For all our good qualities, our website has not historically been one of them. Up until now, it looked a little Clinton Era, a little Netscape if you will. So we’ve got a new look and a new commitment to bringing you consistently exciting stories from the worlds of marketing and advertising

Our reader mailbag was full of complaints that people could only read our deliberately named Friday Brand Roundup one day a week. So, since we are devoted to providing only the finest customer experience, we are henceforth calling this column Your Weekly Brand Roundup. Is it as rivetingly catchy? Probably not, but we do it all for you. This week we’ve got a peanut butter brand re-igniting a consonant controversy (a consonant-roversy?), a grocery store that encourages shoplifting and a fake musician propped up by a CPG company. Go on, have at it!

Steve Jobs wasn’t born until 1955. The term Silicon Valley wasn’t thrown around until 1971. But long before that, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were dreaming up Northern California’s original garage startup. Brand Innovators is in Palo Alto this week for a marketing summit at HP Inc.’s headquarters. (They’ve outgrown the garage by now.) In honor of the occasion, we did some digging to unearth 11 fun and, in some cases, obscure facts about the Silicon Valley OGs.

UNTUCKit launched in 2011 out of a humble Hoboken apartment. Its founders had a crystal-clear mission: make shirts that looked good untucked. It was slow going at first but that all changed after a modest 2013 radio campaign started to drive buzz.

A burger brand proudly showing close-ups of moldy food. A vintage hip-hop group going from Bone to Boneless. A 44-ton ice palace. This is Your Friday Brand Roundup.

What does the future of brand marketing look like? We asked noted digital analyst Brian Solis and a trio of CMOs to read the tea leaves for a complicated landscape increasingly defined by changing customer expectations and breakthroughs in tech. It’s an understatement to suggest that marketers have a lot on their minds in 2020.

A male colleague relayed a story he heard from a female co-worker to Chelsea Render, Director of Marketing-NA for Bosch Building Technologies, an off-putting experience the woman had at a tech trade show. “To his credit,” Render says, “he came to me and said ‘Have you ever experienced this?’ Well, it was something that happens to me at every trade show!”

An impressive roster of experts pulled back the veil on the world of entertainment marketing at last week’s Brand Innovators L.A. Summit inside Universal Studios.

Two telecom giants merging. The death of the cookie. Bikers exhaling on a country road. Fried chicken footwear. This is the weird, wild world of Your Friday Brand Roundup.

We’re living in a moment where marketers are desperately seeking a more comprehensive and data-driven view of their customers, both on an individual and an aggregated segment level. An upcoming Brand Innovators webinar will focus on tools that can help them down that road. The webinar (coming up on Thursday, February 20) will focus heavily on Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), which have driven a lot of buzz in the last year and attracted the attention of marketers, agencies, digital transformation consultants and ad tech companies.

Stanley Pearle could hardly have imagined the complex ways in which marketing and tech would transform the eye care business when he founded Pearle Vision back in 1961. Doug Zarkin, the brand’s current Chief Marketing Officer, spoke to us about the hazards and blessings brought on by tech and data as well as the need to balance art and science in the craft of marketing.

If America is the land of the underdog, then challenger brands must be one of our greatest creations. There’s something endlessly fascinating about a bold outsider revealing a new truth or a better way while throwing a few rocks at the establishment.

We’re hoping some of our ad and marketing friends took a personal day on Monday. Why? At a minimum, they will have stayed up til all hours watching the Super Bowl (the game plus every single ad with no bathroom breaks) and then taking in the Twitters afterward.

By last Friday, Super Bowl fever was starting to grip Miami. The Big Game was 48 hours away. Some 200,000 people were pouring into the region for the weekend. Many were already bleary-eyed after a week of daytime events and evening parties. It was in that spirit that Brand Innovators dragged a couple hundred of those good people out of bed Friday morning for a Sports Marketing Summit hosted by our Burger King friends in their Miami HQ.

“We are trying to savor our heritage but turn people toward the new.” The words of Mitsubishi Motors CMO Kimberley Gardiner (spoken onstage at a recent Brand Innovators event) reveal something about brands that have more history than currency.

Brand Innovators hit the ground running in Miami on Thursday. It was Day 1 of a two-day pre-Super Bowl activation and it was nothing short of spectacular. We started with a few hours of star-studded, sports-themed BI programming inside the Hard Rock Hotel in nearby Hollywood, Fla.

