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Fragmented consumption of media is driving the need for agencies to be smarter with how they manage campaigns, from adjusting strategies on the fly down to the minutia of calculating costs and billing clients.

“If we’re going to run something that’s omnichannel … you have to have all of the back-end sorted in order to be able to do it,” said Daniel Chapman, managing director of products and solutions at Havas.

Deciding whether to go in-house or find a planning and billing platform provider has become an important question for media agencies since brands now have these same tools at their fingertips. If a brand can analyze consumer behavior across platforms and then optimize campaigns on its own, where is the value in a media agency?

Procter & Gamble chief brand officer Marc Pritchard hinted at this dilemma in September at the ANA Media and Measurement Conference, saying the CPG giant would negotiate upfront deals with networks directly after lamenting the “information asymmetry” the sell-side has over the buy-side. By circumventing agencies and the volume they bring to the negotiating table, P&G is essentially seeing more value in data expertise driving down ad prices than sheer spending power.

“If this is about the data, then we as brands can own more of our own data sets. And, if that’s the case, then the next step is we can own media buying directly,” explained Ana Milicevic, principal and co-founder of management consultancy Sparrow Advisers. “It’s a shift in the perception of where value comes from in media buying.”

Bill Durrant, founder and president of Exverus Media, said that as the complexity of media plans increase, so do the back-end systems that support these campaigns in order to store and analyze data that’s used for multiplatform campaigns. But the company’s core focus will always be on strategy rather than having the most unique billing and reconciliation system.

“We’re not an agency that wants to spend time on this stuff that is, frankly, important but noncentral and noncore to what differentiates our offering,” said Durrant.

Tech platforms that support these processes are adapting to shifts in media, too. Mediaocean, the widely used planning and billing platform for companies in media and advertising, bought mar-tech firm 4C Insights in July to prepare for the rise of TV streaming as people continue to cut their cable subscriptions.

Havas’ U.K. and France offices started using a similar platform—FreeWheel’s Strata—in September after employing an in-house solution. Independent agency Exverus Media is evaluating whether it should build something in-house or go with a tech platform’s offering.

For Havas, differentiation means digging into larger data sets, such as interest rates, consumer confidence reports and geolocation data. Chapman said the industry has been “slightly distracted by things like audience-based planning,” which has its merits, but isn’t the type of data “that really makes a difference for clients.”

“We can timestamp that investment against nondigital channels,” Chapman continued. “Then [we can start to] model that against the performance that we see.”

Milicevic said brands are also looking to use data in more areas than just media planning, like new product development or improving their supply chain. Where agencies could help, she said, is by bringing perspective from multiple clients to better inform media buys.

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Through nonprofit Boss Babes ATX and creative studio Group Work—both of which she founded and runs—Hervey’s been pushing the creative and entrepreneurial community in Austin and beyond to think differently about who gets funding, tools and opportunity. With big-name partners like Doc Martens, OkCupid, Red Bull, Tito’s Vodka and the University of Texas, the work she’s doing is reshaping the industry landscape.

“I’m just trying to figure out how to make things work for people who are not typically centered in the design of entrepreneurial and creative spaces,” Hervey explained. “It’s a design problem, in my mind.”

After graduating from the University of Texas in 2014 with a degree in journalism, Hervey spent the first few years of her career in communications and marketing at media startup Neon Cantina and boutique design agency In-House International. Through those experiences—some of which required her to participate in projects she didn’t agree with or support—Hervey sharpened her focus and strengthened her commitment to the values that guide her work today: inclusion and collaboration.

Out of a desire to act on those values, Hervey founded Boss Babes ATX in 2015 with a mission to connect women and nonbinary entrepreneurs, creatives and community organizers. Through Group Work, founded in 2017, Hervey takes branding, creative and event curation clients on a project-by-project basis in her spare time. The studio’s name, Group Work, speaks to Hervey’s philosophy of inclusive, values-driven collaboration.

“I like to challenge this concept of a target market,” said Hervey. With each project, she asks, “Who does this exclude, and why are they excluded?” Using this as a guiding principle, Boss Babes ATX has also been able to work with its partners to extend funding opportunities and connections to communities that have been historically sidelined.

She admits that digging into systems of exclusion can bring up issues that are hard to look at. “A lot of those things are rooted in sexism or racism or other discriminatory belief systems that we’re not always conscious of,” said Hervey.

Big Mistake

Early in her career, Hervey said that she often failed to trust her instinct, instead choosing to sidestep the conflict or gray area facing it would have unearthed.

“You have to be able to—at the bare minimum—trust yourself,” she said. “You have to trust your emotions; you have to trust your read; you have to trust your lived experiences.”

Lesson Learned

Focusing on the gray areas led Hervey to the harder yet more rewarding work that she does now, both through the nonprofit and creative studio. Trusting her vision has allowed her to lean into “group work,” building effective projects.

