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WPP Asked Sorrell to Repay Expenses; (Some) Brands' Gender Tactics Evolve; Your Responses on Coke's Unity Ad |
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PHOTO: ERIC GAILLARD/REUTERS
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Since Martin Sorrell resigned as CEO of WPP last year, he has sent messages to his successor Mark Read, peppering him with suggestions and criticisms, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Meanwhile, WPP has been examining expenses that Mr. Sorrell incurred over several years. He has paid WPP back about £170,000 ($219,000) for what the company eventually determined were personal expenses, including travel for his wife. And in recent weeks, WPP has asked Mr. Sorrell to clarify additional expenses charged to the company including vacations. The amount in question is larger than the initial bill, the person added.
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A Tide Super Bowl ad last year. Laundry brands are among those edging away from longstanding gender stereotypes in ad targeting. Others aren't. PHOTO: PROCTER & GAMBLE
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Some marketers are starting to edge away from dated gender-based strategies—such as exclusively targeting household cleaning products at women, or entirely overlooking men who buy diapers—but others haven’t changed at all, according to a study due to be published tomorrow.
Brands in food and drink adopted modestly more balanced gender targeting for their ads between 2010 and 2018, while laundry and household cleaner marketers saw more recent changes, Research company Kantar found. Categories including auto haven’t reoriented much.
The global study used the lens of the ad tests that Kantar performs, in which brands ask it to seek men and women in certain proportions. The desired gender splits in the tests are a good stand-in for advertisers’ target audiences for the ads, according to Kantar. From 2010 to 2018, women made up 98% of the sample when testing ads for laundry products and household cleaners, and 29% of the sample for motor oil.
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| Your Answers on Coke’s “Unity” Ad |
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I asked you on Friday what Coca-Cola’s ad promoting unity (“He drinks Coke and she drinks Coke even though they disagree”) before the national anthem at the Super Bowl will do for its brand.
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Jim Meyer of GroupM said: “It’s a fair bet that people who drink one Coke a year contribute somewhere around half the annual volume of the brand. It’s with these users that the ‘unity’ ad promises the greatest impact. If even a small fraction of these users—say 2%—is motivated to drink one more Coke purely on the basis of allegiance to the cause of social unity, then the brand would realize a 1% volume gain, which would probably be more than enough to justify the investment.”
Marketing consulting Jonathan Gardner said: “This was a pretty safe social and political stance to take. But I don’t anticipate this will give Coca-Cola much more than a minor and brief ‘relevance blip’ in the social media zeitgeist. As many have said, there can be some temporary benefit from an effort like this but unless it's going to be a sustained ‘unity’ campaign, it doesn’t seem that there would be ongoing brand lift.”
And freelance journalist Laurel Ornish wrote: “What is sad and ironic is that the Coke ad is being described as ‘socially responsible.’ Coca-Cola has no positive nutritional value, which no one writing about the ad seems to want to point out.”
Kerry Morgan at Booz Allen Hamilton said: “Coke is competing with Pepsi, the Patriots are competing with the Rams, and the extreme sides of both political parties are in a verbal civil war, all making the notion that Coke equals unity out of place and quite a stretch. If Coke wanted to remind us that America likes to compete in good fun, and can do so in unity, it should do a joint ad with Pepsi.” [Editor’s note: Burger King tried just such a peace offering/PR stunt by proposing a McWhopper in 2015. McDonald’s declined.]
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“If he enters the race, I will start a Starbucks boycott because I'm not giving a penny that will end up in the election coffers of a guy who will help Trump win.”
| — Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former adviser to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, on the announcement that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz may mount a third-party run for president in 2020 |
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Gen Z uses Facebook solely to signal to elders that they’re still alive, a 21-year-old college junior said in a profile of her generation’s tech and social-media habits. [WSJ]
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger to let people communicate across them for the first time. [NYT]
The NFL’s Super Bowl ad for itself will promote its 100th season with more than 50 current and former players (plus the Twitch star Ninja). [Adweek]
Amazon still hasn’t confirmed that it will advertise in the Super Bowl, but it has released teasers depicting Harrison Ford, Forest Whitaker, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly as testers for new Alexa tech. [Ad Age]
U.K. ad spend is forecast to slow to 4.6%, down from an estimated 6% in 2018, according to the latest Advertising Association/Warc expenditure report. [Campaign]
YouTube is running an interactive “choose-your-own-adventure”-style ad for the video game “Resident Evil 2.” [The Drum]
The deadline has passed for a company sending floating LED billboards around New York City to explain how it is complying with a ban on advertising in area waterways, and its barges are still going. [Gothamist]
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