for its office in Hamburg, Germany, ahead of an office in Helsinki, Finland, later in the year. The Nordic region, according to Ford, represents “tremendous scale” for the business as a collective market rather than as individual countries.

Plans are also advancing to grow the headcount at the company’s content studio over the coming months following work with non-gaming brands like Kellogg’s. While non-gaming brands have been the bulk of Twitch’s ad revenue in the U.K. for some time, it is still seen as a platform with a niche audience by many. And yet, Macquarie Capital analyst Ben Schachter said 962,000 was the average viewership on Twitch last month, putting it on a par with the likes of MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and ESPN, per Business Insider.

Twitch’s perception problem — at least in Europe — stems from limited coverage of sectors outside those directly linked to gaming such as food and film. It is, however, trying to broaden its content range to include fitness, creative, music and others. Agencies anticipate more budget moving over as those content streams solidify and its sales team become more accessible.

The Twitch team is “very proactive” these days, said James Thomas, managing partner at Wavemaker. The team at Wavemaker no longer needs to seek out Twitch sales executives, continued Thomas, since they are regular visitors to the agency’s offices in London, “talking about upcoming releases before any brief comes through.” The pitch from those executives, Thomas continued, has moved away from selling large volumes of quality video inventory to delivering innovative solutions.

The prevailing wisdom among advertisers is Twitch is brand play, due to the high desktop focus and large player size. Newer advertisers to the platform are content to experiment, while the more experienced brands like Netflix and Activision go big and look to innovate.

First-time Twitch advertisers in Europe, the number of which Ford claimed “doubled” last year on 2016, typically run a video campaign on the site to test its efficacy. “Once advertisers see the performance of the video [campaigns] has done well, which they can independently verify, then they want to do more,” said Ford. Despite the momentum, which has seen Twitch’s European team grow from 230 staff in 2015 to 1,200 at the end of 2017, Ford knows there is still work to do.

Put simply the audience is there on Twitch for brands, but the ability to reach them cheaper on other platforms like Facebook still exists. Twitch has around 10 million daily users versus over 8 billion daily views on Facebook. So while Twitch owns a chunk of its users’ attention, its larger counterparts have better targeting and attribution.

Twitch realized it could do more to define engagement in its partnerships, acknowledged Ford, and started giving advertisers access to an internal panel of over 35,000 Twitch users, dubbed Twitch Research Power Group. Launched in 2016, the group is now being used by advertisers to gauge metrics such as brand affinity and likelihood to purchase. There are other ways of measuring engagement through likes and comments for video campaigns as well as affiliate links during influencer streams that direct viewers to Amazon — so marketers can track direct sales through the platform as a result. Understandably, it takes more work and a fair bit of back and forth to define engagement for partnerships with its content studio, according to agencies working with Twitch. By definition, those types of activations are all bespoke, meaning key success metrics need to be set on a case-by-case basis.

Changes are happening at Twitch to give it a larger role in owner Amazon’s ad burgeoning business, per Ad Age. Some of the executives interviewed for this article believe Twitch could be pulled into Amazon’s programmatic play alongside its other video properties such as Fire TV and IMDb.

“It’s my understanding that Twitch and Amazon work out of different offices and, to date, have never worked collaboratively on answering a brief,” said Thomas. However, the thought of having Amazon data integrated into Twitch makes for a “compelling proposition,” he explained, and would render it one of the “most powerful video buys in the U.K. for advertisers” targeting a male skewed youth audience.

Ford declined to comment on the prospect of Twitch being folded into video ad sales across Amazon’s owned platforms. But he did stress the need for the business to keep pace with clients increasingly capable of running their own programmatic campaigns.

He explained: “We’re increasingly seeing clients, particularly the global gaming publishers, build their own in-house programmatic teams and they want to work with supply partners that can deliver them reach and so we’ve had to build the technology to deliver that. As a by-product of that it means we’re able to offer programmatic buys in without a managed service in those markets like Turkey where we don’t have a local sales team.”

The picture is less clear on Twitch’s relationship with influencers. Some agencies like Social Circle are yet to see the site benefit from any blowback on YouTube following its decision last month to make it harder for influencers to make money. Whereas, others like Wavemaker have seen more influencers join as content on Twitch has diversified beyond gaming — this has allowed both existing broadcasters to express their other interests on the platform and enticed new talent from rival platforms.

