Much like your For You page, the skills ad agencies are looking for in creatives are always changing.

For a while, nearly everyone thought the metaverse would be the next big thing. Last spring, TikTokers at agencies were all the rage. Now, AI is the talk of the town, although robots haven’t replaced creatives yet.

Heading into 2024, certain hard skills and experience with new tech, like AI, remain attractive to recruiters and agency execs when hiring creatives. But given the lasting impacts of the pandemic on work environments, agency leaders told us that they are looking more for good vibes than polished résumés.

“To me, talent is everything, and that’s all we have,” Richard Brim, chief creative officer of adam&eveDDB, told Marketing Brew. “Getting the right talent is really, really, really tricky, and it’s getting trickier.”

Tech genius: The good news is that job-seekers don’t have to have a Tony Stark–like AI skill set to get hired as a creative, agency execs told us.

“As this is a relatively new space, we would not look for expansive, deep experience,” Aimee Pagano, global head of talent acquisition at VMLY&R, said.

• External recruiters largely concurred that, for the time being, agencies aren’t seeking AI experts either.
• “I don’t have a client who says, ‘I need a creative who has produced campaigns with AI,’” Debra Sercy, managing partner at executive search firm Grace Blue, said.

However, some experience could help candidates stand out. Pagano said that VMLY&R keeps an eye out for candidates who can demonstrate they’ve worked on projects where AI was incorporated, as well as those who have been trained or certified in AI tools or attended conferences about it.

Continue reading here.—AM

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McDonald’s debuted its new restaurant, CosMc’s, earlier this month, and some marketers are lovin’ it.

CosMc’s, which the fast-food chain describes as having a “beverage-led” menu, takes its name from a McDonald’s character from the ’80s, an alien that stole McDonald’s menu items to bring to its home planet, CosMcland. The new brand employs imagery of aliens and planets set against a blue and yellow color scheme, with one-half of McDonald’s iconic golden arches visible on signage.

The offerings will feature various coffees and iced beverages, as well as items from McDonald’s breakfast menu, according to CosMc’s website. McDonald’s is testing out the CosMc’s concept at one outpost in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook, Illinois, with plans to have roughly 10 locations by the end of 2024.

Drink up: According to Braden Douglas, founding partner at Crew Marketing Partners, CosMc’s could help McDonald’s compete with other fast-food players like Starbucks.

“They’ve got all these different meal occasions, but when it came to beverages and snacks, they were always struggling there,” Douglas said. “I think that’s where other companies like Starbucks and even Dutch Brothers have been filling this void.”

McDonald’s use of the CosMc character instead of an already popular character like Grimace may stand to help the new brand appeal to a younger demographic, Douglas said. The value of the CosMc character, he said, lies in its backstory, which McDonald’s can use to build its brand identity.

But one thing that could set this spin-off brand apart is its ability to employ the brand reputation of McDonald’s, Douglas said.

“People know that McDonald’s has been a successful franchise for a long time,” he said. “You have to have enough of that familiarity, but then you have this slight twist that creates a new intrigue for a new audience.”—JS

If the retail industry were a high school yearbook, retail media networks, where retailers sell online and in-store advertising to brands, would be a contender for Most Likely to Succeed.

• Retail media will grow 9.9% YoY in 2023, to $125.7 billion globally, and will overtake TV spending by 2028, according to a forecast by GroupM.

But the takeaway from a new report is that unless retail media networks (RMNs) improve the experience for brands purchasing their ads, the superlative they’re more likely to earn is one more associated with wooing than outcomes: Biggest Flirt.

The report, by Turbyne, a retail media platform that expects to be available in beta form in early 2024, surveyed 225 retail executives and 87 brands.

Grade expectations: The report found that retailers who expect to make the honor roll may need to hire a tutor instead. Nearly two-thirds (65%) predicted that the largest brands—those with more than $500 million in annual revenues—would give their experience with their RMN an “A” grade. But—cue the helicopter parents—only 6% of brands in the survey said they’d give an “A” to their experience with retail media.

“That’s just one of several indicators that RMNs are failing to deliver on their promise,” the report stated.

Retail media notworks? “While speaking to retailers and brands about their respective retail media experiences,” the report continued, “we noticed a high level of frustration coming from both sides.”

One source of friction is that brands find it inconvenient to have to strike deals with individual media networks for their campaigns, rather than being able to purchase from them collectively:

• 40% of retailers said that having to execute individual advertising purchases with each RMN is the primary reason brands don’t spend more on retail media.

Continue reading on Retail Brew.—AAN

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Op-ed: How sports leagues might consider the importance of reach when considering TV rights deals.

Check yourself: A guide to conducting an email marketing audit.

Strategy: How marketers and media buyers navigated Q4 and a “very tough Black Friday season.”

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