Of all the blatant and unnecessary Photoshops in fashion photography, the hammer came down on Taylor Swift's eyelashes? Really? Yes, really, according to the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which denounced an ad for CoverGirl NatureLuxe Mousse Mascara in which Ms. Swift's eyelashes were digitally, uh, fullened. The agency ruled that the altered image made for a misleading ad, which somehow wasn't the case when L'Oréal gave Beyoncé Knowles what might as well have been a new head. P&G at least had the grace to pull Swift's ad when it got caught, but it's not too slippery a slope between this kind of crap and H&M just building models from scratch.

Across the South, the start of fall can only mean one thing: college football, and along with it the time-honored tradition of tailgating. Riding the enormous popularity of the weekend ritual, Southern Living recentlykicked off its own tailgating season.

In the kind of cross-media touchdown that has boosted newsstand sales 6.6 percent to 137,962 in the first half of this year alone, Southern Living published the Official SEC Tailgating Cookbook, which became a national best-seller thanks to recipes like Woo Pig Sooie Ham-Stuffed Biscuit. On television, an hour-long special on the Great American Country channel featured tailgate parties ranging from the University of Alabama’s 1,000-tent encampment on the campus quad to a University of Texas meet and greet with team mascot Bevo, the longhorn steer. Tapping into football frenzy, the 2.8 million-circulation magazine chalked up an astonishing half-million votes in its South’s Best Tailgate contest, pulling in some 80,000 ballots by smartphone alone. (Using their devices, fans could scan images of a team’s helmet from the pages of the magazine or Digimarc-enabled posters.)

This being Southern Living, it isn’t just readers who get riled up. Across the bucolic Birmingham, Ala., campus of the magazine’s parent, Time Inc.’s Southern Progress unit, staffers decorate their offices with the same watermarked posters, imploring passersby to vote for their favorites. Over by the magazine’s bustling test kitchen, one can find kitchen director Rebecca Gordon, the quintessential Southern belle—all smiles, pearls and perfectly coiffed blonde tresses. But the elegant look belies a rabid obsession with the University of Alabama Crimson Tide.

“Food brings people together,” says Gordon, who posts recipes for concoctions such as the Alabama Yella Hammer cocktail on the blog TideFanfare. “At Southern Living, we’ve always celebrated the fact that Southern food is so closely connected to family and traditions.”

One floor above the kitchen in the editorial offices, more tailgating posters are displayed alongside layouts for upcoming articles, including one on a home-style Christmas dinner and another on a Lilly Pulitzer-themed party in Palm Beach.

Southern Methodist University pride rules for executive editor Jessica Thuston, an Oklahoma native whose new baby and recently renovated kitchen are featured in the magazine’s “Big Ideas for Small Spaces” issue, one of 12 yearly newsstand-only specials. Nearby, managing editor Candace Higginbotham, a 22-year Southern Progress veteran, proudly displays an Auburn University poster.

Editor in chief Lindsay Bierman also got into the spirit, tacking up a University of Virginia sign—despite his Michigan roots. A design aficionado, he fell for the South while studying for his masters in architecture at UVA. He would go on to work for Southern Progress titles including the now-defunct Southern Accents and Cottage Living, along with Coastal Living. “The South has a deep culinary tradition, distinct style and way of life that is very hospitable and gracious,” he says. “I always knew I wanted to come back here.”

It’s no surprise that Southern Living editors are passionate (to put it mildly) about their home turf. But national audiences have also cottoned to Dixie, with its focus on family, friends, food and home. This year, The Help went from best-seller to box-office hit while Taylor Swift, the Zac Brown Band and the Avett Brothers dominated the Billboard charts, TNT revived Dallas, NBC debuted nighttime soap Nashville, and trendy new restaurants serving biscuits and barbecue popped up in Brooklyn.

The South clearly is rising again, which has given the region’s magazines a distinct lift in the face of an industry-wide slump. Read by one in five Southern women, Southern Living has expanded its circ beyond the South by 11 percent over the past four years, while 22 percent of readers overall live outside the region, according to GfK MRI’s readership survey.

Over at buzzy, aspirational lifestyle book Garden & Gun, 45 percent of readers live outside the Southeast, per an Ipsos Mendelsohn subscriber survey, and last month the magazine added 130 newsstands in New York alone. Over the last two years, the Charleston, S.C.-based magazine upped circulation by 20 percent to 261,854 and won a 2011 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Known for stunning photography and high-profile contributors like Pat Conroy and John T. Edge, the five-year-old magazine recently inked a three-title deal with HarperCollins for a how-to book, a cookbook and an anthology of its popular “Good Dog” columns.

“Most people in the media assume that a really good magazine can’t come out of somewhere other than New York City,” says editor in chief David DiBenedetto, who believes that the South’s deep literary tradition has also burnished the allure of the regional titles.

Then there is the politically minded Texas Monthly, which won National Magazine Awards for Feature Writing and General Excellence in 2010 and 2009, respectively. The October issue features a cover story on the University of Texas, a history of Jerry Jones’ takeover of the Dallas Cowboys and a profile of the state’s first female U.S. Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison. Its literary yet newsy mix helped boost newsstand sales 9 percent (the magazine’s total circ now stands at 312,135), while ad pages and revenue grew nearly 7 percent in the first half of 2012. That’s a big improvement versus the magazine industry at large, where single copy sales fell 9.6 percent, ad dollars dipped 3.8 percent and ad pages sunk 8.8 percent in the same period.

Just as the nickname of its Alabama home is “The Heart of Dixie,” Southern Living is the grand dame of Southern magazines. As Texas interior designer Vanessa Evermon explains on her blog: “Growing up, we had two things on our coffee table—the Holy Bible and Southern Living magazine.” With its circ of 2.8 million, the magazine is the 17th largest in the country.

