Ad(of the Week): Walmart Reunites Mean Girls Cast for Black Friday Ad Campaign

Welcome to Adweekly, a LinkedIn newsletter giving an inside look at the advertising industry. Each edition will highlight some of Adweek's most important stories from the past week to help marketers, agency leaders, creatives and publishers better understand the industry they work in. By Jameson Fleming

We're starting off this edition of the newsletter with our Ad(of the)week because it can teach marketers and creatives a great lesson on targeting.

Walmart's Black Friday ad will go down as one of the buzziest ads of the year because it immediately infiltrated culture. Official uploads of the spot from Lindsay Lohan and others on TikTok already generated 10s of millions of organic views, and it's putting up similar numbers on other platforms.

We see these kinds of ads in the Super Bowl all the time, but most pieces built off existing IP typically only resonate with a single group despite the fact that brand is paying to be in front of 100 million people.

The target audience here is clear: Walmart wants millennials to take advantage of its Black Friday deals. And Walmart isn't paying millions to get in front of millennials—organic and earned reach is doing it for the brand.

Watch the brilliant ad on Adweek right here.

The Next Chapter of DEI: Shifting the Focus Back to Inclusion

Since the murder of George Floyd, the ad industry has not made the progress it promised on DEI. There's a stagnation of Black leadership levels and a backslide on the percentage of diverse CEOs at agencies.

There are bright spots, however. In partnership with ADCOLOR Conference and Awards , this year's Beacon Awards spotlight five new agency presidents who are putting DEI at the center of their shops.

Ogilvy 's Darla Price (she / her / hers) , Wieden + Kennedy 's Jason White and Jiah Choi , AKQA 's Tesa Aragones and MullenLowe U.S. 's Jordan Muse spoke with Adweek about how they are pushing DEI forward.

Read the story here.

Related | Check out the rest of the Adcolor award winners and a message from Tiffany R. Warren .

6 CMOs Share What's Scaring Them This Halloween

Yes, Halloween was earlier this week, but the things frightening these CMOs haven't gone away since Tuesday. Shrinking budgets, AI and more are leaving top marketers frightful of the road ahead.

Hear from Marisa Thalberg, Dara Treseder, Paul Suchman, Gayle Troberman, Emily Ketchen and Kipp Bodnar about the terrifying parts of their jobs right now in this great story.

Steak-umm Turns Vegans Into Meat-Lovers to Teach Them the Dangers of AI and Deepfakes

Society doesn't typically turn to steak sandwich brands to learn about the dangers of misinformation, but Steak-umm isn't your typical steak sandwich brand. With the help of its agency Tombras , the brand used deepfakes or as it called them "deepsteaks" to create videos of real vegans describing how much they love meat.

Watch the stunt play out here.