17558: Bye-Bye, AI…?

 

More About Advertising published an Op-Ed titled, “Why don’t we just forget about AI?”

Um, because most White holding companies and White advertising agencies would have nothing to hype if everyone forgot about AI, creating a chorus of crickets.

The acronym should be revised to pose this question: “Why don’t we just forget about Advertising Industry?”

Why don’t we just forget about AI?

By Stephen Foster

Later this week Cindy Rose, a former Microsoft executive, will doubtless tie herself in knots trying to explain how “agentic” deals with the likes of Google and Meta (would you join them for dinner without the benefit of a Roman-style taster?) will help realise WPP’s ‘Elevate28’ transformation.

WPP has certainly gone all-out for Artificial Intelligence, firstly under former boss Mark Read and now under Rose although it’s far from clear how it can help an agency group apart from cheaper production. Brandtech’s David Jones hit the nail squarely on the head the other week when he told the FT: “We like to believe that every person who creates is brilliant, but if you watch the basketball [on television] this week, most of the ads are terrible…95 per cent of people don’t produce much that’s creative or original. So why not do that with fast, efficient machines and let the geniuses handle the other 5 per cent?”

So why don’t agencies concentrate on the clients who do care about impactful communications (Adidas being a case in point as it bunged money into the World Cup only to frighten Wall Street’s algo-driven horses) and leave the AI wizards to squander billions on yet more ways to get bots to talk to bots? Even the IAB acknowledges that such ads gain only the most fleeting attention.

Agencies through their history have gone careering away after the latest fashion (AI now obviously but also influencers or creators as they like to be known) with no real evidence that it delivers better results than ads created by people and placed by people in media that people actually consume?

AI has become a vast circular industry where the chip makers fund the companies who buy their products. Sooner or later the musical chairs will stop and there’ll be a financial crash that makes 2008 look like a practice run. That’s if these fiendish AI inventions don’t keep escaping and bring the whole world crashing down anyway.

Agencies and sensible advertisers should steer clear.

17557: Glassdoor + Indeed = Fireworks + Firings.

 

Adland isn’t the only industry staging questionable M&A deals.

Better together: Glassdoor is part of Indeed…?

Glassdoor has been hyping its Glassdoor Recruiter services, designed to help job seekers by mimicking Indeed offerings.

Ironically, the acquisition will likely lead to redundancies, restructurings, and RIFs, resulting in Glassdoor and Indeed ex-employees needing Glassdoor and Indeed to find new livelihoods.

17556: On Creating And Influencing DEIBA+ Change In Adland.

 

The previous post about Equinox and its White advertising agency perpetuating racist Asian stereotypes warrants additional commentary.

Advertising Age spotlighted creators who criticized Equinox via Instagram and TikTok, including Eunnuri Lee and Ed Choi.

Lee—who boasts 108K Instagram followers and 237K TikTok followers—skewered Equinox and the responsible advertising team, ultimately vowing to boycott the fitness brand.

Choi—who boasts 322K Instagram followers and 680K TikTok followers—went directly after the Equinox Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Digital Officer, calling her out by name and blasting her professional credentials.

Creators and influencers have infiltrated Adland, delivering content, promoting brands, and wielding considerable power.

Yet can they impact progressive change, succeeding where trade organizations, clients, protesting insiders, legal advocates, and politicians have failed? That is, can they bring DEIBA+ to Adland?

17555: On Gen Z Loneliness.

 

MediaPost spotlighted a report from Stagwell enterprises—The Harris Poll and Alison Worldwide—casting Gen Z as the loneliest generation in history.

According to the data, 51% of Gen Z feel lonely on the weekend; 74% stay home for at least half of their monthly weekends; 73% make staying home their default weekend agenda.

Given Gen Zers will unlikely land a job with Stagwell or any White advertising agency in Adland, at least they won’t have to worry about working on weekends.

Report Finds Gen Z Is The Loneliest Generation

By Richard Whitman

They may be the most digitally connected generation in history but they’re also the loneliest, at least on the weekends, according to new research from Stagwell’s The Harris Poll and Allison Worldwide. 