How She Got the Gig

Hervey created these gigs herself, founding Boss Babes ATX in 2015 and Group Work in 2017.

Pro Tip

“I will not work with someone who does not have a written set of values,” said Hervey.

That spirit of innovation and adaptation in the face of adversity is readily apparent in this year’s winners of Adweek’s Podcast of the Year Awards. Many of the shows are new to 2020, having been launched in quarantine, or were retooled to be more engaging in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

Here are this year’s Adweek Podcast of the Year Awards winners:

Agency-Hosted Podcast of the Year

Voices of Resilience
The Shipyard

After organizing a live music festival in 2019 with a focus on addressing issues of mental health, Columbus, Ohio, marketing agency The Shipyard was inspired to create a podcast in partnership with The Ohio State University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health that would continue advancing these conversations. Started in quarantine and initially focused on a local audience, the show—hosted by agency CEO Rick Milenthal—grew to have a global audience who share the agency’s passion for tearing down the stigmas around mental health.

Branded Podcast of the Year

Two winners were honored in this category:

Hypnopolis – a BMW Original Podcast
Jung von Matt, White Horse Music and California Music for BMW

Set in 2063, this sci-fi podcast introduces you to a world in which criminal cases are judged by an AI, with deep-sleep hibernation as the punishment for offenses. When a journalist awakens after a 30-year sentence for a crime she didn’t commit, she sets out to find the real perpetrator. The BMW brand plays a limited role in the 6-episode season, with the focus instead being on pushing the boundaries of audio entertainment.

Big Brains
The University of Chicago

Universities play vital roles in developing the innovations and discoveries that shape our world, but few have found effective ways of sharing those stories with the world in a compelling way. With Big Brains, the University of Chicago captivatingly tells how its faculty and research projects have addressed everything from the discovery of a lost society’s remains in the Sahara to the science of what drives conspiracy theories.

Creativity Podcast of the Year

Blockbuster: The Story of James Cameron
Epicleff Originals

How did James Cameron overcome decades of obstacles on the path to becoming one of Hollywood’s most iconic directors? This 10-episode scripted podcast from Los Angeles-based production company Epicleff Media tells Cameron’s story from his time as a college dropout and truck driver to his nearly catastrophic effort to bring Titanic to the big screen. The show builds on the success of Blockbuster’s first season, winner of Adweek’s 2019 Creativity Podcast of the Year, this time requiring 200% more cast and crew.

Diversity and Inclusion Podcast of the Year

In The Thick
Futuro Media Group and Acast

Pledging to tell you the stories you’re missing from mainstream news, this twice-weekly podcast hosted by Maria Hinojosa and Julio Ricardo Varela was born from a desire to see more diverse representation in coverage of the 2016 presidential election. Whether discussing this campaign season’s debates or interviewing thought leaders across a range of topics, the podcast offers a potent and refreshing perspective amid a media landscape that can often seem like a sea of sameness.

Entrepreneurship Podcast of the Year

The Great Fail
ICON Media

What happens when you bring the vibe of a true-crime podcast to a topic like business obstacles? You get The Great Fail, a podcast that takes a forensic look at the deaths of iconic brands like Blockbuster, Toys R Us, Zima and Atari. Created, produced and hosted by business consultant Debra Chen, the show has grown organically and has evolved its subject matter to include less well-known stories of unraveled business ventures, such as the collapse of esports team Echo Fox.

Innovation Podcast of the Year

Foundering
Bloomberg

Dedicating each season to one topic, Foundering turns the reporting of Bloomberg Technology into a serialized podcast about one major business debacle. The current season is dedicated to the meteoric rise and failed IPO of WeWork, the coworking empire whose seemingly unstoppable momentum plummeted to earth in 2019—as co-founder Adam Neumann walked away with a $1.7 billion severance. Foundering was born out of a 2020 retooling of Bloomberg Technology’s earlier podcast, Decrypted, with the goal of giving the show a more dedicated focus on innovation and tech.

Interview Podcast of the Year

The Get Lost Podcast
Souled Outside Exploration Co.

Aiming to be “a defiant middle finger to the status quo in the world of travel publications,” The Get Lost Podcast features interviews with a wide of range of travelers and experts to inspire you with adventures that “that might curse, bankrupt or kill you.” Hosted, produced and edited by Joe Sills, the show’s second season built on the early promise of its first by adding an original theme song, more immersive openings and a VIP pool of guests including everyone from TV hosts to archaeologists.

Marketing Podcast of the Year

Lead Balloon
Podcamp Media

Sharing tales from the trenches of PR disasters, crises and impossible odds, Lead Balloon is the passion project of Dusty Weis, a former journalist and PR professional who launched Podcamp Media in 2019 to help brands tell their stories via podcasts. Describing the show’s focus as “public relations and marketing disaster stories, told by the comms professionals who lived them,” Weis has finally breathed life into an exciting an educational topic that, surprisingly, has rarely had a compelling platform until now.