While other large-reach titles such as Reader’s Digest and Prevention have been forced to cut rate base because of declining newsstand sales and subscriptions, Southern Living has managed to increase its circ every year for a decade. What’s more, over the past year the magazine added 179 national and regional advertisers, including both new clients and ones that had been dormant for two or more years. Ad revenue rose 5.7 percent as ad pages declined 3.1 percent, compared to an 8.8 percent drop in pages industry-wide.

“The South is clearly having a moment,” says Sid Evans, group editor of Time Inc.’s Lifestyle Division, also based in Birmingham. A Memphis native and the editor in chief of Garden & Gun from its launch in 2007 until 2011, Evans says the South’s strong cultural identity is a key selling point of Southern Living. The magazine, he says, “has an advantage because of this built-in connection to the reader, whereas a lot of other magazines are building a brand around an idea that they have to continually sell to the reader.”

The connection runs deep. Since its launch in 1966, Southern Living has built a massive empire, inserting the brand into nearly every aspect of daily life. Even though brand extensions have become common across the magazine industry, Southern Living’s stable of products is formidable. Its readers can live in a home based on one of Southern Living’s 1,000-plus house plans and constructed by a Southern Living-approved builder. After whipping up dinner based on a recipe in a Southern Living cookbook (there are 56 Southern Living titles for sale through publisher Oxmoor House), they can eat off china from Ballard Designs’ Southern Living line. (The Ballard licensing deal was renewed for another four years following the huge success of last spring’s debut collection.) After washing up with a Southern Living towel, readers can curl up on a Southern Living-branded mattress pad swathed in sheets from the magazine’s bedding collection, a top seller at Dillard’s. Outside the house, they can place a Southern Living planter beside their Southern Living patio furniture.

Along with expanding the magazine’s licensing footprint (which grew 33 percent this year alone), Bierman aims to modernize the brand by embracing the so-called “new South.” With its September issue, Southern Living unveiled a redesign led by creative director Bob Perino that includes more stylish typography, more photo-centric layouts, new columns and features like a quarterly style section spotlighting local boutique owners and more integrated regional pages. (For its five geographic editions, ranging from the mid-Atlantic to the Deep South, editors create some 500 pages of locally targeted editorial each year.) On the digital side, a new blog dubbed The Daily South is populated with local content, while new video series feature edit staffers. (In the Webby Award-winning Deep-Fried Fridays, test kitchen editor Norman King fries up everything from candy corn to Jack Daniel’s.)

Readers have taken to the recast content. “I LOVE the graphically smart, wonderful articles, etc. issues you now have inside SL,” one fan raved on the brand’s Facebook page, though another complained of “cluttered” pages.

Media buyers have also taken note. “The brand has been contemporized and revived,” says Brenda White, Starcom svp and print activation director, adding that the retooling has attracted not only new readers but also fashion and beauty advertisers. (Procter & Gamble’s skin-care line Olay and the clothing retailer Coldwater Creek recently signed large custom marketing deals.)

With the book’s makeover comes new blood, including executive editor Hunter Lewis, who last month bolted Brooklyn and a job at Condé Nast’s Bon Appétit for Birmingham. (Lewis is far from the only New York expat to head south. Garden & Gun editor DiBenedetto recently recruited Mary Tilt Hammond away from her post as executive director of integrated marketing at Hearst’s Elle for the same job in Charleston.)

With his haute cuisine background, including running Saveur’s test kitchen, Lewis has already begun expanding Southern Living’s traditional palate. In his first week on the job, he supervised a tasting that included shrimp and halloumi skewers, leading some staffers to ask what, exactly, halloumi is. (Assuring colleagues it wasn’t really so exotic, Lewis reported that the Greek cheese made for grilling can be found in any Whole Foods.)

Lewis believes his readers are ready for more international flavor. “Southern food is not all bacon and bourbon and pimento cheese—you can go down the highway and eat a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese restaurant in a strip mall,” says the North Carolina native. Still, he stresses the importance of preserving regional authenticity. “You can’t be doing fusion food for the sake of being cute and different,” he says. “It’s got to feel true.”

While Southern Living strives to stay true to its roots as it expands nationally, there have been missteps. When Bierman came on board two years ago, he felt the brand had “strayed.” His mission—“to bring the South back into Southern Living,” as he describes it—includes featuring more local personalities and businesses. When editors made their picks for a holiday guide, Bierman requested that a trendy national brand of aftershave be replaced with a homegrown variety from Lubbock, Texas-based Dirty Deeds Soaps, to drive sales to a local business.

“Our broader mission is to make this brand become a more robust economic engine for the region,” explains publisher Greg Schumann, another transplant from New York and the former publisher of Bonnier Corp.’s Parenting. “I think if the brand does that, all the other metrics will take care of themselves.”

As an example, every year the Southern Living Idea House features a show home in a different Southern town. Since June of this year, 20,000 people have visited the current model in Senoia, Ga.

The magazine’s strong Southern roots resonate with media buyers like Starcom’s White. “They’re striking a good balance between speaking to a national audience and a regional audience,” she says.

Whether appealing to natives by heralding the virtues of sorghum syrup or educating outsiders on Memphis vs. Kansas City barbecue, the Southern titles continue to expand outside their borders. Last month, Garden & Gun hosted a dinner in New York with interior designer Bunny Williams. And next June, Southern Living will sponsor the Big Apple BBQ Festival for the third time.

But what happens when foodies, fashionistas and film fans finally tire of the South and find a new province to fetishize?

