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Mail-Order Cologne, and Other Choices Facing America |
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Hello CMOs. This is CMO Today editor Nat Ives, filling in again for Lara while she works the Web Summit in Lisbon. (Reminder if you’re there: She takes the PandaConf stage at 1:45 p.m. today to talk with IBM CMO Michelle Peluso and SAP CMO Alicia Tillman about how marketers sell their brands internally.)
In the United States, of course, we are concentrating on distracting ourselves from the midterm elections until results start coming in. With that in mind, let’s turn our attention to men’s toiletries, and news that Dollar Shave Club is getting into the fragrance business. The mail-order razor startup is introducing its BluePrint line of scents online today.
To make online fragrance sales work, BluePrint’s six varieties aren’t being coy with their names. "Armani Code—nobody knows what that smells like," Nick Virginio, senior brand development manager at Dollar Shave Club, told Ad Age. "With ours you see Intense Vanilla, Black Suede, Citrusy Bergamot." They’re also assigned numbers “in ascending order of complexity and sophistication.”
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If VCs lose interest in traditional early-stage ad tech and martech startups, there are other areas ripe for new tech-driven marketing, like voice. PHOTO: ANDREW BURTON/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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Early-stage venture capital funding for ad tech and martech startups will plunge 75% next year, Forrester predicts in a research report set for release today. But that may be a good thing for marketers who have spent years trying to navigate the flood of offerings, I report for CMO Today. A retreat could give marketers a break from sorting through the flood of products and trying to make them work together, said Carlton Doty, vice president for emerging technology research at Forrester.
Others said there still is plenty of money for tech-driven marketing tools, if less so for those that Forrester considers ad tech or marketing tech. The machine learning that underpins voice assistants such as Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa, for example, falls under the artificial-intelligence category at Forrester.
"Voice, audio, connected TV, the move away from linear TV to all things video—these are early markets that are super exciting,” said Eric Franchi, who invests in digital media and marketing startups as operating partner at MathCapital. “Clearly that’s the wave of the future for consumer interactions. The leaders in those markets have yet to be identified and yet to scale.”
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President Trump at a Make America Great Again rally in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Monday. PHOTO: JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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Aaaaand we’re back to politics; it’s going to be that kind of day. The genie is hardly back in the bottle for the Trump campaign commercials whipping up immigration fears, even after Facebook, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC all said Monday that they would stop taking money to show it. (It was “insensitive,” NBC belatedly decided.)
Although CNN had already rejected the commercial for being “racist,” it did pass muster with NBC’s standards department long enough to run during the Patriots-Packers matchup on “Sunday Night Football,” a huge showcase that early numbers suggest averaged in the ballpark of 20 million viewers.
Across TV networks, the commercial generated 21.4 million impressions, Variety reported.
Facebook, meanwhile, eventually determined that the ad violated its ad policy against “sensational content”—but was fine to post on Facebook for free. It has accumulated 759,000 unpaid views on Facebook since Monday.
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Britain's home secretary, Sajid Javid, arrives at 10 Downing Street in London on Tuesday. PHOTO: TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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British home secretary Sajid Javid has commissioned research into whether online ad networks are being used to pull brand advertising onto websites depicting child abuse, The Guardian reports.
The study is part of a broader response to signs that child exploitation is exploding online. Javid will also be leading a task force convening executives from marketers, ad agencies and industry trade groups to work out steps that might cut such sites off from ad revenue. He is headed to Microsoft headquarters this week for a “hackathon” to build tools that can detect online child grooming—befriending children online with the goal of sexual abuse.
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“A lot of things are offensive. Your questions are offensive a lot of the time."
| — President Trump, when asked about his campaign’s immigration-themed commercial that was called “racist” by CNN and others. |
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In what seems like a worthwhile bit of brand preservation, to say the least, Under Armour has officially ended its policy of allowing employees to expense visits to strip clubs. [The Wall Street Journal]
Car-mat maker WeatherTech will return to the Super Bowl for a sixth consecutive appearance, likely with another “Made in America” theme, while Avocados From Mexico is back for its fifth year in a row. [Ad Age]
Pinterest has hired Andréa Mallard away from Gap’s athleisure brand Athleta to become its first chief marketing officer in a bid to become more of a destination for shoppers. [Campaign]
Among many other brand exhortations to participate in the elections today, Google has replaced its logo on its U.S. homepage with the words "Go Vote." [Google.com]
Gannett newspapers plan to mostly skip publishing election results in their print editions on Wednesday and Thursday, instead focusing on “big-picture analysis and storytelling.” [Digiday]
CoverGirl has become the largest makeup brand to receive “Leaping Bunny” certification by Cruelty-Free International, citing consumers’ expectations that brands stand for “positive change.” [Campaign]
Here’s how Maison Goyard stays so fashionable even though it won’t advertise, much less “engage in any form of e-commerce,” as its website says. [Adweek]
With the exception of Instagram, the big social-media networks have stopped adding U.S. users or are actually losing them, meaning they have to find new ways to expand their ad sales. [Recode]
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior advisor, has won initial approval for 16 Chinese trademarks on products from umbrellas to sausages, even though her company closed in July. [Business Insider]
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