Morning Update: Sorrell paid £63m; YouTube’s 10 most-watched ads; Harlequin gets romantic; how passion projects can make your agency
The Guardian: WPP pays CEO Sorrell one of biggest pay cheques in UK corporate history
Sir Martin Sorrell has collected one of the biggest pay cheques in British corporate history after WPP, the advertising group, paid out almost £63m to its founder and chief executive. Sorrell has collected a share award of £62.78m, cashing in £30.2m immediately to meet the “consequential tax liabilities”.
The award to Sorrell is thought to be the second-largest ever granted to a FTSE 100 chief executive, behind only the £92m in shares and cash paid to Bart Becht while he was chief executive of Reckitt Benckiser in 2009. Sorrell’s total pay package for the year could eventually hit £70m. He earns a £1.15m salary and will collect a cash bonus worth millions of pounds, although WPP is yet to disclose the exact figure.
Ad Week: The 10 Most Watched Ads on YouTube in February
Super Bowl commercials dominated the February 2016 YouTube Ads Leaderboard, presented by Google and Adweek, ranking the month’s most-watched ads on the video site. And Hyundai was the biggest winner, placing three spots in the top 10, including two of the top three.
Note: To be eligible for Adweek and Google’s YouTube Ads Leaderboard, videos must be marked as ads on YouTube (i.e., they get some paid views) but must also earn significant organic views. The algorithm factors in paid views, organic views and audience retention (how much of a video people watched).
See all 10 spots below.
Ad Week: These Brands Are Striving for Top Honors in Social Media at the 2016 Shorty Awards
These days, every brand wants to lay claim to having the buzz-worthiest campaign on Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram and every other social media platform. Now in its eighth year, the Shorty Awards recognizes that: individuals and organizations who produce great content on social media. On Tuesday, the show announced its 2016 finalists.
“We’re seeing creative video content take center stage on social media now more than ever before,” said Gregory Galant, Shorty Awards’ co-founder. “As brands and agencies play with new mediums and content formats including Periscope, Snapchat, YouNow, Facebook Video and Instagram Video, it’s been interesting to see the ways these platforms are being incorporated into larger strategies.”
Ad Age: Google Debuts Enterprise Marketing Suite Analytics 360
Google today launched an enterprise marketing platform aimed at directly competing with similar offerings from Adobe and Oracle. The move marks the tech giant’s first data management platform offering.
Dubbed Google Analytics Suite 360 (previously known as Google Analytics Premium), the product includes Audience Center 360, a data management platform that integrates with Google and DoubleClick; Optimize 360, which is used to create multiple variations of a website for different audiences; Data Studio 360, a data-visualization product; Tag Manager 360, which offers data collection and APIs to better data accuracy; Analytics 360, Google’s standard measurement tool; and Attribution 360.
PepsiCo president Brad Jakeman recently stated that the ad agency model is not going to bend, it’s going to break. Is he right, asks the chief executive and co-founder at MSQ Partners? He said agencies would lose out to content producers as it’s cheaper for clients to work with them directly and that holding companies should focus on buying content producers.
Now, Honda’s marketing director has called content agencies the most interesting new model. While this sounds like bad news for established agencies, I don’t think we need to panic just yet. I agree that agencies need to adapt, but the suggestion that this “shift to content” will “break” the agency model is wide of the mark – in fact, as is often the case in agency life, with change comes opportunity in equal measure.
This Canadian spot for romance novel publisher Harlequin doesn’t make any apologies about the kind of literature its readers enjoy; it’s escapism, pure and simple, and perhaps something to treat yourself with at the end of a long hard day.
That’s illustrated by a storyline in which a woman daydreams, in her office cubicle, after a day’s drudgery that it’s now “Helen o’clock.” Suddenly a guy from every romance novel cliche invades the office – carrying Helen and her colleagues off to the world of Harlequin. It’s all fun, ridiculously over-the-top stuff, perfect for the genre.
The ad is by BBDO Toronto and is directed by Ben/Dave of Partners Film, Toronto. There’s also a print and social media campaign that centers on the different romantic Harlequin archetypes.
The way news is recorded and distributed has changed fundamentally over the last 25 years, and while the values of news gathering haven’t, news providers are faced with a decline in press freedom and consumers exposed to a rise in propaganda, the editorial and digital director of BBC Global News Richard Porter has said.
Talking to Mumbrella from London as the British broadcaster marks a quarter of a century of international news operations, Porter highlighted 25 ways that news has changed since the launch of BBC World News – formerly the BBC World Service – including the transition from tape to digital, and the impact of social media, smartphones and citizen journalism.
Campaign Live: How passion projects could make your agency famous
Passion projects. Those little side projects that might not be making your agency rich but have a good chance of making it famous. Those PR-able initiatives that not only make your client look great in his or her current job but also stand a great chance of getting them their next, more lucrative one. They are also rather useful PR/fame tools for smaller agencies outside the big top 20 because they represent extra opportunities to get your creativity in the public eye.
It seems you can’t move in adland these days for people launching children’s books, documentaries, immersive theatre, craft beers, novelty bin-bags or social initiatives of all shapes and sizes. No wonder no one has time to make adverts any more.