In DiBenedetto’s view, the Southern magazines, with their commitment to quality content, will hold consumer interest for the long term. Says the editor, “If you’ve got a good product, you’re going to keep it. For us, it’s a wonderful thing.”

This week, Adweek takes a look at the 2012 holiday spots unwrapped by some major brands. From Macy's new take on the beloved classic A Miracle on 34th Street to eBay's perfectly pitched point about the hazards of gifting ponies, retailers and other marketers are starting to bring the magic of the season to the small screen. 

Many of the hundreds of TV commercials that air each day are just blips on the radar, having little impact on the psyche of the American consumer, who is constantly bombarded by advertising messages.

These aren't those commercials.

Adweek and AdFreak have brought together the most innovative and well-executed spots of the week, commercials that will make you laugh, smile, cry, think—and maybe buy.

Video Gallery: Top 10 Commercials, Nov. 16-23

Clear Channel’s streaming service iHeartRadio is turning up the volume in an aggressive bid to take on red-hot Spotify and Pandora.

Over the past six months, Clear Channel’s digital service has recruited a slew of media execs, including president Tim Castelli (veteran of AOL and Google) and svp of marketing Holly Lang from Condé Nast. In July, longtime Microsoft veteran Rick Song was named evp of national digital sales. Song has been on a hiring spree of his own, tapping sales execs for Chicago and Los Angeles.

“Now that we have a leadership team, we are in the process of building our organization over the next six months,” said Song, who also pointed to Clear Channel’s artist relationships as a key competitive advantage. He cited September’s second annual iHeartRadio Festival in Las Vegas, featuring Taylor Swift and Green Day.

Clear Channel definitely has pushed its way into the digital music mosh pit. IHeartRadio’s app, which streams 1,500 terrestrial radio stations, along with digital stations and 15 million on-demand songs, is gaining traction. Since launching on Facebook last year, it’s attracted 20 million registered users and 5 million fans, said Song. The mobile app has been downloaded 135 million times since its launch four years ago. IHeartRadio also powers Yahoo Music’s radio service, which streamed the iHeartRadio Festival and continues to show highlight clips.

It all sounds impressive. But Pandora still commands 70 percent of the Web radio market and 6.6 percent of the total U.S. radio audience, per Triton Media, while Spotify this month scored a staggering $100 million from Coca-Cola in new funding.

While the competition is intensifying, the economics remain questionable for all. Unlike terrestrial stations, music-streaming companies pay exorbitant royalty fees to artists (which is why Clear Channel and Pandora are jointly lobbying Congress to pass a more favorable law). Also, the ad market is still paltry, and agencies don’t know what to do with Internet radio or how to value it. “The whole industry is struggling with this,” said Maribeth Papuga, evp of direct local activation at MediaVest. “You know people are using it. But you have to justify it.”

Clear Channel at least knows how to sell to radio buyers, she said. But interestingly, the company has positioned iHeartRadio as a national radio buy, as Pandora makes a regional push. “What we’ve been good at is being a local company,” said Song. “Now we’re going out there and saying, ‘What is the power of our total reach and audience?’”

Having a bigger sales team will help. But what iHeartRadio really needs is more listeners. “Once they gain scale, they’ll be poised to gain market share,” said Lydia Foy, managing director of local audio, Horizon Media.

Coca-Cola has signed country music star Taylor Swift to promote Diet Coke, per sources close to the situation.

The move comes on the heels of Pepsi penning a $50 million deal with Beyoncé Knowles six weeks ago and largely underscores an ongoing battle for the youth/music market between the soda industry's two titans. For instance, Coke recently invested $10 million in the digital music service Spotify.

In terms of the Diet Coke-Taylor Swift deal, the singer-songwriter will not appear in the brand's Super Bowl campaign, the sources said. Swift has also served as a brand spokesperson for Cover Girl in recent years. 

Meanwhile, a media rep for the Atlanta-based Coke declined to comment.

AdAge first reported the development.

Bonnaroo is one of the biggest music festivals in the U.S. This year, Superfly Presents, the group behind the Tennessee bonanza and other events like San Francisco’s Outside Lands, bought The Distillery, a small Chicago creative agency founded by Agency.com alum PJ Loughran. Adweek spoke with Rich Goodstone, co-founder of Superfly and head of its marketing group, about the growing importance of live events to advertisers; Superfly’s work with brands like JetBlue, Intel and Mattel beyond its festivals; and the recent acquisition.

Why buy an agency in Chicago now?
[PJ] has been a real innovator and pioneer in the social and digital strategy space. That melding with our deep expertise in youth-minded entertainment, and certainly experiential, it just was an obvious fit. He really expands our overall offering and brings a much more strategic approach and storytelling to what we do not only on the festival side, but also for our agency and brand clients.

Because social media amplifies live events and makes them more valuable to marketers?
Profound experiences change lives and build communities, shape perceptions, create relationships. When you have something like Bonnaroo, that’s a Super Bowl moment. It really is about what happens around the Super Bowl. It’s the before, during and after. So while these profound experiences change lives, they’re also the most shareable moments. It’s what most of this social dialogue is about; it’s about your experience.

How has your marketing at Bonnaroo evolved since the festival’s launch in 2002?
From the beginning, because the event sold out in two weeks in its first year—80,000 tickets—we’ve been able to pursue partnerships in the right way. We’ve understood the value of marketing as entertainment, and that the only way a brand was going to really win the heart of a consumer and the lifetime value of the audience that would be at something like a Bonnaroo was to add value to the experience.