Reasons vary, but for many it’s financial or avoiding big, alcohol-focused gatherings. And some just don’t have a lot of IRL friends. 

The report found that 51% of Gen Z say they feel lonely on a typical weekend — the highest of any generation and 37 points higher than Boomers. 

74% stay home at least half of their weekends each month, and 73% say staying home has become their default weekend plan. 

49% of Gen Z adults say they don’t have enough friends to spend time in person and 47% stay home to recharge their physical and mental health. 

Per the research, young people’s social life is increasingly screen-based, with 65% saying they connect more through their phone than in person. 

88% actively avoid at least one social setting, including large groups of near-strangers (39%), loud crowded spaces (38%) and spending a lot on a single night out (36%). 

73% of young people want more social settings where alcohol isn’t the focus.

17554: Adland Hospitality Is A Nauseating Notion.

Advertising Age published a perspective opining Adland could enhance its value to clients by embracing restaurant-style hospitality.

It’s an odd notion, as most restaurants—especially in the QSR category—struggle mightily to survive.

The holding companies complicate matters by presenting similar menus and serving bland offerings.

What’s more, White advertising agencies are unhospitable to anyone who isn’t a White man or White woman.

And non-White advertising agencies must cook with crumbs.

Why hospitality is advertising’s most human competitive advantage

By Heather Freiser

Coming out of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, one message was impossible to ignore: in the age of AI, human connection matters more than ever.

Across stages and conversations, industry leaders debated how artificial intelligence will reshape creativity, productivity, and the future of agency work. That question has only grown louder as industry leaders debate AI’s impact on agencies.

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested that AI could eventually reduce brands’ need for agencies, it sparked plenty of debate. Regardless of whether you agree with him, it raises an important question: what value can’t be commoditized?

I think we’ve been overlooking one answer: hospitality.

In advertising, we celebrate strategic thinking, creative excellence, and operational rigor. We rarely celebrate hospitality.

We should.

Hospitality is one of the most overlooked strategic capabilities an agency can develop. It’s not soft. It’s not a personality trait. It’s the ability to make people feel seen, supported, and genuinely cared for while you’re doing the work. And in an industry built on relationships, that capability compounds over time.

I didn’t learn that in advertising. I learned it in restaurants.

Before joining the agency world, I spent years working in—and eventually owning—restaurants. The restaurant business teaches you something agencies often forget: people don’t just remember what you delivered. They remember how you made them feel.

Restaurateur Will Guidara captures this perfectly in Unreasonable Hospitality: “Service is black and white. Hospitality is color.”

Service is delivering what’s promised. Hospitality is how you make someone feel while you deliver it.

Agencies have become incredibly good at service. We deliver on time, on budget, and on brief. We optimize workflows, build airtight processes, and obsess over execution. Those things matter. They’re the cost of entry.

But they’re rarely what people remember.

A few years ago, I was in New York during a production shoot with my kids. After a long day, they desperately wanted to visit the M&M’s store in Times Square. I kept saying, “Maybe tomorrow.”

While we were eating dinner at the hotel, the front desk manager walked over carrying a giant bowl of M&M’s.

“I heard someone was hoping to make it to the M&M’s store tonight,” he said. “Here’s your amuse-bouche.”

My kids were ecstatic. My stress disappeared. In one thoughtful gesture, he solved a problem I hadn’t even realized I was carrying.

Years later, I still remember his name.

That’s hospitality.

Guidara encourages restaurants to reserve a small portion of their time and budget for creating moments guests never expect. He calls it “the 5%.”

The 5% isn’t where the margin is. It’s where the memory is.

What would happen if agencies adopted the same philosophy?

Maybe it’s remembering something a client mentioned months ago. Making an introduction without expecting anything in return. Anticipating a problem before it becomes an email chain. Creating meetings that leave people energized instead of exhausted. Finding small ways to reduce someone else’s stress simply because you can.

None of those gestures appear in a statement of work.

All of them build trust. And trust builds loyalty.

As AI makes execution faster and more accessible, agencies will increasingly compete with firms using the same tools, the same models, and many of the same strategic frameworks. The gap between capabilities is shrinking.

