Ad Age Insider

Deloitte Digital is one of the world's 10 biggest agency companies: In 2017 Ad Age ranked Deloitte Digital as the world's second-largest digital network, behind rival Accenture Interactive. Hatch joins me today to explain what, exactly, it is Deloitte Digital does. "We exist to make old companies new again," she says. She explains what that means, how data and tech like AI come into play and discu...

Pete Favat talks about building useful things from scrap and renovating his home on "This Old House." The C-suite leaves less time to get his hands dirty on the job, he says. "You're using your brain, which is good, but there's no physical gratification at all. We weren't put on this earth to just bang keys on a keyboard." So he creates on his own time, putting together whatever strikes his fancy:...

When Nicolas Bidon talks about his business, he talks about becoming an "outcome" media company. As part of WPP and GroupM, Xaxis is a billion-dollar business — arguably the world's largest global programmatic media and technology platform — boasting some 3000 clients across 47 markets. The evolution to an outcome-based focus, Bidon says, represents a shift away from fairly crude metrics like CPMs...

Joan Creative CCO Jaime Robinson keeps both a spinning wheel and a loom in her closet so she can spin yarn and knit blankets and sweaters, "like the lady in Rumpelstiltskin." She also reveals her favorite Joan and goes deep on the allure of "Russian Doll" and her childhood memories of the Sears Wish Book.

It's been a busy couple months for Johannes Leonardo. In February the shop announced that it would buy a "significant" portion of itself back from WPP. Then, weeks later, another tantalizing bit of news: Volkswagen named JL its lead agency. Bryan Yasko joins the podcast to discuss these developments, plus working with Adidas, the broader trend toward project work and why he doesn't like holding co...

Electrify America, a subsidiary of Volkswagen Group, is overseeing a 10-year, $2 billion investment on zero-emissions vehicle technology and awareness. The group's marketing director, Richard Steinberg, discusses what it is doing to help nudge the EV sector into the mainstream, including how charging stations might create branding opportunities.

In a digital media landscape littered with layoffs, mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcy, the New York Times remains a bright spot. Last week, the Times reported adding more than a quarter million new digital-only subscriptions in its fourth quarter earnings call. The publisher's success invites the question: what does a subscription-first model mean for the paper's ads business? Tomich joins the...

In a 20-year marketing career with Anheuser-Busch, Bob Lachky oversaw some of the most memorable ad campaigns in beer, including "Whassup," the Budweiser Frogs and Real Men of Genius. Lachky, now a consultant, joins us to talk about the brewing marketing war between his old company and MillerCoors over corn syrup, as well as why Lachky thinks the beer industry has lost its way.

The brand wizards behind Snoop Dogg's career, Cashmere has done work on "Black Panther," "Get Out," "Atlanta" and more. Beyond entertainment, it also counts as clients BMW, Jack in the Box, Adidas, and Diageo among others. Cashmere's Ryan Ford joins us to break down what it means to be a multicultural agency in 2019, the current state of the influencer landscape, and what brands get right — and wr...

Iconic brands are struggling to remain relevant in today's food industry. More evidence came with Kraft Heinz's recent $15 billion asset write-down. We examine the fallout and why Kraft's fall could be good for ad agencies.

Group Nine Media was formed in 2016  with a $100 million investment  from Discovery and today rolls up four media brands: Thrillist, NowThis, the Dodo and Seeker. The rationale for consolidation, according to CEO Ben Lerer: Bigger is better. By combining the brands under one holding company, he says, he has gained a seat at the table with advertisers. He joins us today to discuss those conversatio...

If you wrote iHeartMedia off as DOA last year, you may have made the call too soon. Last month the radio giant gained court approval for a plan that would allow it to emerge from bankruptcy. Its CEO, Bob Pittman, joined the company in 2010 as an investor when it was still called Clear Channel. His mandate: completely transform the company. A quick glance at a few recent stats suggest how far he's...

Independent ad exchange OpenX raised eyebrows in the programmatic realm last month when it announced a five-year agreement totaling more than $110 million with Google to use its cloud computing services. The news came just a month after the supply-side platform laid off some 100 employees as it prepared for the deal and continues to push into the video arena. Tim Cadogan, CEO of OpenX, joins the p...