What’s the best recent example of how you’ve done that?
Probably one of the best programs in 2012 or any year was our RFID that we built out with Ford. So basically, everybody who comes to the festival gets an RFID wristband. It’s their ticket, so they can register it online. It’s got a chip in it, so we understand when they’re coming into the festival site. It allows us traffic and logistical management. People could register them online, be entered to win a Ford vehicle, and also be able to attach that RFID to Facebook. Through a partnership with Spotify, after the event, we were able to send you a full set list from that show. To have that journal all in one place, all of it branded with Ford…[made for] 200 million impressions, 2 million likes and comments.

What about your work outside festival properties?
We help Jet Blue evaluate and navigate the entertainment space. We built a platform called Live From T5, which was delivering travelers concert experiences and content from the terminal—a place that was often looked at as a pain point because people have to wait—and the lines and everything else became something that we can use to surprise and delight. We were able to get acts like Taylor Swift and Robyn and The Wanted and Chris Daughtry to play at the terminal and feed their content onto Jet Blue in-flight screens. We’ve done things with comedy and theater and continue to explore other ways to make music even more core to the JetBlue personality.

Taylor Swift's beverage preferences, like everything else in her life, have been well documented. There was that time she and Jake Gyllenhaal strolled through Brooklyn while drinking "specialty maple lattes." On her taste in alcohol, she once explained, "If it doesn't taste like candy or sparkles, I usually don't drink it." And when asked by Bon Appétit what was in her fridge, she said, "Diet Coke. Because it understands me." (Unlike Harry Styles! Ugh.)

T-Swift also happens to be an official "brand ambassador" for Diet Coke, and this week she released her first spot for the sugar-free cola. The ad, from Droga5 and MJZ director Fredrik Bond, recreates the artistic process of writing "22," a song from her latest album, which apparently involved a lot of journal entries, a lot of red lipstick and a lot of Diet Coke. Because Tay-Tay's message is always super-relatable, we also get to see bunch of other cool, young, Coke-drinking people singing along. (Sample lyrics: "It seems like a perfect night/To dress up like hipsters." That is not a joke.)

It's been a big month for pop stars and cola, with Beyoncé releasing her big new Pepsi ad just last week. But while it's hard to imagine Mrs. Jay-Z drinking anything but Dom Pérignon and the blood of her rivals, let alone a can of (non-diet!) Pepsi, it's actually pretty easy to picture Taylor sitting around the house and writing about ex-boyfriends in her diary while drinking cute little bottles of Diet Coke.

How else could she possibly have the energy for so many adorable photo-ops?

CREDITS
Client Diet Coke
Campaign Stay Extraordinary
Title Music That Moves

Agency Droga5 NY
Creative Chairman David Droga
Executive Creative Directors Ted Royer / Nik Studzinki
Copywriter Sophie Isherwood
Art Director Andrew Wilcox
Head of Integrated Production Sally-Ann Dale
Agency Producer Sam Kilbreth
Head of Brand Strategy Ted Florea
Brand Strategist Matt Springate
Group Account Director Steven Panariello
Account Manager Nadia Malik

Client Diet Coke
Head of Integrated Marketing Communications, Coca-Cola North America, Pio Schunker
Group Director, Integrated Marketing Content, Coca-Cola North America, Adam Hunt
Group Brand Director, Diet Coke/Coke Zero Rafael Acevedo
Director of Multimedia Production, Sarah Zehnle Traverso
Integrated Marketing Content, Coca-Cola North America
Senior Integrated Marketing Content Manager, Coca-Cola North America, Andy Deutsch

Production Company MJZ
Director Fredrik Bond
DOP Roman Vasyanov
Executive Producer Kate Leahy
Producer Line Postmyr

Editorial Marshall Street Editors
Editor Tim Thornton-Allan
Assistant Editor Phil Hignett
Producer S.J. O’Mara

Additional Editorial Union Editorial NY
Editor Sloane Klevin
Assistant Editor Andrew Doga
Executive Producer Caryn Maclean
Producer Susan Motamed

Post Production The Mill NY
Head of Production Sean Costelloe
Producer Sallyann Houghton
Flame Susanne Scharping
Color Grade Damien Van Der Cruyssen

Music Taylor Swift
Song 22 (from the album Red)
Writers Taylor Swift, Max Martin, Shellback

Sound Sonic Union
Mixer Rob McIver
Studio Manager Justine Cortale

When Katy Perry takes the mic for a song during Sunday night's MTV Video Music Awards, the cable channel will temporarily shift focus from inside the event's arena—Brooklyn's Barclays Center—to her performance's secret location in the New York City borough. Considering Perry's penchant for tweet-worthy outfits, coupled with the outdoor scenery, Twitter will likely buzz with chatter about the pop star's antics.

Pepsi, a major sponsor for the Viacom event, plans to own the moment in terms of branding with a social-media twist. The soda, singer and MTV will encourage people to use the hashtag #Katynow to unlock clues about her forthcoming, full-length album, Prism, such as song titles and lyrics.

Throughout the weekend, people can utilize the clues to listen to two songs from her album via a Pepsi microsite and then vote for one by tweeting the title along with #KatyNow. The winning song will be revealed on MTV moments before Perry's VMA performance and then released through iTunes on Sept. 17 (the entire album goes to market in mid-October). During the VMAs, Perry will sing her first release from the record, "Roar," which has reportedly been a veritable hit in terms of paid downloads so far.

Chad Stubbs, senior director of marketing for PepsiCo, and his team believe overall brand engagement will spike during Perry's outdoor performance against a Brooklyn backdrop.

"We wanted to really blow this out with an iconic artist and an iconic location," he said. "It will make for great television."

Pepsi will run TV spots while repeatedly appearing as a sponsor during MTV's telecast. Also that night, the soda maker will offer consumers a complimentary download of Perry's "Roar" if they sign up with Pepsi's rewards platform.