How did we get here? How did the Super Bowl become advertising’s undisputed shining moment on the annual calendar? How did American culture create this spectacle within a spectacle? Well, it was a long and winding road but the answer in the end is eyeballs. So many eyeballs. And all of them in one place for one moment, locked in on one single event–a near miracle in this age of fragmented audiences and scatter-spray media channels.

Like a mini-retreat or a veeeery short semester abroad for marketers, the Brand Innovators Sundance VIP experience brought some terrific people together for five days in the heart of Utah’s gorgeous Wasatch Mountains.

We came, we saw, we conquered. The Brand Innovators marketing summit during CES week in Las Vegas got 2020 off to a fast start as more than 600 attendees listened to 129 speakers representing dozens of brands. The buzz was enough to help #BIsummit trend on Twitter, carrying thoughtful conversations to even more people.

It’s Friday. You worked hard this week. Your brain is at max fatigue. So let’s fix that with a small dose of sarcasm and some shallow headline summaries, shall we?

It turns out the words hospice, hospital and hospitality are all derived from the same Latin root. L. Jasmine Kim, Chief Marketing Officer for Sutter Health, mentions this for reasons that go beyond wordplay. Her Northern California-based not-for-profit health system and others like it are coming around to the idea of “customer experience” as something that must be at the heart of patient/health care interactions.

Fernando Machado is in complete control of the intersection between marketing and culture. That’s the first thing you notice when you spend even a little time with the Burger King Global Chief Marketing Officer. Machado clearly has the mind of a creative but he’s able to effortlessly connect the dots between the power of great creative, the attention and recognition it can engender and the business results that inevitably follow when brand-building gains momentum.

New Year, same old Friday Brand Roundup. We’re back with our usual level of snark, cutting through the noise to the best brand news of the week so you don’t have to. Enjoy!

As marketers, we can learn a lot from bees. Their “brand” has been around for over a hundred million years (and if we don’t screw things up, they’ll be around for a hundred million more). One key to bees’ survival is their “waggle dance,” which signals the location of the most reliable food source to the rest of the hive. Interestingly, a significant portion of the hive completely ignores this information and goes out in search of new food sources that are farther away, often coming back empty-handed.

For marketers, the brand is the most sacred asset. We have to build it and we have to protect it. But brands today are under threat. Consider, for example, a company that sells candy. If its ad plays on YouTube before a video about sugar being unhealthy, this would denigrate the brand – and effectively work against the promotion.

The talk for Brand Innovators’ third and final day at CES coalesced around a single theme: women in marketing leadership. The conversation rightly delved into the current state of gender, diversity and inclusion issues but many panelists also touched on broader leadership tactics and, of course, where marketing is headed in 2020.

A fast food juggernaut fresh off winning 40 Cannes Lions. A credit card company obsessed with brand safety. A gym that refuses to call itself a gym. An advertising pioneer and legend. Day 2 of Brand Innovators @ CES 2020 was a feast for the senses–a rich, broad discussion that left us exhausted yet thrilled at the state of brand marketing at 2020’s outset.

All Vegas hyperbole aside, the opening day of Brand Innovators @ CES 2020 was nothing short of sensational. We heard from an esports visionary building an empire from scratch. We heard from a toy manufacturer taking risks–and winning–in an effort to keep up with the times. We heard from a legacy insurance brand transforming for the digital age. We heard from a bold cola company that hijacked the hometown of its rival on Super Bowl weekend.

CES has been a high point on the annual tech calendar ever since its debut way back in 1967. In the 50-plus years since its birth, it has witnessed every gadget, predicted every tech trend and fad, and chronicled every boom and bust even remotely familiar to the American consumer.

While practitioners of marketing are inevitably experts at ground-level insights, Chief Marketing Officers hover higher above. They are by necessity experts of the holistic, the 30,000-foot view of brand-building. We asked a few of our favorite CMOs for their thoughts on the year just ended and the one that lies ahead. Here’s what they had to say.

We kicked off the festive season by highlighting a few holiday ads we thought stood out. Now we’re back with a bookend second installment.

