How to Stay on Top of Marketing Tech; Burger King Is Melting Toys: Friday's First Things First

Welcome to First Things First, Adweek’s new daily resource for marketers. We’ll be publishing the content to First Things First on Adweek.com each morning (like this post), but if you prefer that it come straight to your inbox, you can sign up for the email here. How to Stay on Top of the Latest Marketing Technology As we document on a daily basis, marketing technology is constantly evolving at a dizzying pace with mar-tech companies continuously offering new products and services. We see these new technologies bleed into marketing every day. For example: companies are experimenting with AI copywriting; Burger King won a Titanium Lion at Cannes for Whopper Detour, a location-based marketing campaign; and companies like Salesforce, Mailchimp and more are building new tools to make customer identity management platforms more effective. One of Adweek’s core missions is to help marketers do their job better. With that in mind, we’re making staying on top of all the latest tools available to marketers a bit easier with our new Institute of Brand Marketing, a complimentary 12-lesson course, created in collaboration with IBM Watson Advertising. Each lesson focuses on a different piece of marketing technology, providing the latest capabilities of the technology and its real-world applications. Read more: You can sign up for the course here. A new lesson will drop every Monday. Burger King Is Removing Plastic Toys from Kids Meals Yet another piece of plastic bites the dust next week as Burger King has announced a new initiative, removing plastic toys from kids meals. Instead, the fast food chain is encouraging people to bring old plastic toys into 500 Burger King locations across the U.K. and place them in designated bins in the restaurants. The move comes as global outcry around single-use plastics is reaching a high point. Read more: Burger King is calling it “The Meltdown," but is it a big enough step toward sustainability? Londoners weigh in. Viral App Highlights the Insensitive Logic of AI It's been well-documented that AI has bias problems, as facial recognition algorithms often lose accuracy when evaluating someone with darker skin. A new tool called ImageNet Roulette is putting those biases front and center by exposing the bias of facial recognition. It purposely spits out results that are more often than not completely useless—nonsensical at best and racist or otherwise offensive at worst. In some cases, it would label black men as “offenders” or “wrongdoers,” while other times it would spit out racial slurs against Asians or outdated and offensive terms for black people. Read more: Learn how the app exposes the deep problems with AI. Meet Our Cincinnati Brand Stars Cincinnati is home to one of the world's CPG giants, Proctor & Gamble. So it should come as no surprise that many of the top brand marketers in the Queen City can trace their careers back to P&G in some form. In total, eight Fortune 500 companies call the city home. Read more: Learn about the innovative marketing at brands like P&G, Roto Rooter, Kroger, SeeMe Beauty and Mensch on a Bench. Just Briefly: The Rest of Today's Top Insights LinkedIn CMO Shannon Brayton Is Leaving at the End of the Year Inside the IAB Tech Lab's New Consumer Privacy Proposals GroupM Is Forming a Coalition to Help Brands Better Reach Multicultural Audiences Ad of the Day: As Obama's 'It's On Us' Program Turns 5, Powerful PSAs Get Personal on Sexual Assault [kickout id="1"] Five years ago, the Obama-Biden White House launched It’s On Us as an initiative aimed at widening the conversation around sexual-assault prevention, with a focus on college campuses. The latest campaign of PSAs contain introductions featuring a direct discussion of sexual assault, including brief, graphic descriptions of attacks. However, the vast majority of the content is focused on how support and love—including for yourself—can overcome the looming shadows cast by assault, stigma and shame. What The Media Kitchen Is Doing to Become More Sustainable By Katherine Kam, associate strategist We recently formed G-unit, an employee resource group with the mission of making a global impact by educating employees how to be more sustainable in and outside the office, by optimizing the office space to be more eco-friendly, and by organizing opportunities to volunteer, fundraise and protest for causes that work to preserve out planet. We know it's not easy to be green, and all the news about climate change, dwindling resources, and the growing piles of trash can seem overwhelming and impossible to tackle as an individual. By creating a community dedicated to sustainability, we hope to create a community where we encourage others to start making small changes that together will make a much greater impact.