In a time where there is no shortage of gloom and doom in the agency landscape, the job falls to Marla Kaplowitz to be its biggest booster. Kaplowitz joins this episode of Ad Lib to field questions about the agency talent crunch, consultancy creep, brands bringing advertising capabilities in-house and, of course, that little FBI investigation into agency media-buying practices launched last fall.

With its first Super Bowl ad, Bumble set out to empower women both in front of and behind the camera. On this special Super Bowl edition of the Ad Lib podcast, Laura Hutfless, partner at FlyteVu Agency, which worked on the ad, discusses how the social networking app pulled together a Big Game commercial in six weeks with a team composed almost entirely of women. 

Michelob Ultra will air two commercials in Super Bowl LIII – one featuring robots and the other making a direct appeal to female football viewers. Azania Andrews, VP marketing, at the Anheuser-Busch brewer, joins this special Super Bowl edition of the Ad Lib podcast to discuss just what goes into creating an ad for the Big Game and how Michelob is trying to change how women are portrayed on market...

A publisher of podcasts, radio shows and online articles about sports and sports culture, Barstool Sports has a robust commerce and pay-per-view events business to feed its rabidly dedicated fanbase, known as Stoolies. It is, to hear CEO Erika Nardini tell it, the publisher model of the future. All of this despite — or perhaps because of — a habit of courting controversy. The company has repeatedl...

Bloomberg Media has been experimenting across the board lately — from its consultancy play to an aggressive over-the-top streaming strategy to TicToc, a video partnership with Twitter. Joining us on the podcast is chief global revenue officer Keith Grossman, who breaks down why these are both the best of times and the worst of times to be in digital media -- and why there's never been a better mom...

Twenty-one percent of the population now owns at least one smart speaker. A full 14 million people in the U.S. got their first smart speaker device in 2018 — meaning voice as a topic of fascination is not going away any time soon. From the floor of the Las Vegas Convention center this week, NPR CMO Meg Goldthwaite joins us to discuss the revolution in voice, and what it means for marketers and con...

Launched in January, Verb is a hybrid shop that claims to have a new approach to the agency space. Verb boasts both traditional agency chops and consultancy offerings for both brands and other agencies — with a specialty in experiential marketing. It is the brain child of Shannon Simpson Jones and Yadira Harrison, both former VPs of the Civic Entertainment Group. We discuss the challenges and oppo...

The Seattle-based creative shop Wongdoody (yes, that's its real name) celebrated its 25th anniversary this year — and as it did so, it was acquired by Indian tech giant Infosys, once known for offshoring jobs. It is, says CEO Ben Wiener, a great time for an agency like Wongdoody. As the big advertising holding companies continue to fumble, Wongdoody is seeing double digit growth, he says. It is wi...

Days after Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne closed on their purchase of Time, the new owners gave its editor, Edward Felsenthal, the additional title of CEO. Felsenthal joins Ad Lib to discuss his role in the negotiation process with the Benioffs – and where he plans to take things under the new ownership. Time is on something of a roll: it won an Emmy in 2017, a National Maga...

In 2015, when Julio Bruno took over as the chief executive at Time Out, it was taking on heavy losses. An executive who had held senior positions at Diageo and TripAdvisor, Bruno saw an opportunity. Now, three years on, as Time Out celebrates its 50th anniversary, Bruno has not only begun to turn the publisher around and make it digitally relevant, but he's taken it public, leaned into an ecommerc...

After 14 years at Anomaly, founding partner Karina Wilsher will be assuming the global CEO title at the agency. Currently the global COO, Wilsher has long been groomed for the new role and will assume the chief executive position in January. True to its name, Anomaly is an outlier in its space, a non-traditional agency that was founded with a commitment to intellectual property and creating produc...

The co-founder of 14-year-old agency Walton Isaacson first went to work for the brand side in 1983 — Pepsi specifically. As it happens Pepsi at the time was working with a singer by the name of Michael Jackson. Walton's job would take him on tour with Jackson. Now, some 35 years after that first incredible gig, Walton is not only still in the business of telling brand stories, he's still at cultur...