The perception of YouTube as a supporter of grassroots creators is “diminishing” after they stopped smaller influencers from monetizing content, said Matt Donegan, CEO at Social Circle, which “could certainly damage the video site’s reputation and cause people to move over to other platforms.

Image courtesy of Twitch.

 

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The BBC is one publisher still fully committed to experimenting with virtual reality.

Last November, the BBC formed a centralized team of between five and 10 VR producers who work with other departments — like news, factual, history or arts and culture — on VR projects. Before then most of the work around VR and 360-degree video was contained to the BBC’s research and development lab and released through Taster, where the R&D unit showcases its work.

The BBC is preparing to release a two-part documentary called “Damming the Nile” with the BBC’s Africa correspondent Alastair Leithead, documenting the water politics along the river. The news team of four people spent two and half weeks filming the content last December. The BBC is also releasing VR work in the coming weeks celebrating women’s suffrage in the U.K.

“[The VR hub] is a different model from how things have worked at BBC,” said Zillah Watson, head of VR at BBC. “We’re understanding that you can’t separate editorial and creative from the technology in order to work out to use a new medium to tell stories. It’s a multidisciplinary team — all people bridge both worlds — where previously tech and creative were separate.”

Two years into the BBC’s VR journey, the corporation conducted qualitative research into how audiences respond to VR. “We are very clear: If it’s good quality and offers something through the headset that’s better than on TV, then it’s worth continuing to explore,” said Watson.

The research underlined VR’s existing challenges like content discovery, the fact that few people own a device, and poor content. Forecasts by PwC from last June predict that there will be 16 million headsets in the U.K. by 2021, around 12 million of these will be portable mobile VR devices that use a smartphone, like a Samsung Gear VR or Google Cardboard.

According to Chris Stack, creative director at agency Ralph, which has created VR experiences for Sony, the average cost for a brand VR experience is between £500,000 ($700,000) and £750,000 ($1 million). By now, publishers have figured out what VR is not good for, to justify the money and effort spent on VR content it needs to offer a richer experience than conventional TV.

“The success metrics are not about audience reach because it’s still constrained by a distribution issue,” said James Montgomery, director of digital and technology, “but the BBC wants to keep pace with the changing video technologies and understand where they might be heading. It’s about developing the capabilities to evolve it into something long term. We’re spending time learning about it, then hopefully influence the evolution of the platforms.”

Tech companies like Google and Samsung are funding media companies like the Guardian and the New York Times to make VR content — Montgomery said that the BBC is in conversations with tech companies — but subsidies have a shelf life. The commercial arm of the BBC, BBC Worldwide, is funded by advertising rather than the license-fee payer, and can see the opportunity to work with brands to co-fund VR content, but the potential audience is still too small to cross the threshold.

The same PwC forecast predicts the U.K.’s virtual reality industry will grow by 76 percent by reaching £801 million ($1.1 billion) in 2021, making it the fastest-growing and largest virtual reality industry in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

While VR camera and recording equipment is improving rapidly, post-production is still arduous, publishers have to work with hefty file sizes and software that’s not powerful enough to render it. Having a clear idea of what you want the finished product to look like is key. “We’re so used to video editing being so fast and easy to learn,” said Watson. “Now everything takes longer, and we have to relearn skills. We’re back in the days of its being cumbersome and constraining.”

The post ‘A different model’: Why the BBC centralized its VR team appeared first on Digiday.

“Let me start out by saying that here, creative is an adjective,” says 360i chief marketing officer Abbey Klaassen when describing her agency’s approach to media in 2017. “It’s not a noun, like, ‘that’s the creative.’ We are all creative.” Before war rooms, viral tweets and voice specialties, when the phrase “social media” was still…

Whether by choice or by fate, IPG’s MullenLowe Mediahub has long played second fiddle to larger, more recognizable networks. But the little agency that could has spent years building its capabilities in the hope of becoming a formidable industry player, and in 2017 those efforts finally paid off. The shop won an impressive 14 out…