The 80s pop star takes a break from shooting a Frito-Lay commercial to discuss the music industry, becoming a meme, and what he's been up to during the pandemic.

Ben Howe of Howe Creative, one of The Lincoln Project's key video collaborators, on the making of 'Mourning in America'—and what it takes to go viral

In a time period when there seems to be little cause for optimism, Ad Age spoke with Omnicom Media Group CEO Scott Hagedorn on where he sees bright spots starting to emerge within his agency and the industry overall.

In September, satellite radio company Sirius XM offered to plunk down $3.5 billion to acquire streaming music service Pandora. Joining us today is Pandora svp of ad innovation Lizzie Widhelm to break down what the Sirius offer means to Pandora — and vice versa. Sirius has more than 36 million subscribers in North America, Pandora has 70 million monthly listeners — fewer than 6 million of whom pay for the service. We discuss the state of advertising in the streaming space, the future of audio and why she's bullish on podcasts. We also discuss why she thinks she didn't experience noticeable gender discrimination until she reached senior leadership positions. Oh, and we get into what her favorite TV show was growing up. 

This weekend some 60,000 sneakerheads, hip hop aficionados, jocks, gamers, design nerds and foodies will descend on Long Beach, California, for the fourth annual ComplexCon. The consumer-facing pop culture bonanza is the physical expression of media brand Complex, which CEO Rich Antoniello has been driving for the past 17 years. Rich — who is outspoken on just about any topic you can throw at him — joins us today for a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from media's pivot to revenue diversification (after it's failed pivot to video) and how Complex's joint acquisition by Hearst and Verizon in 2016 has been playing out for the brand. We talk about why he's bullish on over-the-top streaming platforms and how his own background as an agency and print guy left him perfectly unprepared to be a modern media CEO.

An Aussie giant of a former Rugby player, Troy Ruhanen joined TBWA as president and CEO four years ago. Today he joins us on the Ad Lib podcast to spill some tea on his competitors — including WPP and Publicis — and give us some insight into clients including Apple, McDonald's and Nissan. We discuss what their pain points are, what his agency's big wins over the last four years have been, and growing up blue collar in Brisbane.

Launched in 2005 in the ashes of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Walrus is a fiercely independent shop that's worked with such clients as Amazon, HBO, and Staples. Frances Webster — who co-founded Walrus with her husband, Chief Creative Officer Deacon Webster — has been outspoken about the need to train more women for agency leadership roles. She discusses the decision to offer media and buying services, reconciling programmatic with creative, and her clients' biggest pain points as marketers gear up for the ANA conference next week.  

For the past 18 months, Andrew McKechnie has been building Verizon's in-house agency, 140. It's no easy task. Networks, unlike the smartphones that run on them, are tough to make especially sexy. Still, he comes by the gig honestly. McKechnie had most recently served as global group creative director at Apple, after holding creative director titles at agencies including DDB, Y&R and JWT. Andrew joins us to discuss the pros and cons of moving from adland to the brand side, the tension between creativity and technology, and the challenges specific to Verizon.

After a five-year stint at BuzzFeed and a brief run as the CEO of DailyMail.com the last thing you would probably think to do is start a TV network. From scratch. Yet that's precisely what Jon Steinberg did. The former President and COO of BuzzFeed launched Cheddar Inc in 2016, a new media company with the initial goal of becoming the CNBC for millennials. Two and half years in, Cheddar is a bona fide media concern, a live and on demand video news network that broadcasts weekdays from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ Marketsite, and the Flatiron Building in New York alone. Steinberg joins us to discuss the Cheddar business model, skinny bundles, the future of over-the-top streaming video and where he goes from here. 

As two of the four co-founders of media and entertainment company Refinery29, Philippe von Borries and Piera Gelardi have used a pro-women, taboo-shattering ethos to build a behemoth catering to the interests and cravings of young women that reaches an audience of upwards of half a billion globally across platforms. It is an audience that brands love (and to hear Refinery's founders tell it, an audience that loves brands back). The couple joins the podcast today as their 29Rooms event packs up in New York and prepares to head to California in December. The two of them — who have also spent the last 13 years as a married couple — discuss the journey, working and living together, and what comes next. 