For Pepsi and Perry, the development builds on a relationship that began last year around promotions for the entertainer's Katy Perry: Part of Me 3-D movie. And it marks yet another music-based appeal made by the top beverage giants PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, which have been inking huge deals with big-time artists such as Beyoncé Knowles (Pepsi) and Taylor Swift (Diet Coke).

Hi, tween girls who may have body-image issues and also like listening to Taylor Swift. Diet Coke is launching a new, limited-edition "Sleek Can." It's thinner and more glamorous than those plain old cans, and naturally, it's covered all over in Taylor Swift's autograph. It also features a quote, in script, which reads, "If you're lucky enough to be different, don't ever change." Except it's Diet Coke, so the whole point is kind of to change, to drink Diet Coke and become slim and shiny, like Swift. Way more so than if you drank from Diet Pepsi's "Skinny Can" from Fashion Week a couple of years back. Sure, this isn't the first time Diet Coke has sold a "Sleek Can," but this one is way better and more totally duplicitous. Plus, it goes perfectly with the brand's slim vending machines.

In the brave new world of social media, marketers are doubling down on celebrity endorsements, banking on stars’ earned media mojo to help their campaigns catch fire.

Take HTC’s splashy, $1 billion campaign starring Robert Downey Jr. or Pepsi’s $50 million endorsement agreement with Beyoncé.“Pretty much anything she does is covered both in traditional and social media,” said William Gelner, chief creative officer of 180LA, which this spring created a popular Pepsi spot starring the singer.

Lately, brands like Audi, Honda and Diet Coke have enlisted A-listers like Claire Danes, Nick Cannon and Taylor Swift, fueling their ads with social star power.

Often such deals give advertisers a direct line to celebrities’ fan followings via their personal Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. The true asset, however, is a star’s relevance, buying a marketer the kind of buzzy exposure that only a Hollywood headliner can bring.

“A lot of what social allows a brand to do is to piggyback off earned media, utilizing the fans to do the work for you,” said Anna Holland, executive group director at WPP’s 171 Worldwide, partner on HTC’s push with Downey. “He just came off Iron Man 3 and that alone brings awareness to [HTC].”

The increased visibility of social also amplifies the potential risk of such deals. For one, it raises the bar for what passes as a convincing celeb-marketer marriage, said Chris Raih, managing director of Los Angeles agency Zambezi, which this summer launched a Popchips ad starring Katy Perry (an investor and creative partner in the company).

Or a brand may find itself entangled in a fiasco on the scale of the Mountain Dew-Tyler, the Creator dustup, the Rick Ross lyrics controversy or the Paula Deen meltdown. Still, “it doesn’t happen that often,” said C. Samuel Craig, professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern school, plus brands can usually distance themselves quickly.

YouTube does have its benefits. Brands can get more bang for their buck with longer ads and richer storylines. Fans can watch spots starring their favorite stars on demand—unlike TV where a diverse cross section of viewers watches a celebrity some might not care for, rendering a celebrity-fronted spot less effective.

“Celebrities by their very nature tend to be quite polarizing,” said Peter Daboll, CEO of Ace Metrix, which measures ad impact. “TV is a very blunt targeting instrument.”

Putting a star in an ad isn’t always a silver bullet. “It really only improves your odds with those people who are fans of the celebrity,” said Bruce Clark, marketing professor at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim school.

DMI Music, a 16-year-old shop that aims to bring brands and music together, is launching a platform that lets email marketers include popular tunes with their messages. Nutritional supplement maker Mead Johnson is one of the brands testing the idea that tunes from artists ranging from Bruno Mars to Bach can ramp up click-through rates and sales conversions for direct marketers.

The program, dubbed Engine 1, is first and foremost designed to create loyalty through emotional connections with music, said Tena Clark, CEO of Los Angeles-based DMI. The second most-important benefit is increased engagement and reengagement, she said.

The songs play when recipients click a button within the message. In a preliminary campaign, 75 percent of openers listened to the music, and 43 percent of those that did came back and listened to the music two or more times.

"That's a lot of time customers are spending with your brand," she said.

Clark said that in addition to Mead Johnson, two national and two global firms are testing Engine 1, but declined to name them. 

Of course, any email marketer worth his or her salt will immediately want to know what the embedded music does to deliverability rates. Historically, multimedia has caused email messages to bounce instead of ending up in consumers' inboxes. Clark said the music doesn't hinder deliverability, though.

"There is code in the email, but the actual music is stored in the cloud and streamed to the user, so the email size isn't any larger than a brand's existing emails, and there's no added concern of bouncing back," she said. "Some of the companies we're working with will be running the campaign through their email service provider, and in that case, they rely on us to curate, license and host the music. But when a client does ask us to run the campaign, we optimize delivery."

DMI works with major and independent music labels to legally use tunes from not only Bruno Mars and Bach, but also names like Elton John, Taylor Swift, Lady Antebellum, Aretha Franklin and Maroon 5.

Email, digital marketing's underappreciated workhorse, continues to bring enviable return-on-investment for brands on a daily basis. Getting consumers to hum along with a message sounds appealing, but is it pricey?

"The cost of the campaign depends on the number of songs, the licensing cost and the quantity of emails," Clark said. "The brand pays per email."

And in a world that pays so much attention to Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, DMI's service could make old email a bit more hip. 

Jimmy Fallon and the Roots join Cyrus for an a capella version of 'We Cant Stop.'

Like it or not, Hannah Montana is dead and gone. For better or worse, fans are now stuck with the new, rebellious Miley Cyrus—the one who’s shed the bear suit and brought twerking to the world. Cyrus’ skin-tight, butt-bouncing metamorphosis has scored more media buzz than the government shutdown, generating its heat in the form of controversy. “This is getting more attention more than anything else because she was the Hannah Montana,” said David Johnson, CEO of public relations strategy firm Strategic Vision. “You don't expect this from Disney stars.”

