MAM
Unilever’s Axe Deodorant recognised for creative marketing
SAN FRANCISCO: Monthly magazine Business 2.0 has named Unilever’s Axe Deodorant, Rheingold Beer and Walt Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures recipients of the 2003 Business 2.0 Sweet Spot Awards. The awards recognise the most innovative and successful marketing campaigns of the past year.
The 2003 Sweet Spot Award winners were selected by Business 2.0 editors and a panel of marketing, communications and creative professionals.
The editor of Business 2.0 Josh Quittner said: “We dedicated this year’s Sweet Spot Awards to campaigns that were able to harness that squishy concept called inspiration while still achieving a wholly practical goal: results. In addition to celebrating Axe Deodorant, Rheingold Beer and Walt Disney’s achievements, we unveil some of the behind-the-scenes thinking that went into these successful marketing initiatives.”
Business 2.0 deals with business, technology and innovation. It is published out of The Fortune Group at Time which is an AOL Time Warner company.
Most Innovative Campaign: The Dutch consumer products giant Unilever introduced Axe Deodorant Bodyspray to American consumers last July with a humorous, edgy campaign by New York agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty that focused on the testosterone-addled preoccupations of its male target audience.
Determining that this ad-weary demographic prefers to “discover brands,” the agency bypassed conventional television ad saturation in favor of a highly targeted Web initiative. Judges were impressed, declaring that this sense of discovery really works.
Best Brand Relaunch: Tasked with the assignment of relaunching a brand that had been dead for 25 years, and armed with a $500,000 budget and the edict to capture the mercurial “Manhattan hipster” market, branding agency Powell revitalized Rheingold Beer by reviving one of the brand’s classic hallmarks: a beauty contest.
Leveraging Generation Y’s fondness for nostalgia and enlisting the involvement of East Village and Lower East Side barkeeps, Rheingold promoted the contest through a series of billboards. According to judges, by managing to keep the contest “below the radar enough to tap that tough-to-get New York trendsetter/culture driver crowd,” the strategy paid off in hard-won buzz.
Most Bang for the Buck: Walt Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures was concerned that 40-something superstar Mel Gibson might be too mature to appeal to the teen market it needed to make Signs into a summer blockbuster.
Therefore, the studio turned to Cornerstone Promotion to create a low-out-of-pocket guerrilla marketing strategy for the eerie flick. The judges described the cost-effective campaign, which included creepy online ads, a downloadable remix of the ominous sound effects from the movie and a reworking of the film’s posters into the mysterious shape of crop circles as a great example of the extent of lifestyle immersion necessary for effective viral marketing.
MAM
IAS launches Total TV suite to boost transparency in CTV ads
New solution offers programme-level insights across platforms and publishers.
MUMBAI: In the world of streaming, what you see is not always what advertisers get and that’s exactly the problem IAS is looking to fix. Integral Ad Science (IAS) has unveiled ‘IAS Total TV’, a new suite of Connected TV (CTV) solutions aimed at bringing what it calls “linear-like” transparency to the fast-growing streaming ecosystem. In simple terms, it is an attempt to make digital TV advertising a lot less of a black box.
The offering aggregates programme-level data covering genre, ratings, language, shows and specific content from major platforms including Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Prime Video, along with opted-in publishers via Publica. All of this is housed within the IAS Signal interface, giving advertisers a unified view of where their ads actually appear.
The timing is hardly accidental. According to Nielsen, as of Q4 2025, 74.2 per cent of all TV viewing in the United States is ad-supported. Of that, streaming alone accounts for 45.6 per cent outpacing traditional television and cementing its position as the largest ad-supported medium. Advertisers have followed suit, funnelling premium budgets into CTV, but often without a clear, standardised view of performance or placement.
That gap is precisely what IAS is targeting. By combining content insights with media quality, supply path data and campaign outcomes, the platform aims to give marketers more control over when, where and alongside what content their ads run. The goal is not just visibility, but accountability ensuring ads land in brand-suitable environments rather than disappearing into opaque inventory pools.
The suite also promises practical gains. Marketers can access real-time, aggregated transparency across shows and platforms, streamline campaign controls across digital video channels, and leverage third-party verification to improve efficiency and pre-bid decision-making. Measurement tools extend to quality reach and incremental conversions, offering a clearer link between spend and outcomes.
At a time when high CPMs and fragmented data make CTV both attractive and complex, the push for transparency is becoming less of a luxury and more of a necessity. IAS’s move reflects a broader industry shift, where the race is no longer just for eyeballs, but for clarity on what those eyeballs are actually watching.
Because in streaming’s premium playground, knowing the content may just matter as much as owning the audience.