The experience of working together isn’t.

AI can generate ideas. It can build decks. It can accelerate production.

It can’t notice that your client hasn’t eaten all day. It can’t remember the story they shared six months ago about their daughter’s graduation. It can’t create the small, thoughtful moments that transform a transactional relationship into a lasting one.

That’s hospitality.

If Cannes reminded us of anything this year, it’s that our industry’s future won’t be determined solely by the technology we adopt. It will also be shaped by the humanity we choose to preserve.

Great work will always matter.

But in a business where AI is rapidly commoditizing execution, hospitality may become the most valuable competitive advantage agencies have left.

17553: Equinox And Its White Advertising Agency Are Sweating Over Racist Workout.

Advertising Age reported on an Equinox campaign featuring imagery publicly condemned as racist Asian stereotypes.

Based on the corporate response, Equinox apparently agrees with the protestors, as the ads are being fully pulled and official apologies have been formally posted.

The responsible White advertising agency—Angry Gods—also admitted to cultural cluelessness. Plus, Angry Gods pledged charitable donations to the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. Expect scholarships to follow in performative style.

Ironically, the campaign theme reads, “Question Everything But Yourself.”

Equinox and Angry Gods failed to question everything while executing the work. And the co-conspirators will probably not question themselves for being insular, insensitive, ignorant racists.

Equinox pulls AI ad after creators call out racist Asian stereotypes

By Gillian Follet

Equinox, the luxury fitness company, has pulled an AI-generated out-of-home ad and apologized after dozens of Asian content creators accused it of perpetuating racist stereotypes.

The ad, part of a campaign that broke in January, featured an AI-generated image of an Asian woman’s head mounted on a metal rod, with a hand pressing a thumb between her lips; the image was juxtaposed with a real photo of a different woman, including her exposed torso. Over the past two weeks, creators across Instagram and TikTok have condemned the ad as dehumanizing and fetishistic.

“Asian women have already been treated as dolls, submissive sex machines, anime girls, robots, decorative objects [and] mail-order fantasies for decades now,” said artist and content creator Eunnuri Lee in a video posted Friday. “We are constantly positioned as hypersexual beings and also not fully human.”

Lifestyle creator @relishwithreese called the ad “so disturbing” in a video uploaded earlier this month, questioning what message Equinox was attempting to convey. Soogia, a food creator with nearly 3 million total followers who uses only her first name online, called the ad a “literal embodiment” of the sexualization and objectification of Asian women. And Ed Choi, a creator and podcaster, went further, directly calling out Equinox’s chief marketing and digital officer, Bindu Shah, in a video criticizing the ad for “overly sexualiz[ing] Asian women.”

Though conversation around the ad spiked over the past two weeks, it originated as part of the company’s “Question Everything But Yourself” campaign, launched in January. Made with Los Angeles-based design and strategy agency Angry Gods, the ads addressed the proliferation of AI imagery online by pairing absurd AI creations—Pope Francis in a puffer jacket, a high-heel-wearing Justin Trudeau wrapped around a stripper pole—with images of real people. The idea was to position human strength as a counterpoint to digital fakery.

The ads ran across social, digital and out-of-home placements.

Equinox told creators in comments and DMs last week that it was “in the process” of “fully remov[ing]” the ad from OOH placements. The ad has been taken down from 10 Equinox club locations across New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco where it was still on display, an Equinox spokesperson confirmed today.

“This campaign was designed to explore the false realities created by AI and social media, including fake leaders, fake bodies, fake food and fake robots,” another spokesperson for the company said in an email. “While that was the creative goal, we recognize there was an unintended impact, and we apologize for that. We made the decision more than a week ago to fully remove the image—a choice guided by our core values of inclusivity, mutual respect and empathy, which ensure the Equinox community is a place where everyone is welcome.”

The agency, Angry Gods, also apologized for the offending image in an Instagram post shared Friday, then edited the statement the same day after facing criticism for initially referring to the backlash as a “discussion.” 