Podcast Event of the Year

Debate: Coronavirus Will Reshape the World Order in China’s Favor
Intelligence Squared U.S.

When you think of a “podcast event,” you likely picture a live episode recorded with the hosts on stage—perhaps featuring celebrity guests, a musical interlude and some audience interaction. But with the Covid-19 pandemic shutting down live events, most podcasts simply skipped their live tours and other experiential offerings. The nonpartisan debate hosts at Intelligence Squared U.S., however, saw the opportunity to bring its debate podcasts into the virtual realm and expand them into global conversations, including its two-on-two debate about whether the pandemic will tilt the geopolitical chess board in China’s favor. The debate drew 200,000 viewers across all the organization’s platforms.

Publisher-Hosted Podcast of the Year

Go Off, Sis
Refinery29

Airing two seasons in 2020, this podcast from Refinery29’s Unbothered brand has tackled many of the year’s most important and polarizing topics through the lens of how they’ve affected the lives of Black women in America. While the show often tackles weighty topics, it does so in a way that’s energizing and refreshingly relatable for the show’s audience of women ages 18 to 35. Beginning as an IGTV show, Go Off, Sis evolved into a podcast now in its second year and produced by an all-Black, majority-female team.

Best Podcast Launched in Quarantine

Editor’s note: For the 2020 Podcast of the Year Awards, Adweek created a free-to-enter category for any podcast launched during the Covid-19 pandemic’s quarantine period.

Voices of Resilience
The Shipyard

As described above, Voices of Resilience was created as an extension of Columbus marketing agency The Shipyard’s ongoing commitment to erasing the stigmas around mental health conversations. “Although 2020 has been a unique year full of stress and unprecedented challenges,” the agency says, the quarantine period inspired the shop’s leadership “to create a mental health community globally through connective storytelling.”

Best Podcast Site or App

The Plot Thickens website
Turner Classic Movies

Both a rich hub of content for existing fans and a well-organized introduction for newcomers, TCM’s website for The Plot Thickens packs in an impressive amount of content without ever feeling overwhelming. The Plot Thickens is TCM’s first podcast, with Season 1 dedicating seven episodes to the twists, turns and tragedies in the life of director Peter Bogdanovich.

Technology Podcast of the Year

Command Line Heroes
Red Hat

Now in its sixth season, Red Hat’s podcast tells the often surprising stories behind the personalities who created some of the world’s most iconic tech and software. While the show isn’t specifically about Red Hat, an open-source enterprise software company, the show’s creators say a survey of listeners has found that 95% recognize Red Hat as the brand behind the podcast.

Thought Leadership Podcast of the Year

Two winners were honored in this category:

Think with Google Podcast
Gimlet Media for Google

Launched in 2020 and aimed at professionals in the marketing and advertising worlds, Gimlet’s Think With Google Podcast was a five-episode limited series that looked at topics both weighty (the potential of cutting-edge machine learning) and enjoyably informative (such as the history of the Google doodle). Although the series was prepared for publication before the Covid-19 pandemic hit in force, the podcast team quickly pivoted their final episode—on the realities of being a modern CMO—to include perspectives on how the pandemic was reshaping the marketing landscape.

Floor 9
IPG Media Lab

Analyzing the intersection of technology and culture, Floor 9 hosts Adam Simon and Scott Elchison analyze news that matters to marketers and invite experts on for round-table discussions of the topic. Now in its third year, the show adapted in 2020 to be weekly instead of biweekly, allowing more timely coverage of pandemic-related news, and attracted a large pool of C-suite guests. For holding company IPG and media agency UM Worldwide, the show has become a popular resource for connecting with clients and industry peers alike.

TV/Streaming Podcast of the Year

Land of the Giants: The Netflix Effect
Vox Media

Recode journalists and hosts Peter Kafka and Rani Molla opened Season 2 of Land of the Giants: The Netflix Effect with interviews featuring Netflix execs, employees, talent and even CEO Reed Hastings. This season, the podcast expanded beyond tech listeners to everyday streaming consumers, secured a full-season sponsorship from business financial services platform Avalara, and set up for a Season 3.

Podcast Editor of the Year

Annie Avilés
Vice Media Group

Vice’s Painkiller podcast about America’s fentanyl crisis features many voices across four countries and three languages, creating an inclusive blend of audio that might pose a challenge in the editing process. But Avilés, who began her career in Bolivia before becoming an NPR correspondent and eventually an editor for long-form podcasts, preserves the voices of those living through the crisis in a way that’s both authentic and accessible. Colleagues say her role goes far beyond splicing audio, though: “She helped crystalize a thesis from a loosely formed pitch,” said senior reporter Keegan Hamilton, “pushing us to explore not just where fentanyl comes from and how it gets into the country, but also the systemic racism and the broken healthcare system at the root of the opioid epidemic.”