"We're not in the advertisement business. We're in the engagement business," says Nick Brien, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network Americas. The advertising company was formed in 2013 to manage parent company Dentsu's operations outside of Japan. Dentsu now generates more than half of its revenue — 59 percent last year — from outside its home market. Yet Dentsu and Dentsu Aegis Network are less known and less understood in the U.S. than the big holding companies WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and IPG. Dentsu, and therefore Brien, has a stated goal of becoming a 100 percent digital business by 2020. We get into that, his background in an industry that he says he loves, creativity (something Dentsu Aegis Network is not particularly known for), acquisition goals and why he's tired of the narrative of the big bad consulting companies infringing on agency turf.

Chances are, even if you are an avid consumer of short form streaming videos, you've never heard of Studio 71. But you've seen their work — or at least your kids have. From Canadian YouTube superstar Lilly Singh to vlogger Roman Atwood to Good Mythical Morning with Rhett and Link — Studio 71 is the media agency behind videos that generate a reported 9.5 billion views across platforms every month. The company, co-founded by Reza Izad, helps creators make money and grow their offering for advertisers, and through merchandizing and intellectual property. Izad joins us today to talk about the streaming media space, where there's been no shortage of sturm und drang over the past year or so. 

When Hernan Lopez left his post as president and CEO of Fox International Channels in 2016 to launch a podcast company people asked him a straightforward question: Are you nuts? But he saw parallels between the nascent medium of podcasting and the cable industry of the early 2000s. The company he started is called Wondery, and today it produces premium podcast fare like Dirty John and Business Wars. Wondery's newest show is called Dr. Death. It was released just this Tuesday and is already topping the iTunes charts. Lopez joins me today as the podcast upfronts get underway in New York to break down the landscape as he sees it.

Oscar Martinez, Senior Brand Director of Tecate, joins the pod to talk about the brand's marketing overhaul, which includes a move away from boxing and into music. We break down the brew's "Mexico is in US" campaign that emphasizes the brand's border-town heritage while seeking to appeal to drinkers who are unapologetically Mexican-American. 

Michael Ventura wrote the book on empathy. Literally. The founder of the New York strategy and design consultancy Sub Rosa is a multi-hyphenate. When he's not advising a portfolio of Fortune 500 clients and progressive start-ups, he is running an experiential shopping venture called Calliope with his wife, running an art gallery and event space, publishing a newsletter called La Petite Mort — the french expression for orgasm — and running an eastern and indigenous medicine and healing practice. Now he's an author, too. His book "Applied Empathy" came out earlier this spring and aims to promote how empathy can be a competitive advantage in business. He joins us on this episode of Ad Lib to discuss empathy, what he means by it, how he arrived at it as a guiding principle and how it's won him some surprising clients, like West Point Military Academy. 

When Terry Young founded the agency Sparks & Honey in 2012, it was billed as a "next-generation" agency that really gets culture. Last month the Omnicom shop announced that it was — you guessed it — repositioning as a technology-led cultural consultancy. If it sounds like yet another agency scrambling to maintain relevance with buzzwords, Young says it's an outward reflection of what they've been up to internally for years. He joins us on the Ad Lib podcast to talk about how the agency maps culture. Every day at noon everyone stops what they're doing for an hour for a briefing that distills the Internet's latest (and next) obsessions. We get into what frontiers fascinate him today – space and voice top the list -- and how a mid-career Peace Corps stint continues to inspire. 

A zen koan for 2018: How, as a media company today, does one build both scale and trust? It might be easy to cultivate one, but it often comes at the expense of the other. The USA Today Network has managed to do both. With 109 local papers scattered throughout the country, the newspaper company has certainly cobbled together scale. And the journalists on the ground are putting the lie to the idea of "fake news," picking up three Pulitzers for the network this year alone. Still, news is a tough business. And local news is even tougher. USA Today Network has seen continued growth in digital revenue, but not enough to offset declines in traditional advertising. Tasked with solving that riddle is Kevin Gentzel, who joins us on the podcast today.

