Ad Age Insider

The brand wizards behind Snoop Dogg's career, Cashmere has done work on "Black Panther," "Get Out," "Atlanta" and more. Beyond entertainment, it also counts as clients BMW, Jack in the Box, Adidas, and Diageo among others. Cashmere's Ryan Ford joins us to break down what it means to be a multicultural agency in 2019, the current state of the influencer landscape, and what brands get right — and wrong — when it comes to tapping into the culture.

Iconic brands are struggling to remain relevant in today's food industry. More evidence came with Kraft Heinz's recent $15 billion asset write-down. We examine the fallout and why Kraft's fall could be good for ad agencies.

Group Nine Media was formed in 2016 with a $100 million investment from Discovery and today rolls up four media brands: Thrillist, NowThis, the Dodo and Seeker. The rationale for consolidation, according to CEO Ben Lerer: Bigger is better. By combining the brands under one holding company, he says, he has gained a seat at the table with advertisers. He joins us today to discuss those conversations and his relationship with platforms like YouTube and Facebook. He also addresses the rumors that Group Nine and BuzzFeed have been in consolidation talks of their own lately.

If you wrote iHeartMedia off as DOA last year, you may have made the call too soon. Last month the radio giant gained court approval for a plan that would allow it to emerge from bankruptcy. Its CEO, Bob Pittman, joined the company in 2010 as an investor when it was still called Clear Channel. His mandate: completely transform the company. A quick glance at a few recent stats suggest how far he's come: The multiplatform player boasts more than 120 million registered users, is the number one all-in-one digital audio service with more than a billion downloads and is the top commercial podcast producer in the business. Pittman—a co-founder of MTV and one-time CEO of AOL Networks--joins the podcast to talk all things radio, streaming and his remarkable career.

Independent ad exchange OpenX raised eyebrows in the programmatic realm last month when it announced a five-year agreement totaling more than $110 million with Google to use its cloud computing services. The news came just a month after the supply-side platform laid off some 100 employees as it prepared for the deal and continues to push into the video arena. Tim Cadogan, CEO of OpenX, joins the podcast to discuss the arrangement and how the programmatic landscape looks in 2019.

In a time where there is no shortage of gloom and doom in the agency landscape, the job falls to Marla Kaplowitz to be its biggest booster. Kaplowitz joins this episode of Ad Lib to field questions about the agency talent crunch, consultancy creep, brands bringing advertising capabilities in-house and, of course, that little FBI investigation into agency media-buying practices launched last fall.

With its first Super Bowl ad, Bumble set out to empower women both in front of and behind the camera. On this special Super Bowl edition of the Ad Lib podcast, Laura Hutfless, partner at FlyteVu Agency, which worked on the ad, discusses how the social networking app pulled together a Big Game commercial in six weeks with a team composed almost entirely of women.

Michelob Ultra will air two commercials in Super Bowl LIII – one featuring robots and the other making a direct appeal to female football viewers. Azania Andrews, VP marketing, at the Anheuser-Busch brewer, joins this special Super Bowl edition of the Ad Lib podcast to discuss just what goes into creating an ad for the Big Game and how Michelob is trying to change how women are portrayed on marketers' biggest stage.

A publisher of podcasts, radio shows and online articles about sports and sports culture, Barstool Sports has a robust commerce and pay-per-view events business to feed its rabidly dedicated fanbase, known as Stoolies. It is, to hear CEO Erika Nardini tell it, the publisher model of the future. All of this despite — or perhaps because of — a habit of courting controversy. The company has repeatedly been taken to task for language and behavior that ranges from juvenile to full-blown misogynistic. Nardini unpacks all of that and more on this episode of Ad Lib.

Bloomberg Media has been experimenting across the board lately — from its consultancy play to an aggressive over-the-top streaming strategy to TicToc, a video partnership with Twitter. Joining us on the podcast is chief global revenue officer Keith Grossman, who breaks down why these are both the best of times and the worst of times to be in digital media -- and why there's never been a better moment to be a media brand that knows what it stands for.