TRENDSETTERS

Eighteen months ago, former Omnicom Vice Chairman Tim Love released his award-winning book Discovering Truth: How to Navigate Between Fact and Fiction in an Overwhelming Social Media World. Drawing inspiration from renowned business leaders, Discovering Truth explored how today's social media affects trust in institutions and divides an increasingly polarized society. Tim Love is now devoting his...

Surprisingly, few books are dedicated to how marketers can bring out the best in their advertising agencies.   Joanne Davis, a renowned expert in client-agency relationships, has just released a new book through Internationalist Press entitled How to Get Your Agency to Run Through Brick Walls—Without Paying More.   With humor and wisdom, she provides a concise yet impactful volume that delivers a...

Dave McCaughan, Expert on Age and International Culture, Explains What Brands Get Wrong about Older People   Dave McCaughan is a storyteller, marketing expert, consultant, and public speaker passionate about understanding the interconnection between people and brands.  He spent three decades with McCann throughout Asia, developing the Strategic Planning practice and working with a stellar roster o...

Women’s sports have been soaring in popularity, yet they still receive as little as 5% of sports media coverage. Ally Financial took a pioneering step in May 2022 by committing to spend equally on men’s and women’s sports within five years.  Ally also scored a huge early win by working with CBS to move the National Women’s Soccer League’s championship game to its first-ever prime-time slot. This d...

Hiki is the world’s leading app for friendship and dating in the Autistic community. It stands out from other dating apps because of its mission: to enable the Autistic community to connect with each other.  Autistic people are 4x more likely to feel lonely than others. A contributing factor is that false assumptions and misinformation have created biased images in media and advertising that misre...

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that one out of every thirteen people have enough hearing or vision impairment to depend on captioning and descriptive audio for their media use.   By 2050, WHO also anticipates that 2.5 billion people will be living with some degree of hearing loss.  While these statistics may seem overwhelming, the Ad Access Alliance, a group led by ISBA and Union des...

Lana McGilvray is the co-founder and CEO Of Purpose Worldwide, a communications consultancy that specializes in helping clients define and connect purpose to growth.  In an era of accountability, particularly in marketing, even the most noble missions must be associated with economic outcomes.  Given her broad experience with brands, associations, nonprofits, and tech companies, Lana discusses the...

Parity was created in 2020 to close the gender income and opportunity gap in professional sports, and CEO Leela Srinivasan has been in her role for a year. To help revolutionize the financial model for women athletes and create meaningful opportunities for brands, she has championed what may be the most extensive study of women’s sports fandom to date. In partnership with SurveyMonkey, Parity surv...

Michael Kelly has worked in digital media and communications strategy roles at consumer packaged goods and technology companies for much of his career.  Now, he has accepted a “dream job” as Communications Director of World Bicycle Relief.  While he’s a cycling enthusiast, he’s also passionate about the mission to provide bicycles to remote regions of the world so individuals have transport to edu...

Rahul Malhotra is responsible for global brand strategy and architecture for the Shell brand family, which includes overseeing brand identity, brand stewardship, employee ambassadorship, and brand purpose. Over 125 years old and valued at over $50 billion, the Shell brand is one of the world's top 23 most valuable brands, and its yellow and red scallop shell logo is one of the most recognizable sy...

For the past decade, Anthony Farina, Chief Communications & Brand Officer of biotech giant CSL, has been part of the company’s extraordinary evolution. From his beginnings as the first communications leader in CSL’s century-long history, he has helped champion a purpose-driven ethos or “promise,” which enabled the CSL family to unify as one global brand as it doubled in size through acquisitio...

Gilbert Dávila is among the most sought-after experts on multicultural marketing in the United States today.  After spending 25 years working as a senior marketing executive and multicultural market expert at Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, The Walt Disney Company, and others, he co-founded DMI Consulting in 2010.  He also co-founded AIMM, The Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, i...

Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel believes that brands reflect culture and actively shape societal norms and values. Her new book, Cultural Intelligence for Marketers: Building an Inclusive Marketing Strategy , demonstrates how marketers can create programs that resonate effectively with audiences and meaningfully impact society.    Her book is devoted to helping marketers view culture more criticall...

Few can boast of a professional life that includes investment banker, equity research analyst, long-time agency executive, and developer of two of the global advertising industry's most widely relied upon data sets.  Brian Wieser has devoted much of his career to understanding trends in media spending, its overall effect on advertising budgets, and what this means not only to marketers but to inve...

SeeHer is the ANA’s global initiative to champion the positive representation of women and the leading global movement to eliminate gender bias in marketing, media, and entertainment.  A new edition of the report, Global Perceptions of Progress on Gender Equality , conducted by SeeHer in partnership with dentsu, showed some surprising results, including disillusionment in the U.S. market. While 90...

As a leader in self-regulation, the ANA, through the Center for Ethical Marketing, helps businesses build brand and consumer trust through best practices, guidelines, guidance, compliance services, and committees. The Center seeks to educate, elevate, and advance accountability for the industry and mediate consumer complaints.  Senny Boone, Senior Vice President of the Center for Ethical Marketing...

Liz Kneebone has spent much of her career focused on environmental, social, and governance issues, as well as playing an active role in stakeholder engagement and change management. Today, as Vice President of the Society and Sustainability Collective, an ANA initiative, she believes sustainable, inclusive marketing practices are a significant growth driver for all organizations across every indus...

Martin Puris believes we are approaching a second Creative Revolution in Advertising. He plans to be part of it—just as he was instrumental in the first Creative Revolution during the Golden Age of Advertising when he founded Ammirati & Puris with his partner Ralph Ammirati in the 1970s. Famous for finding the right words to convey the Big Idea, Martin Puris, as a copywriter, coined such iconi...

The AEF is the ANA Educational Foundation, and its mission is to connect today’s advertising and marketing communities with academia. AEF educates and inspires the next generation of talent while advancing the understanding of marketing and advertising in society. According to Gord McLean, President & CEO of AEF, “Our future marketing and advertising leaders are not just looking for a job, the...

Fifty-two percent of Americans have experienced online hate. And violence attributed to hate speech has increased worldwide. Expressions of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, and other forms of targeted harassment against vulnerable groups and individuals can make the connectedness of social media become toxic. Anita McGorty, Executive Vice President of Engage Responsibly, talks about how t...

Sir Martin Sorrell possesses the exceptional ability to seamlessly integrate macro geopolitical issues and technological trends with his deep understanding of marketing, advertising, and media. Plus, he has decades of experience interpreting the significance of an industry’s evolution, first-hand. Certainly, one of the many things that drives him as a CEO is being forthright about current realitie...

Marla Kaplowitz has spent a long career at ad agencies…. And now as CEO of the 4A's (American Association of Advertising Agencies), she is helping her members navigate the constantly changing agency world. She sees her role as ensuring that agencies remain relevant, compete successfully, and have the resources to flourish. Today, she anticipates how events in 2024 will impact the business, interpr...

Two long-time friends and international media professionals had a simple idea that is now changing how both clients and agencies can access strategic marketing solutions—whether within North America or throughout the world. Called AdVentures Americas for its US home base, Oliver Eills (Founder & CEO) and Patrick Williams (Managing Partner), both originally from the UK and Ireland, have spent t...

Bob Liodice, chief executive officer of the ANA, certainly understands both the challenges and opportunities marketers face today. As he anticipates the key issues and trends of 2024, Bob considers both large, defining topics like the effect of AI on the industry and how a central ANA tenet like “growth” is continuing to develop, as well as tactical solutions like new efficiencies available to the...

Stephan Loerke, CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), is unquestionably an optimist when he talks about the potential for marketing to drive outcomes and even reshape business goals. However, he is also tremendously pragmatic when he discusses the importance of embracing key marketing initiatives. He believes that CMOs “need to lead,” and given the global complexities of the year ahead...