Generally not. But that hasn’t stopped the suddenly grown-up Cyrus from appearing virtually nude in Terry Richardson's blog, and then almost immediately releasing her controversial "Wrecking Ball" video (directed by Richardson), which has garnered more than 205 million views. Most recently, during a New York media blitz, Cyrus left Matt Lauer somewhat speechless with her frank comments about sex. And this all led up to the release of her new feature project, "Bangerz." (Gee, what could that mean?)

Shocked? You shouldn’t be. Not only is the new Cyrus the result of a carefully orchestrated strategy (“There's definitely a certain measure of calculation behind-the-scenes to ensure [Cyrus] stays top of mind,” ventures Desmond Marzette, creative strategist at Zambezi L.A.)—it’s a rebranding act we’ve seen many times before. Cyrus is only the latest teen icon to face the enormous gulf that separates them from adult stardom. And, as many before have learned, a proven way to make the leap is with the bad-boy/bad-girl makeover.

Take Justin Timberlake. He started as a Disney Mousketeer, then became a teen pop icon as lead singer of N'Sync. But Timberlake’s leap to being the actor/singer/songwriter he is today required him to scrap the boy-next-door purity in favor of shedding his shirt and showing off his new muscles and tattoos—which is pretty much exactly what that other Justin (Bieber, now 19) is now doing. A generation ago, Janet Jackson went from being a young, playful sweetheart to launching her 1986 hit "Control," whose lyrics included “now I’m all grown up.” Just in case audiences didn’t get the message, Herb Ritts shot Jackson showing plenty of skin and cleavage.

If there’s a difference in the route that Cyrus is taking, it seems to be that she’s leaving nothing to chance—going not just for a sexy remake, but pure shock value. “She's aiming to be this generation's Madonna," Johnson said. “Miley's doing outrageous stuff. Stuff that moms and dads are up-in-arms about—but Madonna did that, too.”

Of course, dressing up and playing whore is no guarantee of adult stardom, either. Back in the 1970s, bubblegum star David Cassidy tried to get an adult following by posing nude for Rolling Stone. Years later, pop-singer Tiffany showed up without her clothes in Playboy. Neither striptease managed to sustain those careers. But teen stars face a difficult choice once their 20s start to loom: If they don’t try to grow up, they’ll be stuck as a dated archetype. “If [a child] becomes famous and they don't understand who they were yet, the fame becomes the thing that defines them," said Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, a loyalty and engagement site. At its core, the teen-star rebrand is a cold lesson in the realities of the media age: Adapt or die.

And for now, that’s what Cyrus is trying to do—and it’s a gamble, given how deeply she has buried her Hannah Montana image. No doubt, brands that might have courted the younger Cyrus won’t want to touch her now, but Marzette says that doesn’t mean product endorsements are off the table. Unlike Taylor Swift, who can still reach young girls because of her relatively clean-cut persona, Cyrus is now speaking exclusively to an older demographic. “If you’re going to use Miley now, you can't overtly talk to that same audience," said Marzette. "But if you're marketing a product for a young woman, then Miley's right there.” In fact, look closely at those recent videos, and you’ll see the new Pill wireless speaker from Beats by Dr. Dre. Will other brands follow? Marzette certainly doesn’t rule it out.

“She turns 21 in November. I wouldn't be surprised to see an alcoholic beverage approach her,” he said.
 

Generationally speaking, there's often a vast divide in musical taste—as most parents of teenagers can attest. When it comes down to men versus women, some names easily top both Top 40 lists, while other popular artists (for example, Kanye West and Taylor Swift) may see a sea of gender uniformity as they stare out from their stages.

The fourth-quarter sales announced by Elizabeth Arden earlier this month weren’t just alarming to analysts. They point to something that some people in the fragrance business have long suspected: Celebrity name-slapping on perfumes and colognes has its limits.

Put another way, the performance of Justin Bieber’s and Taylor Swift’s perfume brands pretty much stunk. “While the company had expected weaker sales comparisons due to the lower level of fragrance launch activity in fiscal 2014 versus fiscal 2013,” the company disclosed, “the decline in sales of celebrity fragrances, particularly the Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift fragrances, was steeper than anticipated.”

Arden posted a big drop in quarterly sales of nearly 30 percent—partly due to the dismal performance of the duo of celebrity brands. Investors smelled blood and punished the cosmetics and perfume maker with a 24 percent sell-off—a gut punch, considering that Arden relies on fragrance sales for three quarters of its business.

Elizabeth Arden is an old hand in the movie-star fragrance segment, having sold sweet-smelling concoctions bearing the names of Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Elizabeth Taylor. Why, then, did the brand get into trouble with the likes of Bieber and Swift? Is it poor marketing, or a sign of a more troubling trend—like, say, celebrity saturation?

Some worry it might be the latter. After all, another celeb in the Arden stable is Britney Spears, whose various fragrances sold an estimated 500 million bottles in 2011, ringing up $30 million in sales. But while Spears’ fragrances have traditionally enjoyed success, in July she launched her 16th one. This month, One Direction unveiled a scent, as did Cheryl Cole and Nicki Minaj (again.) As Jezebel’s Kelly Faircloth penned recently: “People are finally tired of reeking like random celebrities.”

In some cases, the slackening of interest might be related to the news. For example, it can’t help that Justin Bieber—who invariably uses his sweet-little-boy face in publicity shots with his fragrances—has had several well-publicized scrapes with law enforcement. Media outlets have taken to using “pop brat” as shorthand for the 20-year-old star.

