Morning Update: What KISS taught me about marketing; biggest spending brands of 2016; confessions of a weed agency
Ad WeeK: 3 Things Kiss Taught Me About Marketing
When I was a kid, I straight-up loved Kiss. I was drawn to the makeup-wearing, leather-clad, blood-spitting, loud-playing band like a full-on groupie, buying every album and putting on face paint and singing my goddamn lungs out. In hindsight, the music was secondary to the mythology swirling around my head about the band, which is to be expected—because when I listen to it now, its music actually kinda blows.
Ad Age: What You Need to Know About the World’s Largest Advertisers, from Adidas to Yili
Ad Age’s first-ever ranking of the World’s Largest Advertisers shows the top 100 spent $240.5 billion on advertising in 2015, down 2.0% from 2014. The ranking is based on Ad Age Datacenter estimates and company disclosures for total ad spending, an all-in assessment that captures everything from TV and in-store advertising to social media and mobile.
Digiday: ‘It’s the birth of a new industry’: Confessions of a weed agency
Marijuana legalisation in the United States is now a foregone conclusion. Over half of U.S. states have enacted laws that have legalised marijuana for recreational or medical use. That means American capitalism has kicked into high gear, with estimates that the domestic legal cannabis market will reach $50 billion by 2026, according to Bloomberg.
Poynter: Why The Outline looks like the future of magazines
The Outline, the new company/website/technology platform from Joshua Topolsky’s band of media cool kids looks completely different from most digital publications. It also feels very familiar, at least for those of us who still read print magazines in 2016.
This is intentional. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published this morning, Topolsky — who oversaw a splashy redesign of Bloomberg — said he wanted The Outline to be “a next-generation version of The New Yorker,” presumably with fewer arch cartoons and effete punctuation marks.
Mumbrella Asia: Artificially-Intelligent software is eating my job
If everything is eventually destined to become software, what’s to become of us, asks PHD’s Chris Stephenson.
Imagine sitting in an agency and planning communications alongside a partner who knew everything that had ever been written about marketing and communications. A partner who knew inside out every Admap article, every econometric and attribution model, every IPA and WARC paper, as well as every Mintel, nVision or Euromonitor report ever published. Imagine that conversation. Imagine the product that conversation would produce.