Podcast Episode of the Year

“P Line”
California Love
LAist Studios

California Love, hosted by 2020 Podcast Innovator of the Year Walter Thompson-Hernández (see below), tells the often overlooked stories that defined parts of Los Angeles culture. In “P Line,” the show revisits one popular, if risqué, form of pre-internet social networking: the Hollywood Party Line. Through fun recreations and reminiscences, the episode brings a largely forgotten experience back to life for a new generation of listeners.

Podcast Executive of the Year

Kate Osborn
Vp of Audio
Vice Media Group

With a career that started in college community radio, Osborn has become one of the audio industry’s most notable leaders. Focusing on immersion as a key driver of innovation and quality for Vice Audio, Osborn aims for each audio project to take listeners inside a story and the lives of those telling it. Her leadership has helped Vice Audio look beyond borders, too, growing its podcast portfolio through multiple languages and forging partnerships in territories including Europe, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region.

Podcast Host of the Year

Shapearl Wells
Host of Somebody
Co-production of Topic Studios, The Intercept, the Invisible Institute and iHeartRadio, in association with Tenderfoot TV.

An activist and mother of six, Shapearl Wells brings her full self to this podcast about the murder of her son, Courtney Copeland. Wells decided to work with journalists to take the investigation into her own hands, delivering an unfiltered view of a grieving Black mother. Her storytelling, closeness to the topic and authentic frustration showcases how Wells is, as producer Bill Healy says, “a model for how to speak about your own life with rigor and complexity.”

Podcast Innovator of the Year

Two winners were honored in this category:

Walter Thompson-Hernández
Host, California Love
LAist Studios

Stories of Los Angeles often focus on Hollywood’s fame and glamour, but Thompson-Hernández brings a more unfiltered view into the stories of the L.A. residents he chats with on his first podcast, California Love. Be it straight from his family home, horseback riding through Compton streets, or any other locations in Los Angeles, Walter’s authenticity innovates storytelling in podcasting, giving California Love listeners a much more intimate look into the diverse communities of Southern California. Thompson-Hernández was previously a journalist for The New York Times and recently published the nonfiction book The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland.

Jared Gutstadt
Founder and CEO
Audio Up

With the evolution of audio content rivaling that of video, Jared Gutstadt founded podcast studio Audio Up Media in 2019. The move came about a decade after launching Jingle Punks, a media company he sold to Ole Media Management in 2015. With Audio Up, Gutstadt aims to grow the podcast experience beyond just audio programs, becoming an entertainment company with advertising and marketing offerings as well. So far he has launched podcasts with celebrities including Dennis Quaid and Tommy Lee, and Audio Up’s Make It Up As We Go is bringing the world of musicals to the podcast medium with a scripted series about an aspiring country music star.

Gutstadt was also honored in the Podcast Producer of the Year category.

Podcast Network of the Year

Vox Media Podcast Network
Executives: Marty Moe, Nishat Kurwa, Liz Nelson, Hanna Rosin

Already an established force in the audio industry—taking home several of Adweek’s Podcast of the Year honors in 2019, including the top prize for its show Recode Decode—Vox Media Podcast Network has continued to grow at a considerable pace. In just the past year, the network’s downloads are up 50%, and one of its anchor podcasts, Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, was expanded to two episodes weekly to meet audience and advertiser demand. With shows like Nice Try!, The Ezra Klein Show, The Weeds and more, the network reports it has significantly surpassed its 2019 revenue numbers, and in September the network announced its first branded podcast: Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, in partnership with Ben & Jerry’s.

Podcast Producer of the Year

Two winners were honored in this category:

Megan Tan
LAist Studios

Combining atmospheric audio and hip-hop beats for the podcast California Love, Tan exemplifies how a producer can amplify and enhance a host’s creative expression. With past experience in Gimlet Media’s The Habitat, NPR’s Planet Money, and Radiotopia’s Millennial, Tan’s careful balance between art and technical prowess brings listeners a new level of immersive journalism with California Love (whose host, Walter Thompson-Hernández, was honored above).

Jared Gutstadt
Audio Up

See above to learn about Gutstadt’s work, also honored in the Podcast Innovator of the Year category.

2020 Podcast of the Year (Best in Show)

Adweek’s top honoree will be announced Tuesday, Oct. 27, on Adweek.com.

Don’t miss Adweek’s virtual event, How Brands Found Their Voice With Audio, on Oct. 27, featuring thought leaders from NPR, Pandora, Refinery29, Headspace and more. Click here to RSVP for this free event.

