GroupM pledges investment in Black-owned and diverse media, plus Chipotle hikes wages: Tuesday Wake-Up Call

Welcome to Ad Age?s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. If you are scanning this online or in a forwarded email, here's the hyperlink to sign up for our Wake-Up Call newsletters.

The 2% Solution

WPP media agency GroupM is pledging 2% of its annual media spend to Black-owned along with other diverse media, and is calling on its clients to do the same. ?While GroupM is planning these investments now, the target is to start these activations within the next 12 to 18 months,? writes Ad Age?s Jeanine Poggi. The agency can be developing an impact fund to aid Black content creators and distributors.

The news comes weekly after IPG announced a 5% investment in Black-owned media, and 8 weeks after Weather Channel and production company owner Byron Allen threatened legal action if agencies and brands didn?t shift at least 2% of spend to Black-owned media.

Guacamole is still extra

Amid a sales boom, junk food chains are hiking wages in an attempt to lure pandemic-shy workers back to service jobs. Chipotle, that is looking to hire 20,000 people, announced its average wage will rise to $15 per hour by the end of June, NBC reports.

If that number looks familiar, it?s because progressives have already been clamoring for a $15 minimum wage for years. But Chipotle is lifting its average wage, not its minimum, so some positions will still make as little as $11 an hour. Still, the company is instituting $750 referral bonuses and accelerating its advancement structure so lower-level employees could reach to a restaurateur position in three-and-a-half years. At an income of around $100,000, it?s the highest-paid degree of general manager at the business.

Chipotle can be competing for workers with benefits rarely seen in low-wage service positions, like mental coverage of health, 401(k)s and education assistance.

Split decision

Shares of The Trade Desk fell sharply on Monday following the ad tech company announced a 10-1 stock split. Despite beating revenue estimates, ?the stock's performance reflects a wider worry among investors over whether publishers encourage The Trade Desk's advertiser identity replacement, and also low opt-in rates from other identifying methods including Apple's Identifier for Advertisers,? writes Ad Age?s Mike Juang.

Since other third-party identifiers have fallen short of expectations, investors worry exactly the same will befall The Trade Desk?s offering, dubbed Unified ID 2.0, which runs on the single login tied to a contact address.

As the TV industry looks cautiously to a post-COVID world, how will the 2021 ad haggle reflect the demands change that have been building for the past year? Join ad sales leaders, marketers and media buyers to go over the state of the upfront marketplace at Ad Age In-Depth: TV Pivot on May 24 and 25. RSVP at AdAge.com/TVPivot

Take two

Cond� Nast announced a new editor-in-chief for Teen Vogue?again. Versha Sharma joins from Group Nine?s NowThis, where she was managing editor. The appointment comes significantly less than two months following the last EIC, Alexi McCammond, resigned before her official start date after old, racist tweets resurfaced.

Though McCammond had apologized previously and did so again, it was a bad search for the publication, which made a name for itself in recent years for sharp political commentary delivered through a progressive, modern lens. Unlike many fashion and beauty titles, it tackled issues of race, class, economics and gender head-on. The visit a new EIC with the proper outlook and experience to keep that work has proved problematic for Cond�, which has been coping with its own internal scandals, and enjoys little advantage of the doubt from diehard fans of Teen Vogue.

Just briefly

Oops, all problems: The hackers in charge of shutting down the biggest pipeline on the East Coast are sorry. Kind of. Ransomware group DarkSide released a statement that it is ?apolitical? and didn?t want to cause ?problems for society,? CNBC reports. They were just looking to earn money, they say, and will execute a better job of vetting targets to any extent further. DarkSide even has its own ethics code that marks hospitals, schools, nonprofits and government agencies as off-limits. They are probably the most popular targets for other hacking groups, because of the chaos and destruction shutting down essential services can cause (and driving up ransom payments).

All that glitters: NBC won?t air the Golden Globes next year, after recent revelations that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which chooses the winners, does not have any Black members in its ranks, and amid allegations that winners can be bought. As the HFPA has presented an overhaul plan, industry observers say it?s too small and too slow.

You'd me at ?Hey guys?: Probably the most used greeting on YouTube videos is ?Hey guys,? beating out stalwarts like ?What?s up? (tops in fitness videos) and ? 파이널에셋 and gentlemen? (#1 in tech). The male-centered greeting has dominated for ten years and shows no signs of losing steam, easily eclipsing other options in beauty, DIY, cooking and gaming. Whatever happened to ?Greetings, and well met??

That does it for today?s Wake-Up Call. Thanks for reading and hopefully you're all staying safe and well. For more industry news and insight, follow us on Twitter: @adage.

From CMO Technique to the Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, we?ve got newsletters galore. See them all here.

Subscribers make the difference. Individual, group and corporate subscriptions are available?including usage of our Ad Age Datacenter. Find options at AdAge.com/membership.

I-Hsien Sherwood is the associate creativity editor at Ad Age