A booze commercial inside a Netflix trailer inside a Samsung ad: Thursday Wake-Up Call

Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. If you're reading this online or in a forwarded email, here's the link to sign up for our daily newsletter. You can also get an audio version of this briefing on your Alexa device. Ryan Reynolds + Samsung + a Netflix movie + Aviation Gin There’s some serious news on the agenda today, including developments about Google’s political ad targeting. But before we get to the main course, let's enjoy an amuse-bouche. Ryan Reynolds stars in a wacky new ad from Adam & Eve DDB New York that’s actually advertising three products at once, including Aviation Gin, in which he has an ownership stake. As Ad Age’s E.J. Schultz reports, the ad begins with the actor plugging Samsung’s QLED TV as the best way to watch the movie “6 Underground,” which starts streaming on Netflix on Dec. 13. Then, midway through, an ad for Aviation appears on the large-screen TV Reynolds is hawking, prompting him to confess that “I bought mid-roll ad placement.” To recap, it’s a gin ad within a Netflix movie trailer within a Samsung ad, and it’s only 40 seconds long. Got it? Watch it here. On a more serious note Google is clamping down on political campaigns’ ability to target voters. The company will “no longer allow election ads to be targeted based on political affiliation on Google Search, YouTube and across the web,” Bloomberg News reports. Campaigns will, however, still be able to target people by age, gender and postal code. This is an era of heated debate over the role online advertising plays in elections and democracy, and now Google is blunting some of the sharper tools it long offered political advertisers. Google wrote in a blog post: Political advertisers can, of course, continue to do contextual targeting, such as serving ads to people reading or watching a story about, say, the economy. This will align our approach to election ads with long-established practices in media such as TV, radio, and print, and result in election ads being more widely seen and available for public discussion. Which is kind of interesting—it's a tech giant saying it sees something to emulate in old-school TV. Google addressed the issue after Twitter banned political ads outright, and after Facebook said it wouldn’t fact-check them—a laissez-faire approach that has faced criticism from some quarters. Facebook and brand safety Facebook has started to let brands “choose where their messages appear before the ads go live, via whitelists that pre-select the publishers and video makers they support,” Ad Age’s Garett Sloane reports. The new brand-safety tools are an attempt to lure advertisers that might have been avoiding certain ad products. Not that Facebook has problems luring advertisers in general, despite successive scandals over user data privacy. Its revenue was up 29 percent in the third quarter from the year-earlier period, hitting $17.7 billion. Just briefly: ‘Green Wednesday’: Here’s the latest ploy by marketers to invent a new holiday ... "'Green Wednesday' is the day before Thanksgiving that the cannabis industry has branded as the day to stock up on pot before the four-day weekend—because don’t we all need a little help dealing with the in-laws?” Read more in the Ad Age Marketer’s Brief. Wins: Omnicom’s BBDO was the winner of Brown-Forman’s global creative review, which included the liquor giant’s flagship Jack Daniel’s brand. Read more by E.J. Schultz in Ad Age. A question: “Is data privacy regulation sparking an 'ad tech tax’?” Ad Age’s George P. Slefo asks. OK, it’s not exactly a tax, but companies are paying a price to comply with emerging data-privacy regulations. Billion-dollar brand: “Sales of White Claw, owned by alcoholic beverage company Mark Anthony Brands, will surpass $1.5 billion this year, according to Sanjiv Gajiwala, the company's senior vice president of marketing,” CNN reports. Podcast of the day: Ad Age Editor Brian Braiker talks to three top media executives—from The New York Times, New York Media and Bloomberg Media Group—about tackling subscription and paywall models. Subscribe to Braiker’s “Ad Lib” podcast on iTunes or Spotify. Ad of the day: Get in the (branded) holiday spirit by watching Anna Kendrick sing the classic tune “My Favorite Things,” with the lyrics changed to mention Cheetos, Doritos, Lay’s and Tostitos, along with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. It’s an ad from Frito-Lay North America’s in-house creative team, Ad Age’s Jessica Wohl reports. It’s worth watching for Kendrick, but also for the gingerbread house made out of Cheetos and chips. Subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter for exclusive data and analysis about marketers, brands and agencies. Learn more: AdAge.com/datacenter

A booze commercial inside a Netflix trailer inside a Samsung ad: Thursday Wake-Up Call

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