But even though Glenn hadn’t spent time in office, he did have a lot of skills that are useful for statecraft. “He was a master at negotiating the bureaucracies of the Marine Corps and NASA,” says Launius. “He also knew how to play to the public, which is important if you’re going to run for any sort of office. So from that standpoint, he was really good at this.”

Glenn’s political dreams were put on pause just months before the election in 1964 when he slipped and fell in a tub. He lost during his next campaign in 1970. But in 1974, Glenn won a special election and was elected as a Democratic senator for Ohio, a position he held for the next 25 years. Aside from a failed campaign for president, Glenn’s political career was rather unremarkable. Most of the enacted bills he sponsored were for the creation of obscure national holidays, and Launius says he rarely ever broke ranks with his fellow Democrats. “He was a pretty reliable vote,” he says. “If the party was behind it, he was usually behind it.” Arguably, his most enduring legacy is setting a precedent for the astronaut turned politician.

Since Glenn’s election, a number of astronauts have run for congressional office. Harrison Schmitt, a member of the last Apollo mission to the moon, served as a Republican senator for New Mexico for a few years, and Jack Swigert, a member of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, won a seat in the House of Representatives after losing a bid for the US Senate, but he died before taking office. Being an astronaut isn’t a guaranteed ticket to Capitol Hill, however. Jack Lousma, a member of the second crew to visit Skylab, America’s first space station, lost a 1984 election to represent Michigan in the Senate. And Jose Hernandez, the most recent astronaut to run for Congress, lost to an almond farmer in California in 2012.

If Kelly is elected this November, he’ll be the only astronaut to make it to Congress on their first try. Throughout most of his campaign, Kelly has had a lead over Republican incumbent Martha McSally in the polls reported by the political analysis site FiveThirtyEight, although polls added on Friday show them in a dead heat. That Kelly maintained a lead for so long in a state that has gone Republican in all but one of the past 17 presidential elections is surprising, especially given his lack of political experience.

Some of that might have to do with an electorate that’s hungry for evidence-based policy during a presidential administration that wages war on science. Arizonans have especially borne the brunt of anti-scientific politics during the coronavirus pandemic. Doug Ducey, the state’s governor, was slow to shut down businesses and quick to reopen them in the early stages of the pandemic. Throughout the pandemic, Arizona has had an overall testing positivity rate of slightly over 14 percent, one of the highest in the nation.

“Communities are suffering, and the main reason they’re suffering is we have a failure of leadership to address a serious pandemic,” Kelly said during a debate with McSally earlier this month. “I worked at NASA for 15 years, and NASA wouldn’t give you the 17th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.”

Still, Kelly’s campaign seemed like a long-shot bid in a historically red state. He leans left on some policies—he advocates for health care as a right, ending tax breaks for large corporations, lowering interest on federal student loans, and more renewable energy—but is more centrist on others. As a gun owner and the spouse of Gabrielle Giffords, a former US representative who was shot in the face during an assassination attempt, Kelly advocates for universal background checks, but he also supports the right to bear arms. He says he wants strong borders, but also protection for “Dreamers,” children born in the US to parents who lack documentation. Kelly is not an archetypal Democrat—and he doesn’t want to be. He’s running on the idea that he’s a pilot, an engineer, and an astronaut, not a beltway bureaucrat.

In 1981, Steven Spielberg was getting ready to start shooting E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. One of the critical scenes involved Elliott, the movie’s kid star, winning the trust of the wrinkled little space alien by offering him some candy.

But Universal Studios had a problem: M&M’s had turned them down. The consensus now is that Mars Inc. wasn’t interested because the plot was a little too, well, weird. So Universal decided to approach its second choice, Reese’s Pieces.

At Hershey’s headquarters, director of new product development Jack Dowd was happy to take the call. In the three years since Reese’s Pieces launch, sales were slipping. So Dowd was eager to land his new product in the film, which is why he agreed to a deal that seemed risky at the time. As Dowd recalled in a 1991 interview, he had explained to Hershey’s president Earl Spangler that “we were going to spend a million dollars on a movie that I couldn’t show them the script for [and] that was going to employ a little green creature from outer space.”

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Spangler asked him. Dowd replied with an uneasy, “Oh, sure.”

Fortunately for Dowd’s career and candy fans everywhere, it did work. Nearly 150 million people bought tickets for E.T., which has earned $1.33 billion to date, adjusted for inflation. As for the marketing value that Hershey’s got, that’s somewhere between $15 million and $20 million.

So whatever kind of Halloween you’re having come Saturday, you can thank that little green alien not only for putting this candy on the map but, in many ways, for saving it.

Starting with a treat called Hershey-Ets in the 1950s, the candymaker had perfected the method of applying a hard-shell coating. But not until the 1970s did research and development figure out how to remove the peanut oil from the penuche filling.

