Table of contents for December 2023 in Adweek

Hiring challenges and low employee morale are putting pressure on agencies’ stringent return-to-office (RTO) mandates, according to staffing firm WorkReduce. Most holding companies are rolling out and doubling down on RTO policies. More than half—52%—of the 1,000 ad industry employees surveyed said their companies either expect them back in the office at least one day each week, or that they plan to. But these policies aren’t good for employee morale and contribute to churn. Those navigating RTO mandates are 40% more likely to seek new work and 96% more likely at risk for burnout than remote employees. At the same time, agencies are having trouble staffing open roles because applicants aren’t willing to go back to the office. “You get four times the qualified applicants for a remote role than…

Shiv Gupta is widely considered an early ad-tech guru, founding ad-tech education firm U of Digital to help tech workers be more savvy at their jobs. The platform reaches employees at 44 companies including Yahoo, Pinterest, Nielsen and FreeWheel to teach the nuts and bolts of programmatic advertising. U of Digital’s newsletter, which is a primer of the biggest ad-tech news of the week, reaches more than 7,000 subscribers. But Gupta started his career not particularly interested or knowledgeable about advertising at all. BE OPEN TO NEW AVENUES A little more than 15 years ago, Gupta took an Advertising.com operations job, hoping to do something interesting on the business side of tech. In this role, he discovered a pleasant challenge in programmatic advertising. “Technology’s always changing. It’s confusing,” he said.…

There’s famously a disconnect between the CMO-CEO positions, with underlying tensions around how marketing plans are executed, budgeted for and measured. A 2022 report from U.S.-based ad agency Boathouse illuminates just how wide the gap is, with just 32% of CEOs saying they trust their top marketer. For James Rowe, managing director at adam&eveDDB New York, bringing the top boss into the agency fold is one way to close this chasm. He asserted: “A great CMO will understand that cultivating a bond between their CEO and agencies will ultimately lead to a stronger relationship and more powerful and effective work. “This doesn’t mean the CEO being directly involved in the work output, but it does mean facilitating moments for [shared] thinking and having both formal and informal conversations about their…

Asad Ayaz Chief brand officer, The Walt Disney Company; president, marketing, The Walt Disney Studios and Disney+ Asad Ayaz has only been Disney’s first chief brand officer since April, but he’s already overseen some of the company’s biggest global campaigns to date. He’s been head of marketing for the legacy studio since 2018 and took on the elevated role, directly reporting to CEO Bob Iger, to raise the Disney brand across the entire company. “His strategic, operational and creative prowess, along with his profound passion for Disney, will make him an outstanding steward of our stories, characters, brands and franchises,” Iger said upon Ayaz’s promotion. In 2023, Ayaz and his team led the global campaigns for The Little Mermaid—which also had the most extensive promotional campaign yet for a Disney…

“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” That quote from Henry Ford is as relevant today as it was a century ago, when his Model Ts were rolling off the assembly line. In this, Adweek’s final issue of 2023, we are highlighting those who move forward together, and whose connections and collaborations are leading to business success. As Jason Notte reveals in his cover story with Naomi Osaka, the collective work of her team, not the individual wins on the court, brings her joy today. “I think the most exciting thing is being passionate about all of the businesses, wanting to learn and wanting to see where it takes us,” Osaka told Notte. Osaka was one of the special guests at Adweek X, our newest…

Forty years ago, Americans kicking off the holiday shopping season decided to kick one another instead. It was a doll they were all after, and most would stop at nothing to get it. In Charleston, W.Va., 5,000 shoppers began fighting over the 120 dolls that the Hills department store had in stock. “They knocked over tables, fighting with each other,” manager Scott Belcher told The New York Times. “There were people in midair. It got ugly.” Things got even uglier at the Zayre department store in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where a thousand people who’d waited in line for eight hours rushed the store, trapping manager William Shigo behind a counter. “Get back—you’re breaking my legs!” he yelled, wielding a baseball bat. All of this for a 16-inch blob of stuffed nylon…

Google is giving buyers more tools to avoid ads showing up next to unsavory content following a new report by Adalytics. According to the findings, large brands that bought Google search ads ended up running on its lesser-known Search Partner Network (SPN), which includes pornographic, sanctioned and pirated websites. Buyers are automatically opted into advertising on SPN, but they have the option to opt out on Search and Shopping ad campaigns. For other campaign types, like AI-powered Performance Max (Pmax) and Universal App, buyers could not opt out of SPN inventory. Though a Google representative called Adalytics’ claims “wildly exaggerated,” the platform is temporarily allowing brands to opt out of placing their ads on SPN for all campaign types. Media buyers were told the opt-out for Pmax is available until…

A client CEO may not be someone ad agency teams are used to engaging with, but Saatchi & Saatchi London chief strategy officer Richard Huntington believes it’s time to start speaking their language. In October 2023, Huntington was part of a dedicated Publicis Groupe team that helped U.K. telecom brand EE build the blueprint for its biggest overhaul ever, in which it replaced legacy business BT as the group’s flagship consumer brand. “New EE,” as client CEO Marc Allera has christened it, was launched into the stratosphere with a thumping ad campaign highlighting how the brand shows up for customers every day, whether they are gaming or working. A closer look at that pivot, though, revealed it to be much more than a marketing push. It was a wholesale business…

‘Equity is really important, and believing in the brands and the partners that you’re with pays off really well.’-Naomi Osaka In January, Naomi Osaka announced to the world that she’d be stepping away from tennis in 2023 as she prepared to give birth. Her daughter, Shai, arrived in July, and—a little more than two weeks later—Osaka returned to her tennis training to begin fulfilling a dream: “for my kid to watch one of my matches and tell someone, ‘That’s my mom.’” To the casual sports fan and Osaka’s career statistics page, that’s her year in summary. To the multiple people and enterprises that comprise Osaka’s business universe, it’s a segment of a larger story. At the gated home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., where Osaka has been training, she brought together…