The 10 things in advertising you need to know today
1. The boss of Japan's biggest ad company is stepping down after an overworked employee killed herself. Tadashi Ishii, the president and CEO of Dentsu, said he was resigning from his role to take responsibility for the 24-year-old employee's suicide and for failing to achieve a "dramatic reform of overwork."
2. Facebook ads are "far less viewable" than some advertisers were expecting. That's according to Drew Huening, director of Omnicom's digital ad buying trading desk Accuen - although Facebook argues that it has much higher standards of viewability than other platforms on the web.
3. Facebook is in talks with Media Rating Council, the marketing industry's watchdog for media measurement research and methodology. The company is under increased pressure to provide more transparency after confessing on several occasions now that it had misreported metrics.
4. Consumer spending in the US jumped up in the final stretch of the December. It's a welcome boost for retailers after a muted November.
5. These nine retailers that bombed in 2016. These are the companies that struggled, with slumping sales and unappealing sartorial trends.
6. J. Crew's website shows everything that's wrong with the brand. We visited J. Crew's website and found some glaring fashion misses and deep discounts that make a turnaround for the struggling brand seem less and less likely.
7. Here are the 10 most pirated TV shows in 2016. The power of "Game of Thrones" hasn't waned, for better or worse.
8. Although digital ad spend is up 20%, it's benefiting only a few, The Drum reports. And it makes marketers' jobs a lot harder.
9. These are the ad agency executives to watch in 2017, according to The Wall Street Journal. From ad holding company CEOs to female creative leaders on the rise.
10. The biggest brand fails of 2016, according to Digiday. The list includes Samsung's exploding phones.