Hershey’s originally called its 1978 foray into a soft peanut candy with a hard shell PBs, but soon changed the name to Reese’s Pieces. Despite the catchy name, the candy didn’t make it big, perhaps because Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups already had such a lock on the flavor.

It’s easy to see how E.T.’s 1982 release changed all of that, but what difference could an old movie possibly make today? In analyzing the popularity of Halloween candy, it’s important to remember that kids might eat the stuff, but their parents buy it.

“Shoppers are really the people who are most inspired by E.T.,” said writer and consultant Beth Kimmerle, author of the book Candy: The Sweet History. Hershey’s, she said, “was able to tie in this candy brand with a movie that provided a lot of emotion for people, and that emotion is still playing out 40 years later.”

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Ransomware attacks have surged around the world in recent months, targeting big corporations and critical organizations like hospitals alike. But digital extortion comes in many forms. And a particularly vicious assault is currently taking place in Finland, where a hacker is threatening to release therapy notes and other data stolen over the last two years from one of the country’s largest psychiatric services clinics.

The health care and mental health services provider Vastaamo says it first began investigating a possible breach at the end of September, when a hacker contacted three of the organization’s employees with extortion demands. Since then, Vastaamo has been working with the private security firm Nixu, Finland’s Central Criminal Police, and other national law enforcement agencies to investigate the situation. It seems that Vastaamo had at least one exposed database of patient information that was breached in November 2018, and likely again in mid-March 2019. It is unclear how many patients were affected in all, but the National Bureau of Investigation said on Sunday that the number could be in the tens of thousands.

The hacker or hackers running the extortion campaign have been demanding 200 euros-worth of Bitcoin, about $230, from victims within 24 hours of the initial ask, or 500 euros ($590) after that, or else they’ll make their information public. A hacker persona “ransom_man” has set up a site on the anonymous web service Tor that already lists leaked data from at least 300 Vastaamo patients. Finnish media reports also indicate that Vastaamo has received a demand for around $530,000 worth of bitcoin to keep the stolen data out of the public domain.

In a statement updated on Monday, Vastaamo said that a managing director had been removed over the incident. “The authorities and the Response Office will do their utmost to find out what happened, to prevent the dissemination of information and to bring the perpetrators to justice,” the release says, as translated by Google. “We apologize for the shortcomings in data security, the consequences and human cost of which have become extremely heavy.”

Finland’s Central Criminal Police said in a statement that it was investigating the incident as aggravated burglary, aggravated extortion and dissemination of aggravated invasions of privacy, adding that situation is “exceptional… due to the sensitivity of the material disseminated online,” as translated by Google.

Data extortion attacks can come in many forms. For example, a common type of email scam involves a threatening to leak nude photos or other sexually explicit imagery of a victim if they don’t pay up. These types of messages are often a pure bluff, personalized to contain one of the victim’s old passwords exposed in a historic data breach as a way of attempting to legitimize the demand.

But while the concept may be widely known, the practice is widely viewed as especially immoral. And leaking mental health patient data for extortion appears to be a new low.

“I’ve seen a lot, but I haven’t seen this,” says Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer at the security firm F-Secure in Finland. “It’s such a sad case, and this attacker has no shame. To get justice to the victims, I’d like nothing more than to get the person behind this arrested. However, I’d also like to see the Vastaamo clinic be held responsible for failing to protect critical patient data.”

Hyppönen and others point out that there is another known example of patient data being used in extortion schemes; in 2019 attackers used breached plastic surgery data from an office in Florida in an attempt to blackmail patients.

The nostalgic appeal of old movies, favorite sports, concert clips or music that’s carried through decades has an especially strong pull during moments like the constant stressors of the coronavirus pandemic and political uncertainty.

Cognizant of that appeal, Paris-based agency Romance created a new campaign for Audi that hones in on the timelessness and reliability of the brand’s cars by advertising its pre-owned inventory. It’s part of a broader push to promote Audi’s new certified pre-owned car program, Audi Approved :plus.

The creative approach

In its first 30-second spot for the campaign, the ad begins with body shots of a car that invoke any traditional ad for a new car model. But then, the camera zooms in on the mileage (well, kilometerage in this case) on the dashboard—the car’s already driven 43,052 kilometers.

The model, Audi A1, is from 2018. Words then flash across the screen: “Sometimes, age doesn’t matter,” before finishing with a reference to Audi’s new pre-owned car program.

Promoting this new program represents “a major challenge for the years to come,” said Audi marketing manager for used cars Anne-Sophie Bernard in a statement. She added that Romance’s work resulted in an “intelligent and original campaign” that’s up for that challenge.

The media buy

But even more interesting is where the agency has chosen to deploy these ads. Rather than simply targeting digital spaces that its target demographic frequents, Romance has gone to great lengths to ensure that the ads fit well within the content that they’re interrupting or living alongside.