      

“Whatever we intended, an artificial, eroticized Asian woman’s face is not a neutral symbol of ‘fake,’” the agency stated. “It carries a history, and we should have seen that before the work ever shipped.” The agency will be donating $5,000 to the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, with agency founder and CEO Krish Menon contributing an additional $5,000 to the organization, Angry Gods stated.

Some OOH displays from the campaign, including the ad at the center of the backlash, had remained up for months in cities such as New York before Equinox removed them. While some creators had occasionally discussed the ad since it went up in January, Equinox earlier this month posted a video of its gym on New York’s Bond Street, where the ad was prominently displayed in one of the windows. The video has since been deleted.

Several of the creators who criticized the ad, including Choi, pointed out that the unsettling image of an Asian woman’s disembodied head didn’t match the surreal yet playful tone of the rest of the campaign.

“Hey, Equinox, if you want me to ‘question everything,’ I’m gonna ask: why the f*ck did you … think [this] was a good idea?” Lee said in her video. “Why did you need to use an Asian woman’s body? And I’ll also ask this: who the f*ck was in that marketing room?”

The controversy around the ad echoes the backlash American Eagle faced almost a year ago, when its Sydney Sweeney campaign was criticized as racist and overly sexual. American Eagle stood by the campaign, with Craig Brommers, the retailer’s chief marketing officer, later telling Ad Age that the polarizing campaign actually boosted the brand’s business.

17552: FYI Stagwell Q2 BS.

  

MediaPost reported White holding company Stagwell experienced the biggest Q2 in its history.

“Stagwell was founded as a tech-forward challenger to the legacy players for the vision of providing customers with everything from global full service to platform self-service solutions,” gushed Stagwell CEO Mark Penn, adding the Q2 performance “is validation of these founding principles.”

Sounds like Stagwell adopted the founding principles of all holding companies—except Stagwell is smaller, dumber, and worse than the rest.

Stagwell Q2 Driven By Digital Transformation, Political

By Steve McClellan

Stagwell reported second-quarter net revenue of $632 million, up 6% with organic growth (excluding M&A and currency impact) of 5%. 

The company reported a record $171 million (annualized revenue) in net new business wins for the quarter and $540 million in wins over the last twelve months. Wins in the quarter included IBM, Adobe, Mondelez and Heineken. 

The company reiterated full-year net revenue growth guidance of between 8% and 12% and upgraded its earnings-per-share forecast to between $1.03 and $1.17. It did not provide a net organic revenue growth guidance for the full year.   

“This was the biggest second quarter in the history of the company,” CEO Mark Penn told investors and analysts on an earnings call Thursday morning.  

“Stagwell was founded as a tech forward challenger to the legacy players for the vision of providing customers with everything from global full service to platform self-service solutions,” he added. Performance in Q2 “is validation of these founding principles.” 

The standout performance was delivered by the company’s digital transformation operation (essentially Code And Theory and Instrument), which posted an 18% net organic growth gain for the period. Communications (PR and political consulting) was up 12%.  

Those were the two biggest drivers of growth for the company in Q2. Media and marketing advisory firm Madison & Wall noted that “activity at the rest of the business was much more tame, with Media & Commerce (i.e. Assembly) up 1.0%, The Marketing Cloud (the company’s smallest segment) up 4.1%, and Marketing Services (the largest segment at 37% of net revenue) up just 0.5% organically.” 

M&W noted: “This marks two consecutive quarters of flat growth for Marketing Services, the segment that houses the creative agency networks 72 and Sunny and Anomaly along with Harris Poll and NRG, which is a meaningful deceleration from the 6.6% organic growth in 3Q25.”

By region, the U.S. was up 7% and the U.K. posted a 13% gain.   

Adjusted pre-tax earnings was $109 million in Q2, up 15%, which Penn attributed to “continued focus on cost management.” 

M&W noted that Stagwell did not explicitly disclose political revenues, which likely represented a 2% bump in reported organic revenue. “Consequently, the as-reported 5% organic net revenue growth was likely closer to 3% on a basis that’s comparable to other agency groups — still stronger than most of them, other than Publicis.”