Ad Agency

Growing up in Puerto Rico, Ingrid Otero-Smart was so introverted she rarely spoke in school.  Yet as President and CEO of Casanova McCann, Otero-Smart runs one of the largest multicultural advertising shops in the country. The firm works with blue-chip clients including Nestlé, U.S. Army and the California Lottery. This year, it was the most-awarded U.S. Hispanic agency at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the second year in a row Casanova earned that recognition.  By Court Stroud

Republica Havas announced the appointment of Jason Wolske and Danny Alvarez as the agency’s Executive Creative Directors, effective immediately. Based out of Republica Havas’ Miami headquarters, Wolske and Alvarez will report to Luis Casamayor, Co-Founder, President and Chief Creative Officer. In the newly created roles, they will lead the agency’s creative team across a roster of major clients.

The 2016 ANA report on media transparency was a welcome and long-overdue wake-up call for the global advertiser community. By highlighting the existence of nontransparent trading practices in the U.S. media market — by most measures the largest and most sophisticated in the world — the report focused many national and global advertisers' attention on the issue of transparency in media. It was the first stepping stone on the journey to more transparent media trading.

Earlier this year the ANA launched the Trust Consortium in partnership with our outside counsel, Reed Smith LLC, to help address the issue of trust between marketers and the advertising ecosystem. The Trust Consortium consists of subject matter experts committed to working together to keep trust on the front burner, emphasizing transparency, integrity, and growth for the overall health and well-being of the industry.  By Bill Duggan

I’ve wanted to do a post about trends in agency positioning ever since I wrote about agency taglines. What I expected to find was a significant overlap in the key terms and positioning statements across agencies. When I circled back to write it up, however, that wasn’t the case as much as I’d expected. The reason, I suspect, is that I selected some of the top-ranked agencies for this exercise. Were I to revisit this topic with a larger group of agencies, including small to midsize agencies that are not necessarily in the “top 100,” I think I’d find a huge amount of redundancy in positioning statements.  by Mark Duval - The Duval Partnership

Robyn Loube,has been named Vice President of East Coast Operations for Sensis. Loube will oversee Sensis offices in DC, Atlanta, and Little Rock

The advertising industry, struggling to find ways to generate growth, has instead turned on itself, extracting value from partners rather than finding better ways to provide value to customers. The outcome is predictable, and the consequences may be difficult to reverse.  By Michael Farmer