Shark Week’s top advertisers—and more from iSpot, Kantar, Amazon, Nike: Datacenter Weekly

Shark Week’s top 5 brand advertisers so far

iSpot hires Leslie Wood to lead research

Speaking of iSpot, the company just hired Leslie Wood as its chief research officer, “giving the Nielsen measurement challenger a high-profile addition,” Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports.

The details: “Wood spent more than a decade working with packaged goods marketers to merge Nielsen audience data with Catalina household retail sales data,” Neff notes. “She was chief research officer of NCSolutions, a joint venture of Nielsen and Catalina in which Nielsen has the majority stake, for 12 years up until February. ... At iSpot, she’ll lead new currency initiatives across linear and streaming TV and oversee the data science department.”

Essential context: “Wood is likely the most honored active market researcher in the business,” Neff writes, “most recently receiving the 2023 American Marketing Association’s Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Award for helping brands understand the business and brand impact of advertising, an honor that’s been bestowed on George Gallup and David Ogilvy among others. Wood also received the Advertising Research Foundation’s Erwin Ephron Demystification Award in 2019 and was inducted into the Market Research Council’s Hall of Fame in 2016.”

Keep reading here.

Amazon tops Kantar’s new Brand Inclusion Index

“Amazon topped Kantar’s list of the overall best brands in DEI in the U.S., followed by Nike and Disney,” Ad Age’s Adrianne Pasquarelli and Maia Vines report, referencing Kantar’s new Brand Inclusion Index, “which focuses on consumer perception of a brand’s diversity, equity and inclusion strategies and how that influences their buying decisions.”

The details: “In the report, one surveyed consumer cited Amazon’s focus ‘on doing business for all customers’ and its ‘not choosing to virtue signal’ as a reason for its high ranking. ... Kantar based its score on a brand’s perceived impact, ranging from negative to positive. The company surveyed 1,000 adults in the U.K. and 2,500 in the U.S. in April.”

Essential context: “Unaided by researchers, Nike was voted as the top brand consumers could nominate for its DEI efforts,” Pasquarelli and Vines add. “Kantar noted that just 60% of U.S. respondents could nominate one or more brands making DEI progress without a prompt. Among those who voted for Nike as the top brand, many noted perceived brand values such as fairness and Nike’s history of inclusive marketing.”

Keep reading here.

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