On the first day of her job as CEO, Kiran Smith broke her left foot. What could easily be interpreted as a bad omen turned out to be a blessing in a cast: Smith says the boot she's had to wear these past five weeks have endeared her to new staffers and broken the ice with clients. She could use all the help she can get: In its second quarter earnings release last month, parent company Vivendi blamed weak organic results of its agency network Havas on "the impact of Arnold's underperformance." A veteran marketer — her most recent gig was as CMO at Brookstone — with no agency experience, Smith says she brings with her a fresh perspective to a gig that is sorely in need of one. She joins the podcast today to discuss the challenges she faces in her new job, what she brings to the table as a former marketer and what she's learning from clients like Progressive and Jack Daniels.

Publicis Groupe has had quite a year. In June of 2017 Maurice Levy stepped down as the holding company's CEO, handing the reins over to Arthur Sadoun. That same month, the company made waves at Cannes for saying it would abstain from sending work to awards shows for a full year in order to devote resources to an internal tech platform called Marcel. Still, Publicis missed its revenue targets in second-quarter earnings reported last month -- despite winning some major accounts in the first half 2018. Serrano joins the podcast to discuss what distinguishes the Publicis strategy at a time when holding companies are under pressure from clients to cut costs and under siege from consultancies and tech giants Google, Facebook and Amazon. Plus we talk about her childhood as the family's black sheep — and she tells us about the time she gave advertising legend Lee Clow some really bad advice.

For a publication with "news" in its title US News doesn't focus much on what's happening in the papers these days. Formerly known as US News and World Report, the publisher is perhaps best known to the average reader for its annual college rankings. But it is actually something of a digital pioneer. The media brand ditched its print magazine in 2010 to go all digital and shifted its focus to pure service. While its core business is still advertising-based it does a monster business in lead generation, or, as CEO Bill Holiber calls it, performance marketing. Something seems to be working: The brand sees roughly 40 million monthly visitors, about 10 million going to each of its four core subject areas: education, health, government and money.

The Fox Business anchor joined the "Ad Lib" podcast before her news-making interview with President Trump last week. Here, Bartiromo discusses her evolution from a CNBC pioneer—where she was the first reporter to broadcast from the stock exchange floor—to a somewhat more ideological Fox Business headliner. We discuss her "Money Honey" nickname and industry sexism, the future of cable news and the demographics of her audience.

With 22 years heading up an independent agency under his belt, DiMassimo Goldstein's Mark DiMassimo believes traditional advertising's days are numbered. Of course, he would say that. A long-ago JWT creative who logged years at holding companies, DiMassimo says he saw the light when he realized agencies fundamentally failed to meet clients needs. Proud to never have been to Cannes over the span of his entire career, DiMassimo discusses using advertising to fight the opioid epidemic and why, for the first time in his life, he finds himself agreeing with Martin Sorrell.

At a time when ad tech is besieged by brand safety concerns, transparency issues and industry-wide consolidation, the Trade Desk has been having a solid run. The demand side programmatic ad buying platform — have we lost you yet? — generated $85.7 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2018, a 61 percent jump from the same period last year. Today we are joined by Brian Stempeck, chief client officer for the Trade Desk and rhythm guitarist for the company band, whose job is, in part, to translate the bewildering jargon of the industry and parse the challenges and opportunities around things like cross-device targeting and leveraging data, specifically as it pertains to addressable TV.  We get into all that, plus what it's like going toe-to-toe with Google, what GDPR means for the future of ad tech consolidation, and what this week's AT&T acquisition of AppNexus means for the industry.

Michael Wolff has some thoughts about conflict. A consummate media insider for decades, the journalist-provocateur-entrepreneur shot into the public consciousness in January with the publication of his sensational peek inside the Donald Trump White House, "Fire and Fury." He, along with the rest of the advertising and media ecosystem, is in Cannes for the International Festival of Creativity. In a panel with adman Jeff Goodby, Wolff riffed on Trump's psyche. On this episode of Ad Lib, recorded earlier this week on the Croisette, Wolff opened up about the success of the book, the nature of fame – and our collective fascination with conflict, understanding Trump, the role of the journalist and more. 

