Top 10 celebrities in TV commercials: Datacenter Weekly

Plus: Meta’s Threads racks up users, how AI is coming to the cloud, the latest jobs numbers and more.

Jul 8, 2023 - 21:01

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Top 10 celebrities in TV commercials: Datacenter Weekly

Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals.

TV’s top commercial celebs

TV measurement company iSpot.tv pulled together the following ranking of the 10 most-seen celebrities in TV commercials year-to-date exclusively for Datacenter Weekly. The list ranks the stars by TV ad impressions across national brand commercials, and it focuses on celebrities being themselves, basically—as opposed to actors playing specific characters (e.g., Progressive’s Flo, Allstate’s Mayhem). We’ve listed the top brand driving exposure for each celebrity in parentheses.

1. Cecily Strong (Verizon)
2. Shaquille O’Neal (The General)
3. Stephen Curry (Subway)
4. Melissa McCarthy (Booking.com)
5. Ted Danson (Consumer Cellular)
6. Kevin Hart (Chase Freedom)
7. Seth Meyers (Verizon)
8. Peyton Manning (Nationwide)
9. Ben Barnes (T-Mobile)
10. Alton Brown (Neuriva)

The fine print: For the purpose of this analysis, we’ve excluded network/show promos and movie trailers, as well as voiceover-only appearances by celebrities.

10 million

That’s the number of users who signed up for Meta’s new text-centric social platform Threads—Mark Zuckerberg’s challenge to Elon Musk’s Twitter—within the first 7 hours, per Politico.

Ad agency employment hits all-time high

First-party data x generative AI

“First-party data and generative AI may seem like two unrelated spaces, but Amazon Web Services is already envisioning ways that they can come together,” Ad Age’s Asa Hiken writes in setting the stage for his interview with Jon Williams, global head of agency business development at AWS. Hiken notes that in late June, AWS announced “a partnership with Omnicom that will incorporate Bedrock, among other AI products, into the ad holding company’s Omni marketing platform.” (Bedrock is “a tool that combines numerous AI models so that customers can build their own generative AI applications,” per Hiken.)

Hiken spoke with Williams about the Omnicom relationship, what responsible AI development looks like, and more. Williams also offered his take on the newly launched AWS Generative AI Innovation Center:

“The Innovation Center provides agency customers, as well as customers from other verticals, with machine learning science and strategy expertise, which will help them experiment and use generative AI across their businesses,” Williams told Hiken. “It will help them to understand and select what use cases to experiment with, to improve accuracy in AI models that we just talked about and to fine-tune and customize the models for use cases—which is going to be key for advertising.”

Keep reading here.

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Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.