New York Times' Powerful Ad; Facebook cracks down on QAnon: Thursday's First Things First

Welcome to First Things First, Adweek’s 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. The New York Times Tells Over 100 Stories in 2 Minutes in New Work From Droga5 Droga5 has produced some remarkable work over the past couple years for The New York Times for its "The truth is worth it" campaign, including: Documenting the separation of children from their families at America's southern border.Looking at a journalist's harrowing descent into the heart of ISIS.Refuting false claims about Covid-19. Instead of focusing on a single story for its latest ad, Droga5 uses over 100 New York Times stories to tell a narrative set to the tune of jazz artist Makaya McCraven’s song Requests. Watch it here. More great creative from yesterday: After fellow Restaurant Brands International chain Burger King tried to usher in the end of 2020 with Christmas in July, Popeyes started a countdown to 2021 135 days early with its latest campaign.NFL star Saquon Barkley, while completely deadpan, endorses the protein in Oikos yogurt during these spots, which demonstrate his need for "yogurt strength" so he can demolish everyday tasks. Facebook Cracks Down on QAnon Content On the same day President Donald Trump responded to a question about internet conspiracy fringe group QAnon with "I don't know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate," Facebook took decisive action. The platform booted accounts promoting QAnon, banning 790 groups, 100 pages, 1,500 ads and blocked 300 hashtags across Facebook and Instagram. Read more: QAnon isn't the only group Facebook cracked down on. Was Keyword Blocking as Bad as We Thought? One of the focuses for Sleeping Giants' co-founder Nandini Jammi in her new venture Check My Ads [read our feature on her here] is to look at brands' use of keyword blocking in order to better fund publishers. During the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, publishers widely reported a drop in CPMs, which was often blamed on keyword blocking. DoubleVerify revealed a piece of good news, however, as it found keyword blocking actually dropped year over year. Read more about DoubleVerify's findings here. Havas Appoints DEI Advisory Committee in North America Last month, Havas revealed it would create a DEI Advisory Committee when it released diversity numbers, which were in line with other holding companies and showed a lack of diversity in executive and management roles. Yesterday, Havas announced who would make up the committee, which will oversee diversity, equity and inclusion strategy and integrate such efforts across Havas. See the full committee here. Related: Pizza Hut has appointed Chequan Lewis to its first chief equity officer role. He'll create new diversity and inclusion structures and programs for the brand.