| | Media Buyer & Planner Today | | | | | | | | | #1 Dove Apologizes for Racist Facebook Ad | The Unilever brand has apologized and pulled a Dove body wash ad on Facebook that showed a black woman removing her brown t-shirt and becoming a white woman. The three-second video clip was posted late last week and pulled on Saturday, after it was criticized by a hoard of social media users. The company said, "An image we recently posted on Facebook missed the mark in representing women of color thoughtfully." It also said, "Dove is committed to representing the beauty of diversity," adding, "we deeply regret the offense that it has caused." Ad Age said it was unclear who created the ad. Ogilvy & Mather is Dove's creative agency but Unilever's in-house U Studios also does digital creative. Marissa Solan, a spokesperson for Dove, told The New York Times that the ad was "intended to convey that Dove Body Wash is for every woman and be a celebration of diversity. But we got it wrong and, as a result, offended many people." She said Dove is "re-evaluating" its internal process for creating and reviewing content.
| | WHY THIS MATTERS: The video is so blatantly racist that it's hard to see how it could have passed any type of internal review process. But as the Times reports, the Dove ad is just the latest in a long line of tone-deaf ads by many companies. In fact, in 2011, Dove was criticized for another ad, this one showing three women standing side-by-side, each with lighter skin that the woman next to her. Behind them were signs reading "before" and "after." The "before" sign was positioned behind the black woman and showed cracked skin. The after sign was behind a white woman showing smooth skin. | Three Takes: Ad Age | NYT | Adweek
| | | | #2 Fusion Media Rewards Engaging Ads | The Univision-owned digital media company targeting millennnials, whose 12 sites include Gizmodo, The Onion and Jezebel, is implementing a new approach by determining which ads are getting the most viewer engagement and rewarding the advertisers with bonus impressions, The Wall Street Journal reports. Fusion Media will use technology from ad tech firm Performance Pricing LLC, called Impressions Per Connection, to gauge the quality of the ads by monitoring the number of user clicks and mouse-overs. The highest engagement rates get higher bonuses, which are capped at 20% of the total impressions purchased.
| | WHY THIS MATTERS: Mike McAvoy, executive VP of sales at Fusion Media, says, "When you have premium content, you want the quality of advertising to live up to the quality of journalism and the comedy." Jeff Goodby, co-chairman and partner of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, says this type of technology which compensates advertisers for making better ads could lead to a higher standard of ads throughout the industry. But Joshua Topolsky, editor in chief of The Outline, a digital news startup, says compensating advertisers for making a good ad will not stop ad avoidance by consumers. "You're just putting lipstick on a pig," he told The Journal. | | A Take: WSJ | | | | #3 FT Demands Exchanges Pull Ads from Spoof Sites | The publisher has demanded that four top ad tech provides – Verizon Communications' Oath, SpotX, Comcast Corp.'s FreeWheel and BidSwitch – remove Financial Times ad video from their exchanges, according to a Digiday report. The Wall Street Journal says FT also contacted PubMatic and SpotX and made similar requests. Under the practice known as "domain spoofing" fraudsters create sites disguised as those of legitimate publishers and marketers buy ads on them believing them to be legit, in this case the FT.com site, when they are not. They pay for the ads thinking the money is going to FT but it instead is paid to the fraud sites which often contain questionable content. Two reports from DoubleClick Bid Manager showed large levels of purported FT video impressions across platforms ranging from 70,000 to 12.6 million impressions. The tech companies are cooperating to remove the questionable ads.
| | WHY THIS MATTERS: Domain spoofing hurts advertisers, who are paying a premium to advertise on specific legitimate websites only to have their ads run in places where their messages are either not seen or seen by people they don't care to reach. At the same time, the money paid for the ads is not going to the publishers it's intended to but into the pockets of fraudsters. | Two Takes: Digiday | WSJ
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| | 12.1 | | Time in hours and minutes each day that U.S. adults spent with major media, according to eMarketer estimates. They spend the most with digital media (5 hours and 53 minutes), followed by television (3 hours and 58 minutes), radio (1 hour and 26 minutes), print (24 minutes) and other media (21 minutes). | – Reported by eMarketer
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| | NBC Wins as 'Sunday Night Football' Grows | by Michael Malone
NBC scored the top ratings Sunday, as Sunday Night Football led the network to a 4.3 rating in viewers 18-49, per the Nielsen overnights, and a 15 share. Fox was runner-up at 3.0/11. Football Night in America did a 2.7 on NBC, down 21% from last week's pre-game, before Sunday Night Football, Chiefs versus Texans, went up 6% to 5.2. Fox had an NFL overrun, then The OT at 4.7. Comedies The Simpsons did a 2.2, up 57% from last week, Ghosted a 1.4 that stayed level with its premiere, Family Guy up a tenth of a point at 1.4 and Last Man on Earth also up a tenth at 1.0. CBS scored a 1.0/3, as 60 Minutes weighed in at 1.1 (with an NFL lead-in a week before, the newsmag had rated a 2.0) while Wisdom of the Crowd fell 29% to 1.0. NCIS: Los Angeles slipped 17% to 1.0 and the premiere of Madam Secretary did a 0.8, up a tenth from its May season finale. ABC did a 0.7/2. The Toy Box scored a flat 0.4 and the season premiere of America's Funniest Home Videos a 0.9. Shark Tank fell 15% to 1.1 and Ten Days in the Valley dropped 33% from premiere to a 0.4. Univision rated a 0.5/2 and Telemundo a 0.3/1. | |
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| • MEGHAN McCAIN was named co-host of ABC's morning talk show, The View. The daughter of U.S. Senator John McCain brings a Republican voice to the daily panel that includes Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Sonny Hostin and Paula Faris. McCain will also be a contributor to ABC News and will make appearances on Good Morning America and This Week. She was most recently host of the Fox News show Outnumbered and also hosted the late-night news program TakePart Live on Pivot TV.
• CHARLES TREVAIL was named CEO of Interbrand Group, the Omnicom brand consultancy. He was most recently CEO at Omnicom's customer and brand agency C Space, which is being merged into Interbrand. He succeeds Jez Frampton, who is retiring.
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