Innehållsförteckning för November-December 2020 från AdNews

Advertisers have had mammoth amounts of data placed at their fingertips over recent years. Never before have they been able to reach audiences at such a granular level. Yet many advertisers still don’t feel completely confident wading through what is often insurmountable masses of data to maximise effectiveness in their campaigns. In fact, data accuracy is one of their key concerns. Fragmentation and change in consumer media habits, as well as consumer privacy concerns... ranked as top challenges for advertisers at 44% and 42% respectively. According to Xandr’s Third Annual Relevance Report, while expertise in data varies across regions, most advertisers recognize the challenge in creating better ad experiences for consumers. Advertisers in Australia are the least confident, compared to their global counterparts, in their ability to use data to…

Don’t let a good crisis go to waste. Jack Watts, CEO of Bastion Collective, the largest Australian independent agency network, had done a lot of work on the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix up to March this year. “We were doing a major Ferrari activation and a Robbie Williams concert there that I've personally worked on for a couple of years,” he says. “I went into a meeting at 7.30am on the Friday (March 13) with a big day planned. I came out of that at 8.35am and the world had changed.” The COVID-19 crisis had arrived. The grand prix was called off, and the fallout for the rest of the economy came quickly. Bastion has a strong collection of major accounts including Microsoft, KIA, AMP, Customer Service NSW, Deakin…

Jack Burton and Lucas Fowler, Ogilvy Creative team, say the big change has been the Browning Effect. “Oh, you haven’t heard? That’s fair, Jack just made it up. Not to discount any of the daily atrocities that continue to out-2020 the long list of other atrocities that have made 2020 so unique, but the Browning Effect has made its impact felt on many of us, and caused all the vibrant colour to turn brown. The symptoms? Fatigue, the inability to switch off and Microsoft Teams taking up more screen time on your phone than Reddit. How do we deal with it? The taller one of us does yoga in the mornings and tries not to touch any work before 9am, the better-looking one of us ensures he tends to his…

A decades-long battle of the franchises, Star Wars and Star Trek have left fans divided over the years. Yet never had the two worlds collided until 2020. Debuting Uber Eats’ brand platform Tonight I’ll Be Eating (TIBE) in the United States and Canada earlier this year, local independent agency Special Group Australia brought together two of pop culture’s most iconic heroes. No-one expected to see Luke Skywalker and Captain Jean-Luc Picard – actors Mark Hamill and Patrick Stewart – “battle” it out in-person. Let alone in an Uber Eats ad. It was the first ad created for the North American market under the TIBE platform following several years of success in Australia. Born in Surry Hills in 2017, the idea has since made its way across seas to New Zealand,…

What were your initial thoughts on The Annual brief at hand? Summing up 2020 felt incredibly daunting. After everything that’s happened during this unprecedented year, how could we encapsulate the enormous highs and lows we’ve all experienced in a single cover? Post first brief chat, what went through your mind(s) and what were the next steps you took as a team? After that initial WTF moment, we gave ourselves the time and space to just chat (remotely) and bounce around ideas. We thought a lot about tone. Did we want to be dark, uplifting, funny or somewhere in between? We also looked at some of the symbols and the moments that had the most impact on us in 2020. How did you know you’d landed on the best concept? Toying…

Aimee Buchanan, CEO, OMD Australia My 2020 work year kicked off in February, when I returned to work from parental leave. I can clearly remember rushing around that first morning, internally grappling with how I was going to manage working with a four-month-old and a four-year-old at home! Fast-forward six weeks and my anticipated struggles were so far from my day-to-day reality. I was losing sleep, but the little ones were not to blame. The responsibility of all 500 OMDers was weighing heavily on my conscience. As the CEO, this is a big part of the job — you are ultimately responsible for people’s livelihoods. But now, front and centre, was the responsibility for people’s safety, health and wellbeing at a level I have never experienced. This year the rulebook…

A monumental year for the history books, the start of this new decade hasn’t quite begun like the roaring ’20s of a century prior. Fuelled by a global pandemic, disruption has taken a new toll across industries — magazines included. The favoured “death of print” line has been rinsed and repeated during the years but with change and innovation underway across the magazine industry, it’s safe to say magazines won’t be going anywhere. In fact, they are just taking on new and diversified formats inspired by their audience preferences and the disruption that has been 2020. One could argue that this has been one of the biggest years of change for the local industry with Bauer Media’s purchase of Pacific Magazines being approved by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission…

Time at the company: Four weeks. Hoping I pass probation. How would you describe what the company does? They write the advertising and media industry's bible. It’s kind of a big deal. What do you do day-to-day? Sleep, eat, bite, play, pee, repeat. Define your job in one word: Paw-inspiring. I got into advertising and media because: I didn’t have a choice because it’s a family business and I’m learning the ropes so I can take over one day. Who is your right-hand person? The whole team. It takes a village. Whose job have you set your sights on in the future? Managing director. I’m going straight to the top. Where do you turn for inspiration? AdNews of course. My favourite advert is: Schmackos. Extremely relatable as they literally send…

The realisation of how much things have changed sank in the moment my 80-year-old parents Zoomed me for the first time - weeks earlier they were buying newspapers and struggling mightily with a smartphone. AdNews Publisher and Future Now host Assia Benmedjdoub recounted a similar story of how her mother, born in the Soviet Union, sent her a gif. Other guests across the series have talked about virtual dinners with their families, appdriven workouts and trying to work while homeschooling. It’s been a year like no other, one that’s changed the trajectory of our technical evolution and shifted attitudes and habits through an undeniably challenging collective experience. Future Now is about uncovering those changes and arming businesses with the tools to move forward. In the first episode way back in…

H ere are all the winners from the AdNews Agency of the Year Awards. AdNews is delighted to partner with Google, PubMatic, Outdoor Media Association, SpotX, NOVA Entertainment, IVE and Adstream. AdNews would also like to thank Andrew Sherman, founder and CEO of The Transition Coach, for offering the winner of the Emerging Leader award an Executive Coaching program of eight coaching sessions. AdNews Agency of the Year 2019 Winner OMD Australia was named AdNews Agency of the Year for 2019 and took out a string of other awards, including Media Agency of the Year presented by PubMatic and Media Campaign of the Year. The top accolade was accepted by Aimee Buchanan, CEO of OMD Australia. “I am so proud of the agency,” she told a live streamed ceremony. “I…

Eric Beecher, chairman of Private Media Hall of Fame winner 2017 A decade ago, I bought and read maybe 20 printed magazines a week, covering politics, ideas, current affairs and business. Today I still read and pay for most of that content, but none of it in print. I still miss the tactile, almost sensory experience of opening and navigating through a freshly minted magazine, but not enough to cling to a format that takes too long to arrive, piles up on the desk, and tests the limits of the environment. Same with printed newspapers. Now, I’m a digital publisher with a business model that barely has to worry about the physical form, and can focus entirely on the content. That has created a whole new world where the word…