For example, the ads will play before YouTube videos of classic concerts or sports moments and during Spotify playlists from the 70s, 80s and 90s. As soon as it’s safe for movie theaters to reopen, the ads will also run before classic films played at Parisian cinemas.

“Since we’ve integrated the digital scope into the agency, our work has been driven by transcribing Audi’s DNA throughout all digital channels,” said Romance creative director Caroline Guittonneau in a statement. “This campaign demonstrates that it’s possible today to be creative while using strategic targeting.”

In 2017, Symantec discovered the same hackers carrying out a more targeted set of attacks against US energy sector targets. At the time, the security researchers described it as a “handful” of victims, but Thakur now says they numbered in the dozens, ranging from coal mining operations to electric utilities. In some cases, Symantec found, the hackers had gone so far as to screenshot control panels of circuit breakers, a sign that their reconnaissance efforts had gone deep enough that they could have started “flipping switches” at will—likely enough to cause some sort of disruption if not necessarily a sustained blackout. But again, the hackers appear not to have taken full advantage. “We did not see them turning off the lights anywhere,” he says.

Six months later, in February of 2018, the FBI and DHS would warn that the hacking campaign—which they named Palmetto Fusion—had been carried out by Russian state-sponsored hackers, and also confirmed reports that the hackers’ victims had included at least one nuclear power generation facility. The hackers had gained access only to the utility’s IT network, though, not its far more sensitive industrial control systems.

Going Berserk

Today Berserk Bear is widely suspected of working in the service of Russia’s FSB internal intelligence agency, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB. CrowdStrike’s Meyers says the company’s analysts have come to that conclusion with “pretty decent confidence,” due in part to evidence that aside from its foreign infrastructure hacking, Berserk Bear has also periodically targeted domestic Russian entities and individuals, including political dissidents and potential subjects of law enforcement and counterterrorism investigation, all in line with the FSB’s mission.

That’s a contrast with other widely reported state-sponsored Russian hacking groups Fancy Bear and Sandworm, who have been identified as members of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency. Fancy Bear hackers were indicted in 2018 for breaching the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign in a hack-and-leak operation designed to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election. Six alleged members of Sandworm were indicted by the US Department of Justice last week in connection with cyberattacks that have caused two blackouts in Ukraine, the NotPetya malware outbreak that inflicted $10 billion in damage globally, and the attempted sabotage of the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Berserk Bear appears to be the FSB’s more restrained version of the GRU’s Sandworm cyberwar unit, says John Hultquist, director of intelligence at FireEye. “This is an actor whose mission appears to be to hold critical infrastructure under threat,” Hultquist says. “The difference is we’ve never seen them actually pull the trigger.”

Just why Berserk Bear would toe the line of critical infrastructure disruption without crossing it over so many years remains a subject of debate. Hultquist argues that the group may be preparing for a potential future geopolitical conflict, one that warrants an act of cyberwar such as attacking an enemy’s power grid—what cybersecurity analysts have long described as “preparing the battlefield.”

The latest round of Berserk Bear breaches could be that sort of preparation, Hultquist warns, for coming attacks on state, municipal, and other local governments responsible for administering the current election. According to cybersecurity firm Symantec, three of Berserk Bear’s attempted operations also targeted airports on the West coast of the United States, including San Francisco International Airport. Symantec’s Thakur imagines a future where Berserk Bear is mobilized to cause disruptive—if not necessarily disastrous—effects, like “lights out in a small part of the country, or a certain airline has trouble refueling their planes.”

But CrowdStrike’s Meyers, who has tracked Berserk Bear for eight years, says he’s come to believe that the group may be playing a more subtle game, one that has more indirect but immediate, psychological effects. Every one of its breaches, no matter how seemingly minor, triggers a disproportionate technical, political, and even emotional response. “If you can make US-CERT or CISA deploy a team every time they find a Berserk Bear target, if you can make them publish stuff for the American public and get their partners from the intelligence community and law enforcement involved, you’re basically doing a resource attack against the machine,” Meyers says, drawing an analogy with a hacker technique that overwhelms a target computer’s resources with requests. Meyers points out that last week’s CISA advisory describes widespread scanning for potential victims, not the quieter, more targeted tactics of a group making stealth its highest priority. “The more they can run these theatrics, the more they can make us go freaking nuts… They’re getting us spun up. They’re burning our cycles.”

He was in the middle of two of the largest race discrimination class actions in history, going up against Texaco in 1997 and Coca-Cola in 2001, which settled for $176 million and $192.5 million, respectively. Additionally, Mehri was instrumental in getting the NFL to establish its so-called Rooney Rule, requiring the league to interview at least one minority candidate for head coaching and general manager roles. 

