Ad Age Insider

If you want to see what's driving ad spending, just look for the net gains. Bradley Johnson joins us to break down the most interesting findings in our annual Leading National Advertisers report, out this week (hint, FANG has developed a big bite). We also dive into Datacenter's 2019 agency rankings to draw some big and small conclusions about the state of the industry in 2019.

What happens when Big Football meets Big Beer? Until now active pro athletes could not appear in beer ads during games. The head of sports marketing for Anheuser-Busch discusses what a rules change means for Bud Light, and dishes on the brewer's overall sports marketing strategy.

An advertising vet who started his own search consultancy in 2007 Avi Dan brings with him close to 4 decades of experience. As the rest of the agency world packs for Cannes, he breaks down how the festival has changed over the years, and who he thinks win big. We take a 30,000 foot view of the entire landscape, from consultancies in the agency space, the in-housing trend, data and creativity, and more. Avi also gets a little personal and describes his life growing up in Tel Aviv and his stint in the military, including a volunteer tour during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Depending on whom you ask, this is either the worst time to be in TV, or the most exciting. Count Linda Yaccarino and Josh Feldman among the hopeful. The two share the company's moves to modernize measurement across the industry, and NBC's plans to launch an ad supported streaming over the top service next year--to do battle with the Netflixes and Hulus of the world. They also explain why Cannes is going through something of a renaissance.

Usually when you hear about consultancies in the marketing and advertising space these days, it's in the context of them luring talent away from agencies or making full blown acquisitions. But last year when MediaCom was looking to hire a new chief client officer, it went right into the lion's den. In hiring Bhavana Smith, a six-and-a-half year Accenture vet, the WPP media network is seeking to burnish its digital transformation capabilities—and take a page from the consultancy playbook.

Rishad Tobaccowala, who has logged nearly four decades at Publicis, joins the podcast to discuss, well, a little bit of everything. In a conversation that kicks off by unpacking Publicis's recent announcement that it will be acquiring data marketing juggernaut Epsilon, Rishad breaks down the industry from his own unique vantage point as someone who has spent time in creative, digital and media. We discuss how the holding company model is being forced to evolve and what it means to be a brand in 2019. And we get into what growth means to him both as a chief growth officer and as a human being. Stick around and you might pick up a few life hacks.

In this week's Ad Age Ad Lib podcast, we interview the chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, who tells us about his legendary 65-year history in advertising, including why he pointed a cannon--literally--at Leo Burnett's offices and the inside story of the "Big Bang" merger that created Omnicom (and why he had to keep changing rooms at The Palace Hotel.) Reinhard also discusses his admiration for Bill Bernbach, who he calls "the Picasso of the business," and tells us where he sees the ad industry going in the future.

Peter McGuinness wasn't always a yogurt guy. Before joining Greek yogurt brand Chobani in 2013, he had a career in ad agencies. On this episode of the podcast, he discusses making the transition to the brand side, and the fresh self-awareness that brought him. He describes working for a brand with purpose and how Chobani is grappling with the current dip in U.S. yogurt sales as more alternatives come to market.

People are conducting more than a billion searches for GIFs on messaging apps a day. At the heart of their results is, usually, Giphy, a shareable online database of those short looping soundless videos. Giphy's Alex Magnin who claims to net in the ballpark of 10 percent of the search traffic of Google, joins the podcast today to discuss all things GIF and messaging, what it looks like from an advertising and branded content perspective, plus what the most popular GIF search terms are. (Hint: They might just restore your faith in humanity!)

Our conversation with Shelly Lazarus, Ogilvy's chairman emeritus, covered a lot of ground—from what it was like to be a woman ad exec in the 1970s to today's #MeToo movement to where holding companies are going in the future.