Last week we managed to sneak in a Lizzo reference. This week it’s “Sausage Party.” Oh, what a world. This is your very special and festive and perhaps sprinkled-with-nutmeg Friday brand roundup.

Day 2 of Brand Innovators’ December New York City takeover also happened to be our very last event of the year. (Whew!) The Friday summit landed us inside the downtown offices of Horizon Media, a highly-respected agency that has worked with GEICO and Corona among other notable clients.

Without question, this has been Brand Innovators’ biggest year yet so it seemed fitting that we closed out 2019 with two big events in the holiday-decked Big Apple.

Without question, one of the highlights of last week’s Brand Innovators Summit at SAP in New York was an appearance by the enterprise software giant’s global Chief Marketing Officer Alicia Tillman.

The week–and the year–are winding down but the brand news just keeps coming. Here without delay is your Friday brand roundup.

Marketing inclusively. Crafting content for a “slow burn.” Building micro communities to tap into audience passions. These were a few of the topics on display as leading marketers from some big brands convened inside Seattle’s Four Seasons for a Brand Innovators marketing summit. On the minds of many: how to attract young consumers and make them loyal customers for the long term.

Brand Innovators capped off a busy week in Atlanta with an intimate three-hour marketing deep dive on the future of customer engagement. The central question as the program unfolded: how can brands leverage data to learn more about their customer so they can deliver the best possible experience?

“The purchase cycle has become a purchase cyclone.” That statement from Darren Moore, Product Marketing-Measurement Lead at LiveRamp, set the tone for a terrific half-day Brand Innovators marketing deep dive last week in snowy New Jersey.

Stop the presses! We just read that PERSONALIZATION was voted the top marketing word of the year in an annual ANA survey. (It defeated other buzzworthy terms like equality and inclusion, data and in-house.) Are you all buying that as the winner? Based on a heavy sampling of 2019 Brand Innovators events, that sounds about right to us.OK, without further adieu, here is your Friday brand roundup.

Some may treat a Snow Day as a chance to huddle under a blanket and watch a movie. But our Boston-based Brand Innovators community is far heartier than that, turning out in big numbers for a lively marketing summit at the Encore Boston Harbor just a day after a major winter storm.

As Black Friday makes way for Giving Tuesday, we asked Lisa Bowman–the Chief Marketing Officer of United Way Worldwide–to share her thoughts on how brands can use this day as a springboard to create real, long-lasting impact the whole year round. Here’s what she shared with us.

Are the conditions right for a massive 1-2 brand punch in the name of Black Friday and Cyber Monday? With unemployment down, wages rising and consumer confidence rallying, it’s certainly possible. Adobe Analytics projections have 2019 sales numbers for the twin towers of the early holiday season up 19-20% from 2018. If that comes to pass, it means consumers will spend somewhere in the region of $17 billion.

How does change happen? We’re talking about real change, the kind that alters the way we behave and the things we believe in a lasting way.

Two stats from a recent IBM study tell you everything you need to know about the state of customer experience in 2019: 80% of CEOs believe their company is delivering an exceptional customer experience. 78% of people do not believe companies understand them as unique individuals.

Happy Friday, marketing fiends. Lots to share this week: sweet cereals and sweet brand acquisitions, legacy brands feeling fresh and people getting angry for a good cause. Read on to see who made the brand news that mattered.

Round and round she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows. What we do know in the marketing world is that CMOs aren’t staying in their jobs as long as they used to. One oft-cited reason is that, as marketing becomes more and more tech-driven, CMOs are under enormous pressure to deliver and excel on both the creative and analytical sides of the business.

“People see ads. People read content.” The words of Wendy Foster (Director-Content Strategy, Nativo), spoken at last week’s Brand Innovators Content Marketing summit in New York, should ring in every marketer’s ears. They perfectly summarize the distinction between offering nothing to your audience and offering something. Something of value (we hope). It feels like the essence, the foundation of the very best content marketing is contained in that statement.

We know, you had a busy week. You work hard and you missed 99.4% of the news. This is our attempt to catch you up on a few stories from the world of brand marketing as you peace out on a Friday.

Americans will spend more than $450 billion this year on holiday gifts. For some retailers, holiday sales can represent as much as 30% of their annual revenue. So exactly how important is the holiday season to marketers? It’s everything.