The ad world may recall Mehri from his time working on the Madison Avenue Project, which shed light on the significant underrepresentation of Black professionals in the ad industry, exposing systemic issues in 2009. Mehri’s firm subsequently represented several Black ad pros in race discrimination charges before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

With new pressure being put on the ad industry, and particularly agencies, Mehri and his firm have reached an agreement to work with advocacy group 600 & Rising. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the organization said: “600 & Rising is focused on advocacy, transparency and, importantly, policy that supports Black talent in advertising and public relations, with wage equity a top priority, based on feedback from a recent survey of 600 & Rising signatories. While taking steps toward meaningful change, 600 & Rising will be receiving legal counsel from Cyrus Mehri and the team at Mehri & Skalet.”

Without going into specifics, Mehri noted that the firm is “providing legal counsel on a wide range of topics.”

Over the summer, several agencies and holding companies released diversity data, yet, according to Mehri, not much has changed since his first foray into the industry in the late 2000s.

“The data shows that virtually no positive changes happened,” he said, also referring to a recent study from economist Marc Bendick showing employment and pay gaps. “The data and social science show that when organizations go through the motions and check boxes, they get the same result. The only way to overcome that is for leadership at the top to insist on meaningful change, accountability and intentional efforts to create an atmosphere of equal opportunity.”

Mehri also noted that American culture and current sentiment are different from 2009, with a population more vociferously and actively demanding change. Related to the advertising industry, he feels that there is “an incredible moment for this industry to do what’s right and genuinely create the change that has eluded them all of these years,” adding that it has to “start from the CEO, C-suite and board of directors, putting their foot down and holding people accountable.” 

Litigation, Mehri feels, is “the absolute last resort.” Instead, a range of opportunities, including policy initiatives, could pave the way for agencies to succeed. 

In looking at where the industry sits at the moment, Mehri is both pessimistic and optimistic that industry leaders can do the right thing and avoid some of the missed opportunities of the past. 

“The pessimism is the track record of dodging and weaving, putting things off and talking a good game, while not holding people accountable,” Mehri said. “I’m optimistic because there’s a tidal wave of change coming. They’re either going to go with it or be forgotten. But there’s probably no better moment than now.”

When you’re designing a pumpkin, it’s important to keep a lot of different viewpoints in mind—the shape of the pumpkin, where it will be placed, and who is carving it. For example, if you’re a parent carving a pumpkin with a 3- to 5-year-old, you might not want to dictate a design at all. Just put down some newspaper, hand them a safe tool, and let them have at it.

Whatever they come up with will be much more creative, and much more fun, than forcing your small child to watch you painstakingly draw and cut out a silhouette of a cat on a broomstick. Will it be a tree? Will it be a ghost with chickenpox? “Whatever they create, you celebrate,” Hardin said.

But if you have bigger plans (and yes, more fine motor control), the next step is to consider where the pumpkin will be. If it’s going to be on a stoop by your door, orient the design closer to the top of the pumpkin, where people are going to be able to see it.

If you have an enormous pumpkin, keep in mind that for some reason, everyone kicks them! “If someone kicks it, then your new artist, who has worked so hard to create a beautiful pumpkin, will go inside the house to get a meat cleaver,” Hardin said. Secure your squash with a sign or another obstacle (and hide the sharp objects in your home).

Another trick Hardin suggests is to place the pumpkin in a yard or garden to watch it change as it starts to decompose. “If you do a face, they start to grow little beards, they start to distort in on themselves,” Hardin said. “But you don’t want it in your home. When they go to juice, they go to juice very quickly, and there’s a lot of juice in these guys.” If it decomposes in your yard, the pumpkin carcass can go toward fertilizing your garden or straight into the compost.

Lighting That Lantern

Let’s get one thing straight: Nothing is more annoying than seeing the light source inside the pumpkin. Luckily, there are ways to get around this. For example, rather than cutting all the way through the wall, you can use a sculpting tool to thin it. This lets light shine through and will give your pumpkin interesting dimensionality.

“It glows in orange or red, so it plays with color as well,” Hardin noted.

Battery-operated or rechargeable lights now come in all shapes, sizes, and price points. There’s no need to use candles to light a pumpkin, especially if you’re planning to put them outside or in a place where they can be easily kicked over.

Finally, once you’ve put all this work into creating the perfect pumpkin, you want to preserve it for as long as possible. If your pumpkin is small enough, you can keep it in the fridge at night. But if you’re keeping it outside, you can spritz it with a solution to help preserve it. Hardin likes to use a 50/50 solution of bleach and water. “It’s like rocket fuel,” Hardin said. “Nothing’s getting through.”

If you prefer less harsh solutions, mixing an 80/20 solution of water and vinegar (80 percent water, 20 percent vinegar) will work—and may smell a little more funky. But even with rigorous maintenance, it’s a pumpkin and won’t last forever! So enjoy it while it lasts, then let it go.

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