Curtis Hougland, the founder and CEO of communications and strategy shop Main Street One, explains the social and political science behind voter/consumer persuasion, and why the time is right for campaigns and brands to leverage older (55+) influencers.

You may not have heard of David Shing, but you probably know about Shingy. The self-styled "digital prophet" at Oath – the Verizon-owned juggernaut that comprises AOL, Yahoo, the Huffington Post and some 50 media and b-to-b brands – is in Cannes on a mission that seems counterintuitive to what a digital prophet ought to be all about. He wants people to dial down their anxiety-inducing reliance on their phones. On this pop-up Cannes-themed edition of the Ad Lib podcast, we caught up with Shingy, who was en route to his keynote address. Here, we discuss tech dependence, Oath, 5G, living a bit more mindfully – and what exactly it is that he does.

In a challenging time with so much gloom and doom out there, Paul Marobella remains a consummate optimist. The North American Chairman and CEO of Havas creative says the current climate reminds him of the mid-1990s, "when digital was going to change everything." Marobella joins the Ad Lib podcast today to discuss the advantages of being owned by Vivendi as opposed to a traditional advertising holding company, creating a culture of creativity and what he's looking forward to in Cannes.

An expansive marketer in an era of the incredible shrinking CMO, Rajamannar joins the Ad Lib podcast to discuss what he calls the CMO existential crisis. We talk about marketing at scale in a time when people hate ads and have the power to block them, the surprising durability of the 20-year-old "Priceless" campaign and increasing gender diversity at his company's ranks. We also talk about a recent Mastercard campaign that received a bit of social media backlash for promising to donate meals to starving children every time footballers Lionel Messi and Neymar Jr score a goal during the World Cup – an ad that the company ended up pulling.

You're going to be hearing Ken Auletta's name a lot this month. Auletta, who has been writing the Annals of Communication column for The New Yorker since 1992, is the author of a new book about the industry's current existential crisis. "Frenemies" comes out June 5. He'll also be at Cannes at the end of the month interviewing Martin Sorrell on stage. This, however, is our moment to turn the tables on Auletta and interview him for the Ad Lib podcast. We discuss privacy, Sir Martin, platforms, publishers and his least favorite ad of all time.

When Andrew Swinand was tapped to be Leo Burnett's North America CEO last January, he had a daunting remit. Burnett had long been a flagship Chicago agency, but after losing McDonald's in September 2016 — and a few other accounts — the legendary creative shop had lost some of its luster. Swinand, who had most recently been at sister Publicis shop Starcom Mediavest, brought in a history of data and analytics to the role of burnishing Burnett. He joins us today to discuss all things Leo Burnett and Publicis, data and creativity, sitting out Cannes, consultancy creep and how an incident when he was an infantryman during the Gulf War helps inform him what's really important. 

Terri Meyer and Sandy Greenberg are the co-founders of the New York independent shop Terri & Sandy. Both refugees from the big holding company world — Meyer and Greenberg had worked together as a creative team at both J. Walter Thompson and FCB — the two bring a big sensibility toward small agency life. On this episode of Ad Lib we discuss life as a small agency, building—and maintaining—agency culture, and how to get on the radar of big marketers. (Side note: it's not too late to buy your tickets for our Small Agency Conference and Awards July 17 and 18 in beautiful Marina Del Rey Los Angeles! Check it out at adage.com)

The major broadcast networks wound down the 2018 upfront week Friday. Top-line takeaways: In 2019, look forward to more reboots, shorter ad slots and lots of live sports. If the scripted programming leaves a little to be desired there's still a staggering amount of money on the table: Roughly $10 billion in advertising for the broadcast networks and an additional $10 billion for cable. Ad Age media reporters Jeanine Poggi and Anthony Crupi break it all down in a spirited special upfront edition of Ad Lib. 