If you ever want to see right in front of your eyes how a so-called “legacy” brand can present itself as thoroughly modern, visit the Nestlé USA headquarters on the banks of the Potomac River in Rosslyn, Virginia. The brand may be ~150 years old but the building is a beacon of 21st-century cool and the people who work there clearly have their eyes fixed on the future.

What place does humanity still hold in an increasingly data-driven marketing world? And how can brands still grab attention against a cluttered content backdrop? These were among the profound questions asked last week as Brand Innovators came calling at the world’s largest beverage company.

The fake cobwebs had barely been taken down when the advertising world–as it does–abruptly shifted gears and moved on from the fake gore of Halloween to the sweet Frank Capra violins of the holiday season. Didn’t Christmas-related marketing used to wait for Thanksgiving to clear out? Perhaps so. But if those days ever existed, they’re long gone now.

It’s easy to take a 150-year-old brand for granted. And it’s forgivable to think you know who they are after all these years, though history teaches us a different lesson. So, ahead of our trip to Nestlé’s Washington-area HQ next week, we thought we’d do a little digging to see who they really are in 2019. You might be as surprised as we were to learn some of it.

Our second trip to Georgia in 10 days found us at Georgia-Pacific headquarters inside a gorgeous theatre space. Atlanta is home to so many great brands and we were thrilled to reconnect with old friends from Coca-Cola, IHG, Kids2, Delta Air Lines, Focus Brands, UPS and SunTrust. We were likewise ecstatic to add two new brands–Instacart and PÜR Cosmetics–to our community here.

The advertising world leaves no holiday unturned. And while the heartstring-tugging of the Christmas season is not far off, let us first bask in the spooky jack-o’-lantern glow of Halloween.

Last week’s back-to-back Brand Innovators summits in Dallas underscored the richness of the area, both in terms of brands that are present in that region and the smart, sophisticated marketers who call The Big D home. The Probiotic Pops (below) were merely an appetizer–the main course was a dizzying two-day discussion of data, speed, innovation and inspiration.

If there’s a city with friendlier people than Atlanta, we have yet to discover it. No wonder the Brand Innovators fall tour is making not one but two stops in The ATL.

A quick history lesson on our hosts: the company was founded by Dr. Amar Bose, who got his start as a teenager repairing broken radios in his parents’ Philadelphia basement. He would later attend MIT where he learned to design electronics. When Amar founded Bose Corporation in 1964, he established an identity built around scientific research but guided by human interests. You could argue his customer-centric approach was way ahead of its time.

Insights and wisdom were everywhere last week as Brand Innovators visited Baltimore-based McCormick & Company for a marketing summit. But we have to be honest: despite our best efforts, no single knowledge-bomb was as oddly satisfying as the mustard ice cream served to attendees.

We spent Advertising Week inside glorious Viacom HQ on Times Square in New York. We broke bread with our Viacom friends and welcomed in marketers from dozens of other brands for a fast-paced three-day program designed to channel everything that’s happening (and it’s a lot) in the marketing world.

Some highly accomplished women took center stage on Day 2 of Brand Innovators’ Advertising Week New York summit. Gathered again at Viacom’s Times Square offices, we heard from a dazzling collection of industry leaders who opened up about both the successes and stumbling blocks they’ve faced along their career journey as women.

We are thrilled to unveil the 2019 class of Brand Innovators’ Top 100 Women in Brand Marketing and Women To Watch. But do we really still need to single out women and acknowledge their successes? Can’t we just treat them as, you know, people? Hard as it is to say in 2019, there are still compelling reasons to make the distinction.

It’s not like we need a special invitation to come to Los Angeles, one of the world’s most irrepressibly sparkling cities. In addition to the beach, the restaurants and that evergreen Hollywood Walk of Fame, nerds like us love coming there because we can spark deep conversations about the collision of media, entertainment and brand marketing.

Why does your brand exist? What problem does it solve? How can it make someone’s life better? Brands that successfully address these questions will lead their respective industries in the coming years and decades.

Since the inception of loyalty programs more than century ago, much has changed in the wayconsumers interact with companies and how companies work to foster consumer loyalty.

Never have so many talked so much about a topic so little quantified as the marketing organization of the future. There are many airy proclamations of big, vague changes lying ahead