Adweekly: Regulators Find a New Way to Ban Calvin Klein's FKA Twigs Ad
Welcome to Adweekly, the LinkedIn newsletter giving you an inside look at the advertising industry. Each edition will highlight some of Adweek's most important stories from the past week to help marketers, agency leaders, creatives and publishers better understand the industry they work in. By senior media reporter Mark Stenberg
Good morning, and welcome back to Adweekly.
In January, a Calvin Klein ad featuring a nearly nude image of the musician FKA Twigs was taken down in London following a ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the U.K., which deemed the promotion "likely to cause serious and widespread offense."
On Tuesday, following public criticism over the decision, the ASA partially capitulated, saying it had been wrong in its initial conclusion. The about-face marked the first time a decision made under its guidelines around objectification had been overturned, the agency confirmed to ADWEEK.
But it still held that the imagery was “overtly sexual” and that the billboards should be banned so children under the age of 16 could not see them in an “untargeted medium.”
The debacle is only the latest example of the double standards facing women and women's issues in advertising, writes ADWEEK brand editor Rebecca Stewart . The issue highlights the degree to which, as much as sentiment around gendered issues appears to have evolved, the reflex of institutions like the ASA remains to default to censorship in moments of uncertainty.
As the CMO's Role Evolves, Companies Are Shifting How They Refer to Top Marketers
Does your company have a chief marketing officer, a chief brand officer, a chief growth officer or a chief strategy officer?
While their responsibilities might be the same, the exact nomenclature can vary wildly, which highlights the nebulous nature of the profession, according to ADWEEK data and insights senior reporter Paul Hiebert .
领英推荐
According to data from the executive search firm Spencer Stuart , 36% of top marketers have the conventional CMO title, 31% have "marketing" in their title, 13% have the CMO title plus another function, such as "communications," and another group of top marketers have titles without the word "marketing" in them at all.
What does it all mean? The situation, researchers at consulting firm 麦肯锡 argue, has made the top marketer’s task more byzantine due to competing budgets and overlapping responsibilities.
"Companies have taken that CMO job and broken it across multiple roles,” said Robert Tas , a partner at McKinsey.
Google Is Paying Publishers to Test an Unreleased Gen AI Platform
Last week, I got the scoop that Google, through its program the Google News Initiative, kicked off a private experiment through which it pays small publishers a five-figure sum to test an unreleased suite of generative AI tools.
The beta tools let under-resourced publishers create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article.
According to the conditions of the agreement, participating publishers must use the platform to produce and publish three articles per day, one newsletter per week and one marketing campaign per month.
The program does not require that these AI-assisted articles be labeled.
The suite of tools is the latest foray from Google into the world of gen AI. In the past two years, it has released a tool codenamed Genesis, which can produce whole news articles and was privately demonstrated to several publishers last summer.
Other AI-enabled products, including Search Generative Experience and Gemini, are available for public use and threaten to upend many of the commercial foundations of digital publishing.
Architectural Designer| Arts and Tech investor | Founder of Atmosfera Studios
7 个月It’s two fold because the concern can be there sure for “children”, but it also is a slight overreaction because there have been way more risqué ads done before.
Training & Quality assurance | Customer experience | Account management | Integrity and reliability | Teamwork | #OpenToWork |
8 个月Qué estupid0 en éste tiempo seguir usando la imagen femenina para publicidad. Con o sin tecnología, muy bajo igual.
Marketing and Business Strategy Director - Santuário Nacional de Nossa Senhora Aparecida and Executive Director for Rainha Hoteis
8 个月Hi ADWEEK Team! Could you please inform the contact info to send a press release regarding a disruptive marketing e-book?
Relationship Coach, Writer, Speaker, and Radio Show Host
8 个月My always unpopular opinion is that feminism encourages women to play both sides of an issue and men are left chasing their tails in response to them about a very broad and (more) fluid topic: propriety. It doesn't truly exist in any society or culture anymore. What is sexual? What is suggestive? What is offensive? What is appropriate? Ask 5 different people, you'll get 20 different answers; but they're just 4 different versions of the same question that is politically motivated, supposedly. But it all comes back down to one simple bottom line: insecurity. The decision is not ever based on propriety or respect. It's based on not pissing people off. Because the only thing that is certain in business? Pissed off people don't give you their money. Splitting hairs is not going to change the fashion industry, because it's not going to change society. As long as there is emotional confusion within the genders themselves, these are just going to be more and more of the same thing like this. It's getting old.