Morning Update: Spotify gets nostalgic; why brands need Snapchat; Nintendo UK up for grabs; a year in start-up hell; 4A’s on pay gap
https://youtu.be/zuOiNjpkEFY
Ad Week: Falkor From The NeverEnding Story Soars as Spotify’s New Spokesdragon
Spotify’s new brand campaign from Wieden + Kennedy features three new TV spots, including—perhaps most notably—one with Falkor, the dragon-dog from the 1984 fantasy film The NeverEnding Story.
The point of the ad is simple: “The NeverEnding Story,” the song by the English pop singer Limahl, is streamed at least once every day by someone in the world. In the spot, Falkor remarks on this oddity, as does Atreyu, riding on his back—except Atreyu is no longer a 12-year-old boy but a 44-year-old man.
Ad Age: To Big Brands, From a Millennial: Snapchat Filters Are Where It’s At
If you’re a billion-dollar company targeting millennials and you’re not investing in a sponsored Snapchat filter, you’re already late to the game.
For those of you who have no idea what Snapchat filters are, they allow users to insert special effects into their selfies (think turning your selfie into an animated, purring cat) on Snapchat’s photo and video-sharing messaging app.
Yes, it’s weird. Yes, it’s a waste of time. Yes, it’s why your teenage daughter spends hours making silly faces at her mobile phone.
Campaign Live: Nintendo reviews UK media
Nintendo, the Japanese gaming company, is reviewing its media planning and buying account in the UK. MEC is the incumbent on the account and has declined to repitch. Briefs for the business were issued two weeks ago.
Nintendo manufactures the Wii and Nintendo 3DS games consoles. Karmarama handles the company’s UK advertising. The company was founded in 1889 when Fusajiro Yamauchi began manufacturing Japanese playing cards. Nintendo could not be immediately reached for comment.
Fortune: My Year in Start-up Hell
If you made a movie about a laid-off, sad-sack, 50-something guy who is given one big chance to start his career over, the opening scene might begin like this: a Monday morning in April, sunny and cool, with a brisk wind blowing off the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.
The man—gray hair, unstylishly cut; horn-rimmed glasses; button-down shirt—pulls his Subaru Outback into a parking garage and, palms a little sweaty, grabs his sensible laptop backpack and heads to the front door of a gleaming, renovated historic redbrick building. It is April 15, 2013, and that man is me. I’m heading for my first day of work at HubSpot, the first job I’ve ever had that wasn’t in a newsroom.
The principal and co-founder of pitch consultant R3, Greg Paull, discusses the recent developments at Dentsu Aegis and Publicis Groupe, suggests marketers are heading towards a Mad Men mentality and warns of new competitors on the agency landscape.
Recent events at Dentsu Aegis have been likened to Game of Thrones. What is your take on developments?
It’s endemic of a lot of agency groups. It’s turf warfare. You’ve got to remember that agencies were once upon a time integrated and the people from the creative side were running the place.
Ad Week: Could the JWT CEO Scandal Become a Watershed Moment for Change?
Unlike 4A’s conferences in recent memory, soul-searching was the underlying theme in Miami this year—mostly the result of the fallout from the case against former J. Walter Thompson CEO Gustavo Martinez over alleged sexism and racism. Panel sessions and keynotes hit on the lack of diversity (and, to a lesser degree, transparency) in the ad business. It remains to be seen if the industry can live up to the conference’s name: Transformation.
Nancy Hill, 4A’s president, kicked off the conference with an admonishment in light of the JWT scandal. “Unfortunately, the alleged behaviour happens more frequently than we think,” Hill warned the 750 or so in attendance. “Real change has to start at the top. That means if you are the CEO, you are the chief diversity officer. That means you need to look at every hire as an opportunity to change the playing field at your own company. Look at salaries. Is there a gap? If so, I urge you to fix it.”
Ad Age: A PR Partnership That Makes Social Media Easier
The entire industry is looking at how to get content into people’s social media streams that others trust and spark engagement. Edelman recently announced a strategic investment in in employee-advocacy and engagement platform Dynamic Signal, a move meant to help the agency’s PR clients further activate and measure engagement among influencers.
Edelman will help create and curate content for its clients, combining community management and content strategy efforts. Dynamic Signal’s technology, which gives employees and influencers the option to share approved content on their own social channels, can track measurable results based on an individual post or platform.
Campaign Live: Iris launches new division to bring sports marketing ‘out of the 70s’
Iris Worldwide has launched a dedicated sports marketing division called Iris Sport to move the sector “out of the 1970s”.
The new division, headquartered in London within Iris’ offices in Southwark, will be led by Nico Tuppen, the managing partner and global client director at Iris.
Iris Sport will work closely with the integrated network’s consulting, CRM, data and insight team, Iris Concise, to better analyse campaign activity and integration in real time.
