Ad Age Insider

Kevin Hamilton has experienced first-hand the pressure to pull off a Super Bowl ad. As the senior director of marketing at Avocados From Mexico, Hamilton is charged with promoting the produce on TV's biggest stage. In this podcast, we explore the continued importance of TV advertising, the gender gap in Super Bowl ads and how he decides what's funny.

Brian Nolan has a music fan's dream job. As the senior vice president of Capitol Records' in-house division focused on brand partnerships and licensing, Nolan is tasked with bringing new or under-exposed music to potentially huge audiences. In this podcast we touch on his work with artists ranging from Sam Smith to Migos to Halsey. We also explore how the music industry has adjusted to and evolved with the rise of streaming—and how he decides what to surface for advertisers, movies and TV shows.

If you've spent any time in agency circles, you haven't seen a lot of people who look or talk like Harry. Tall, bearded, often tie-died and bolo tied, Bernstein, who goes by Harry Bee, is as apt to talk about clean living and guided meditation as he is trap music and Adidas collabs. In September, Havas acquired The 88, the social media and digital shop he founded in 2010, and brought him on as chief creative officer of the New York office. We talk today about his non-traditional approach to advertising.

Recent research has found that smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home will be in 55 percent of all U.S. households by 2022. That's a lot of skills. To help us break down what this all means — for consumers, marketers, content providers, non-profits and more — we're joined by Doug Robinson, CEO of Fresh Digital Group. Robinson's team has built some 400 skills for clients ranging from ESPN to BMW and UNICEF to Toys R Us among many others. Robinson breaks down how consumers are using these smart speakers, what's coming down the pike in terms of the tech, and what people just get wrong about voice.

In a note at the end of 2017, Quartz publisher Jay Lauf gave his thanks to readers and advertisers, making it a point of pride that the commercial team at Quartz had been "very deliberate" about never putting its inventory on open exchanges. Sounds a bit in-the-weeds, but in a year where brand safety was top of mind for publishers and brands alike, Quartz's five-year resistance to go the programmatic route seems downright prescient today. We discuss this perspective, as well as what it means to be "Quartzy," and how the digital media landscape is shaping up in 2018.

The co-founder and CEO of the travel media company Skift, Ali is a digital media veteran. We talk about his childhood in India and what made him want to get into media. He takes us on a tour through internet 1.0 with stops at Inside.com and PaidContent, the first company he founded. And we arrive at the here and now, where Ali is an advocate for niche media brands and the pivot to quality.

The Simulmedia CEO helps us make sense of the Disney-Fox deal, breaks down the state (and future) of addressable TV, explains the agency "existential" crisis -- and more.

It's been just under two years since DDB brought Wendy Clark — a former top marketer at Coca Cola — on board as its North American CEO. And it's been just under one year since she brought on Ari Weiss as the Omnicom network's first chief creative officer. Together the two discuss creativity, talent and the highs and lows of 2017 for DDB specifically and the industry at large.

The New York Magazine editor is Ad Age's Editor of the Year — and the title he's edited since 2004 is the Magazine of the Year. Today he sits down with Ad Age editor Brian Braiker to discuss his time at New York, how the media landscape has changed in the past 20 years, the future of magazines in general, Harvey Weinstein, Rolling Stone and more.

The CEO and co-founder of Fatherly, a New York City-based media start-up that caters to millennial dads, is himself not a father. Rather Rothman, whose last gig was as Thrillist's first business-side hire, is a digital media vet. On this episode of Ad Lib, he discusses building a media business on the back of curated content and newsletters — and ultimately scaling up original content, going deep on Facebook and expanding into events. He also shares the details of a certain X-rated patent he attempted to file at the ripe old age of 11.