From Adweek

  • Meta More Than Doubled Revenue From its AI-Powered Ad Tool

    AI continues to drive Meta's year-long recovery. Revenue from its Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ACS) more than doubled since last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the Q1 2024 earnings call. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, reported a 27% increase in revenue, reaching $36.5 billion compared to $28.6 billion in 2023. Advertising contributed 97% of that revenue, or $35.6 billion, and the average price of ads rose 6%. “For all the recent scrutiny of its...

  • Meta’s Ad Business Is Still Surging As Headcount Ticks Upward

    Meta Platforms saw advertising revenue grow to $35.6 billion during the first quarter of 2024. That's up 27% compared to the same three-month period last year. Following chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's cost-cutting “year of efficiency,” which involved mass layoffs, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp now has 69,329 employees, down 10% compared with the same period in 2023, but up from the previous quarter.

  • Owen Wilson Does His Best Steve Jobs Impression for a Beauty Startup Ad

    Prolific actor Owen Wilson has a new gig, and at first glance, it may seem like he’s playing tech entrepreneur Steve Jobs, complete with the trademark black turtleneck and PowerPoint presentation in front of a cheering crowd. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Wilson tells a rapt audience in a just-dropped video.  In fact, Wilson has landed his first commercial endorsement in the U.S., co-writing and starring in a cheeky ad that borrows...

  • Commerce Can No Longer Be Where Creative Goes to Die

    Last year, global ecommerce sales totaled nearly $6 trillion and are expected to grow 10% this year. People expect nothing but the best shopping experience every time, and expectations increase every time they experience something better. This represents a sharp departure from how commerce has traditionally been approached--as a mere transaction after all the creative

  • Buyers Are Wasting Money on Alt IDs While Cookies Still Persist

    Brands proactively testing alternative ways to find audiences, without using third-party cookies, are also wasting a chunk of that budget on sending too many ads to a narrow slice of publisher inventory, new data from the demand-side platform (DSP) Adform reveals. When buyers test alternative identifiers, like ID5, UID2, RampID, or a whole host of others, it's mostly in environments where cookies do not exist, like Firefox and Apple's Safari and iOS. While traffic in these environments is...

  • David Yurman Names PHD Global Media Agency of Record

    The David Yurman Company has wrapped up a four-month-long traditional and digital media review led by the media consultancy ID Comms. The business includes four markets—the U.S. and Canada in the Americas and France and the U.K. in Europe. The luxury jewelry brand operates 49 retail stores globally, and at more than 300 authorized locations worldwide. The brand's 2024 billings are estimated to be between $50 million and $60 million, according to an anonymous source familiar with the pitch. ...

  • A Life in 3 Minutes: Swedish Lingerie Brand Debuts an Emotion-Packed Ad

    There’s a wide range of messy and emotional territory covered in just shy of three minutes in a new campaign from a legacy Swedish brand called Lindex. It’s a multigenerational story, centered on a mother-daughter rite of passage, that flows from the combative teen years to the relative contentment of middle age, weaving in the joy of birth and the heartache of illness before coming full circle. By the way, it’s an ad for skivvies. The 70-year-old Lindex, known for its female...

  • Under the Hood of Tesla’s Fleeting Foray Into Advertising

    As Tesla's sales slide, insiders say the automaker left creative ideas on the cutting-room floor without allowing its nascent marketing team to launch its first significant marketing campaign.Investors were enthusiastic when founder and CEO Elon Musk declared that the business was set to "give advertising a go," having eschewed it for 20 years. However, 10 months on, the 40-person "global growth" team tasked with delivering on this has been laid off, with former staffers sharing that none of the...

  • Google Delays Cookie Deprecation For The Third Time

    Pack away those tired cookie crumbling metaphors until 2025, as Google has once again delayed the death of the third-party tracking cookie in its Chrome browser. This is the third reprieve Google has given cookies since it first promised to phase them out in 2020. The next year, it pushed the date back to 2023, and then delayed it again to 2024. In its latest postponement, Google said in a blog, “we envision proceeding with third-party cookie deprecation starting early next year.” The...

  • Ad Sales Legend Jo Ann Ross to Exit Paramount Ahead of Upfront

    After more than three decades at the company, Jo Ann Ross is exiting Paramount. On Tuesday, Paramount announced that Ross, chairman of Paramount Advertising, is stepping down from the position at the end of the month. In a memo to staff, Paramount CEO Bob Bakish noted the timing worked for the decision, with Ross "having helped prime our sales team for another strong upfront season." How Paramount and Innovid’s Interactive Super Bowl Spots Scored Big Ross joined CBS in 1992 as vp of...

  • Sustainability Is More Than a Big Leafy Green Picture

    As businesses attempt to navigate the incredibly complex, fragmented and increasingly regulated sustainability landscape, they all too often opt for a "leave no trace" approach. This is because the issue is all at once highly prioritized and also highly scrutinized, from consumers to C-suites. As a result, organizations often delegate it to the responsibility of

  • Love Wellness Is Getting to the Root of Women’s Health

    When it comes to maintaining good health and wellness, it can be expensive and challenging to track down the right products, particularly for women. Love Wellness was founded by The Hills star Lo Bosworth, who wanted to give consumers access to doctor-developed supplements and wellness products that work. Founded in 2016, Love Wellness is a women’s wellness brand focused on safe and effective solutions for common issues across vaginal, gut and brain health. Its goal is to eliminate the stigma...