Earlier this year, John Seifert announced that Ogilvy would be undergoing a "refounding," which he dubbed the shop's "Next Chapter." A 39-year veteran of the legendary agency, Seifert joins us to talk about what that entails. "Times are tough" he says in his surprisingly candid fashion. Not just at Ogilvy, but across the board — including for the agency's clients. We discuss the encroachment of the consultancies into the advertising space. We'll hear his take on his former boss, Martin Sorrell, and what his departure from WPP means for the holding company. We also get to hear some personal stories about David Ogilvy himself and why, as a child of a single mother in 1950s, the #MeToo and Times Up/Advertising movements resonate with Seifert personally. 

With giant clients like Honda and Farmer's insurance, independent, LA-based agency RPA punches above its weight. Tim Leake's mandate, when he joined the shop in 2014, was to nurture a culture of growth and innovation within the agency as it scaled. Having come most recently from Hyper Island, the Swedish school and consultancy, Leake brought with him a zest for business transformation that wasn't yet quite all the rage it is. Now RPA's chief marketing officer, Leake discusses the agency take on business transformation, the industry talent crunch, creativity and data, indie shops versus the holding company behemoths in a post-Martin Sorrell world and why ad agencies, despite being good at selling things, are so bad at selling themselves.

When Bonnie Kintzer became president and CEO of Trusted Media Brands in 2014, it was still called the Reader's Digest Association. Job number one became bolstering the brand, reviving it financially after a series of bad investments and changing just about everything in the way it operates — starting with the name. In addition to Reader's Digest, the company also publishes Taste of Home, Family Handyman and a number of other titles. Kintzer joins the Ad Lib podcast to explain how Reader's Digest, against all odds, has not only survived. but is thriving. A third of its 12 million monthly readers are millennials she says. She shares the strategy and tactics behind bringing Trusted Media Brands back from two bankruptcies, and the company's digital play across all of its titles. 

4A's Executive VP of Government Relations Alison Pepper discusses how she and other industry organizations fought a 3 percent tax on advertising services and the sale of "personal information" proposed by The Washington, D.C. City Council as part of a plan to combat a growing budget deficit, and won. She says the fight isn't over though.

For almost exactly a year now, Hanya Yanagihara has been molding T Magazine, the New York Times' lifestyle and culture magazine, in her image. A recent refresh brought in a new logo and typeface, but the full bleed art, smart cultural journalism and yes the ads — so many ads — are still going strong. Hanya is also the author of the critically acclaimed 2015 novel A Little Life. Here, she discusses her tenure as T Magazine's editor one year in, fiction writing versus non-fiction editing, where the lush magazine fits in the broader New York Times ecosystem, and why — in an era when the Times is doubling down on digital — she herself doesn't tweet and has never been on Facebook. 

Under the hood of the Drudge Report, and other conservative sites like it — including Political Insider, Smith & Wesson Forum and MRC Newscasters — is its advertising marketing firm Intermarkets. And under the hood of Intermarkets is Erik Requidan, vice president of programmatic strategy. In an era when the advertising community likes to talk about inclusivity and embracing divergent viewpoints, Requidan says he feels like the odd man out. He joins us on the Ad Lib podcast today to make the case for how Drudge and his other sites — for as video-free and Craigslist-looking as they still are — are actually innovative on the tech front. We get into ad blocking and key word filtering, how brands are often quick to blacklist certain points of view (especially in the current political climate) and how Intermarkets has dealt with its own brand safety issues. 

Last year Intel, the PC maker best known to the wider world for its "Intel Inside" tagline, decided to pivot from being a PC-centric to a data-centric company. It invested heavily in artificial intelligence, the internet of things, drones, autonomous cars and more. Those data-centric businesses made up 47 percent of revenues in fiscal 2017, underscoring the diminished importance of the PC to its business. "We need to make sure the future tech buyers of the world understand we're not just a chip in a PC," says Intel's Alyson Griffin, who is charged with telling that story. "We need to make sure we're not stuck inside a PC." 