Then there’s the questionable connection between celebrity and product. When Tiger Woods began endorsing Buick in the late 1990s, more than a few wary consumers questioned just how likely it was that the uber-wealthy athlete actually tooled around town in a Buick. Similar suspicions might have prompted Paris Hilton’s disclosure last year that, yes, she does indeed spritz on the scents that bear her name. (“I wear them all,” the heiress said. “I’m wearing one now. Smell me.”)

In fact, Hilton—who reportedly sold $1.5 billion worth of her branded fragrances between 2004 and 2014—might constitute a valuable lesson in the crowded segment of celebrity smells. Sure, Hilton slaps her name on a lot of bottles, but she’s also (by her own account) heavily involved in the creation and promotion of her brands.

“I’m not just putting my name to any old product,” she told the Daily Mail last year. “I’m hands-on. I sleep with a notepad next to my bed and design everything from the bags and sunglasses right down to choosing the smell of my perfumes.”

So is ongoing celebrity support and involvement key to reviving the sluggish sales of star perfumes? Maybe. A website run by The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania reported on the shopping whims of high school freshman Shannon Gribbins, who spends plenty of time and money thinking about celebrities. But when it comes to her enthusiasm for Taylor Swift’s perfume Wonderstruck, the article stated, the New Jersey teen “admits to not really thinking about the big businesses out there that rely upon celebrity products and endorsements.” Mainly, Gribbins said, she bought the juice because “it smells really, really good.”

So much for the marketing.

Just when you thought Taylor Swift couldn't get any more respect from millennials, here she is proving again that she lives in a reality only believable in a Disney movie.

Swifties around the world may spend their inheritances on Diet Coke after seeing this magical ad conjured up by Droga5, featuring the incomparable Swift sitting in her living room enjoying her beverage of choice (coincidentally, the one she's paid to love). The spot also gives a sneak peek of a track from her new album, 1989.

After each sip, she remains unfazed and giggly as adorable kittens appear exponentially. That's right, she's not completely freaked out, as any normal person would be when they need to fill the bathtub with cat food and convert their bedroom into a litter box.

We're told the ad also features "a cameo from Taylor's own kitten, Olivia." Yes, Taylor Swift is so popular, her cat's appearance in an ad is considered a cameo. (Cameow?)



"As a longtime Diet Coke fan, Taylor is a natural example of who we're celebrating in the 'Get a Taste' campaign. It's all about passionate fans who simply love the delicious taste of Diet Coke," says Andrew McMillin, vp of Coca-Cola Brands North America. "The spot with Taylor is lighthearted and fun, bringing together two of her favorite things—kittens and Diet Coke. And it genuinely shows, from Taylor's perspective, what her life would be like if it tasted as good as Diet Coke."

I'm going to let you finish your Diet Coke, Taylor, but I am also going to call the ASPCA when you're done.

CREDITS
Client: Diet Coke
Agency: Droga5, New York

Irked by pop star Taylor Swift's much-hyped departure from Spotify, the music platform's CEO Daniel Ek took to a blog today to claim that his tech player has doled out some $2 billion to artists since 2008. Also, Ek wrote that his Stockholm, Sweden-based company has paid musicians $1 billion in the last year.

As his privately held firm has previously stated that it pays artists around 70 percent of its revenues, with the application of a little back-of-the-napkin math that means Spotify's sales were nearly $1.43 billion in the last year.

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the global music marketplace generated $15 billion in business last year, down from $16.5 billion in 2013. So unless the last 12 months have shown unusual growth in the music business, Ek's remarks suggest that Spotify has been responsible for roughly $1 for every $15 (or 6.6 percent) in the last year.

And the IFPI has said that streaming music services were 39 percent of the industry last year, or $5.9 billion. Therefore, if Ek's statements are accurate, his company has a 17 percent share of the digital streaming marketplace. The other dozen or so music streamers might have something to say about that.

At any rate, Taylor Swift's sales don't appear to be suffering after quitting Spotify. Far from it.

Even though Ek writes that Swift was on pace to pull in $6 million this year before she yanked her catalog from his platform, her new album 1989 sold 1.2 million copies in its first week, per Nielsen SoundScan, which equates to roughly $12 million in seven days.

In between barbs with Spotify, Taylor Swift is having a pretty good time lately, namely selling millions of digital and physical copies of her new "1989" album. And her big party extends to Instagram, where she appears as the top celebrity for the first time since the Adweek/Shareablee rankings for branded Instagram videos debuted a few months ago.

Swift's 15-second clip features the pop singer lip-syncing to Kendrick Lamar's hip-hop tune, "Backseat Freestyle," including the following lyrics: "Goddamn, I feel amazing, damn I'm in the matrix. My mind is living on cloud nine and this nine is never on vacation. Start up that Maserati and vroom-vroom, I'm racing."

She's driving her car (doesn't appear to be a Maserati, though) in the video, which has garnered 864,000 likes and comments. Those consumer engagements certainly haven't hurt record sales.

The Adweek/Shareablee chart below features eight categories (auto, beauty, consumer electronics, retail, fashion, celebrity, sports leagues and TV shows) every week and showcases the best branded effort. Two wildcard niches are always sprinkled in, and we've chosen pro sports teams and government agencies for this week's edition.

Check out Swift and the other winning pieces of work via our multimedia infographic, where you can watch last week's top Instagram videos and see the brands' organic reach.

Here are this week's 10 most compelling data points from the digital marketing space, including one whopper stat that reveals what a success #BreakTheInternet was for Paper Magazine as well as numbers that show how automakers should focus more on mobile. Check them out below.