Hyperlocal news has had a rough, ahem, patch in recent years. Undone by Craigslist and Facebook and Google, among others, local news sites have struggled to stay afloat. The end of 2017 alone saw the shuttering of both Gothamist and DNAInfo.  Patch CEO and executive editor Warren St. John joins Ad Lib this week to tell us what's going on at Patch. Among his many accomplishments as a writer and reporter for the New York Times and others, St. John also happens to be the guy who popularized the term "metrosexual" in 2005. Today he shares what he's been up to as a CEO and how he hopes to make hyperlocal work where others have stumbled. 

Synonymous with powerful, rich and usually white male entrepreneurs, Forbes is, like many media companies, being forced to evolve. Randall Lane took over as editor of the 101-year-old publisher in December of 2017, after Lewis D'Vorkin went on to run the LA Times newsroom — leaving behind a large pair of wingtips. Under D'Vorkin, Forbes grew its army of contributors in a bid for scale and led the native advertising charge with its Brand Voice program. Lane joins Ad Lib today to help us get a handle on what Forbes is today — how it plans to expand its custom content offerings, dig into new "microbeats" and attract a younger set of readers.

March Madness is well underway and if you're a sports fan of a certain age, chances are you're tracking your decimated bracket on Bleacher Report. Bleacher Report CEO Dave Finocchio joins us on this episode of Ad Lib to discuss its distributed approach to publishing, what makes Bleacher Report connect with younger audiences in an oversaturated sports market — and how it's been working with Turner Broadcasting, which acquired Bleacher Report in 2012 for a reported $175 to $200 million. 

It's been five years since Troy Young came to Hearst to build out the magazine company's digital division. Today as the global president of digital for a media empire that includes Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle, Good Housekeeping, Town & Country – the list goes on – Young is redefining what it means to be in a 130-year-old publisher with its roots in print. 

In this episode of Ad Lib, Sarah Hofstetter, the global CEO of full-service digital-first agency 360i, discusses the agency's new Amazon practice, the future of voice, the best kosher restaurants in Cannes and more. (She also admits to a few regrets about a certain Oreo Super Bowl tweet.)

Last month, a subset of the media world snapped to attention when Jarrod Dicker left the Post, where he built out a lot of pioneering proprietary tech for the company, to become the CEO of something called Po.et, which bills itself as "an open, universal, and immutable ledger for managing the ownership and licensing of the world's creative works." It runs on blockchain, and today Dicker will explain what it is -- and how he hopes to upend the media business model as we know it.

Chas Edwards is a co-founder and publisher of both Pop-Up magazine—a roving circus that brings magazine journalism to life in staged events—and the print publication it spawned, California Sunday Magazine. Taken together, the two represent a new kind of media company. Edwards breaks down of what it all is, how its evolved and how its unique business model is helping the publisher thrive.

Pernod Ricard North America CEO Ann Mukherjee describes why the liquor marketer will resume social media spending after pausing it in July. The longtime marketer also describes what it's like moving into the CEO job, and she explains her leadership style, which involves bringing your personal experiences to the job.

You may know Aardman Animation as the creative force behind Wallace and Gromit, "Shaun the Sheep" and "Chicken Run." This weekend its seventh feature film, "Early Man" comes to our shores. But the recognizably Aardman characters the studio is well known–and beloved–for, only comprise 5 percent of its branded content output. Heather Wright fills us in on the other 95 percent. An executive producer and head of partner content at the studio, Wright works with brands on storytelling in a wide array of media, not just animation – but AR and VR for clients including Google and the BBC.

There's a lot of talk in the marketing and advertising industries about diversity — but not a ton of walking. Antonio Lucio is one of the walkers. Lucio talks about his diversity drive on today's podcast and also breaks down his view of the state of marketing in 2018. Along the way, he shares a little of his own personal journey, how his childhood in Spain and Puerto Rico shaped who he is today, and why a diagnosis of depression changed him.

Bryan Buckley has nearly 60 Super Bowl credits to his name, directing spots for a bevy of brands ranging from Monster.com and Cash4Gold to Coca-Cola and Bud Light. In this podcast, Buckley discusses what it's like working with high-profile celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Martin Scorcese, the Super Bowl ad he wishes he made and his most recent Super Bowl efforts for Febreze.