1. As we all now know, Paper delivered a whole lot of Kim Kardashian in the flesh when its newest print issue hit newsstands Nov. 12. Well, per a rep for the publication in an email to Adweek last night: "November 12, our traffic hit 6.6 million page views with 5 million of those being unique visitors. This is just direct traffic to the site, and does not include the billions of impressions created on social channels and news outlets." Impressive, indeed. And the publication wasn't shy on Twitter, posting a bare-chested picture or two of the sexy bombshell. In total, as of late Thursday, Paper had tweeted eight Kardashian photos that collectively totaled 7,993 retweets and 7,078 favorites on the social channel. Her husband, Kayne West, retweeted one of the magazine's photos and almost immediately accrued 76,000 retweets and 85,000 favorites for his effort, cheekily dubbed #AllDay.

2. According to Dealertrack, smartphones and tablets accounted for 40 percent of total Web traffic for the automotive space in October. Per its research, the software company concludes those on-the-go eyeballs helped drive a 32 percent overall increase in online lead-generation forms being filled out last month. The theory is that consumers started their research via mobile and then often completed forms—if not on their phones—at their home computers.

3. Wednesday morning'sGoogle/DoubleClick ad server crash took down ads for more than 55,185 websites, equivalent to 315 ad network outages, said online monitoring firm Dynatrace.

4. Twitter revealed that 200 million people visit the social platform monthly to see a celebrity's profile, but they don't actually stick around. And Kardashian's social performance did little to discredit such a figure.

5. The IAB U.S. and China Mobile Report 2014 found that 71 percent of China's mobile-toting consumers watch full-length TV shows weekly on a smartphone or tablet. Twenty-eight percent of U.S. respondents said the same.

6. John Lewis's awesomely clever #MontyThePenguin video has been watched nearly 14 million times since being uploaded Nov. 6. (If you haven't seen it, scroll down to the end of this post when you are done reading.)

7. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said his company has paid musicians $1 billion in the last year in a response to a dis from Taylor Swift. His privately held firm has previously stated that it pays artists around 70 percent of its revenues. With a little back-of-the-napkin math, that means Spotify's sales were nearly $1.43 billion in the past year. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the global music marketplace generated $15 billion in business last year, down from $16.5 billion in 2013. So unless the last 12 months have shown unusual growth in the music business, Ek's remarks suggest that Spotify has been responsible for roughly $1 for every $15 (or 6.6 percent) in the last year.

8. Speaking of Taylor Swift, she isn't just killing it with record sales, but she's slaying Instagram video too. A 15-second clip of the pop singer lip-syncing Kendrick Lamar's hip-hop tune "Backseat Freestyle" quickly garnered 864,000 likes and comments.

9. Here's to $640 million, Yahoo—because that's how much a sought-after programmatic video system such as BrightRoll is worth in late 2014, evidently. By this time next year, though, the cash that CEO Marissa Mayer doled out may represent a bargain. Programmatic will total $20 billion and account for 63 percent of digital ad spending by 2016, eMarketer recently said.

10. And last but not least, let's close the marketing book on #AlexFromTarget, shall we? Social stats player ViralHeat this week gave Adweek exclusive data on how the situation benefited Target Nov. 3 through Nov. 7. Take a look at the sentiment analysis in the intriguing charts below.

Last week, Taylor Swift was the No. 1 celebrity on the Adweek/Shareablee Instagram branded video charts after she posted a clip of herself driving in a car while lip-syncing to Kendrick Lamar's hip-hop tune "Backseat Freestyle." The Spotify-dissing songstress picked up 913,500 likes and comments for the 15-second social video.

And it appears that Selena Gomez might have taken notice because she grabbed the top spot in the celebrity category this week by employing the same tactic. Gomez does more than lip-sync in her Instagram video, though, as the 22-year-old pop star belts out the chorus from Carrie Underwood's "Something in the Water" tune that hit the market this month.

Like Swift, Gomez selected a song from an artist who doesn't normally perform in her category. (Gomez is pop, while Underwood is country, for instance.) And Swift and Gomez chose to shoot the video in a car. While it could be a coincidence, Gomez lists Swift as an influence on her Wikipedia page, so they could easily follow one another on the social platform.

At any rate, Instagram users definitely "like" seeing pop singers cover other stars' tunes. Gomez garnered 758,000 likes and comments for her effort to beat out all others in her niche from Nov. 10 through Nov. 16.

The Adweek/Shareablee chart below features eight categories (auto, beauty, consumer electronics, retail, fashion, celebrity, sports leagues and TV shows) every week and showcases the best branded effort. Two wildcard niches are always sprinkled in, and we've chosen sporting goods/apparel and fashion luxury for this week's edition.

Another standout performance goes to Mercedes-Benz, which continues to show that taking Instagram viewers to unusual places is a winning formula.

Check out Gomez and Mercedes-Benz's work via the multimedia infographic below where you can watch the top Instagram videos and see the brands' organic reach.

Beyoncé showed the world how she kicks it in her downtime with the biggest Instagram post of the week.

The 15-second clip represents why she is who she is, perhaps the biggest star on the planet. Also, her Instagram got more likes than Taylor Swift's recent post.

Swift gave the world a peak at how she lip-syncs to Kendrick Lamar while driving. Beyoncé showed us how she dances in a bathrobe and lip-syncs to herself. Both were worthy Instagram moments, but as the Adweek/Sharablee charts show, Beyoncé's 945,000 likes in five days definitely tops Swift's 925,000 in three weeks.

The Adweek/Shareablee chart below features eight categories (auto, beauty, consumer electronics, retail, fashion, celebrity, sports leagues and TV shows) every week and showcases the best branded effort. Two wildcard niches are always sprinkled in, and we've chosen travel and food and beverage for this week's edition.

Also, you're going to want to see how Walt Disney World went 8-bit for its birthday.