What you need to know in advertising today

Seph Lawless; Skye Gould/Business
Insider

Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy early Monday morning
after a multiyear battle to stay afloat amid steep declines in
sales and customer traffic.

The company said that it would close 142 stores before the end of
the year and that Eddie Lampert would step down as CEO while
remaining the company’s chairman.

The more than 125-year-old company, once the most iconic retailer
in America, has seen its sales cut in half since 2014. It has
been burning through cash, closing hundreds of stores and
slashing jobs in an attempt to stanch the bleeding.

To read more about how the iconic retailer ended up filing for
bankruptcy, click here.

In other news:

‘In the next 12 months, you’re going to see a massive
amount of consolidation’: Web publishers are overhauling their
branded content divisions to keep ad budgets
flowing. Dozens of publishers pushed hard into
branded content over the past several years, but some worry that
a shakeout is coming.

Brands continue to take their advertising in-house in
droves — and it’s terrible news for ad
agencies. A whopping 78% of respondents to a
new survey by the Association of National
Advertisers reported having some form of an in-house agency
in 2018.

Here are all the types of personal info hackers stole
from 29 million Facebook users, and why it’s so
frightening. The majority of data taken was
personal names and phone numbers, while for some people, much
more information was taken including date of birth, location,
religion, and a variety of other details.

‘We needed to re-educate the market on Hulu’: The video
streaming provider’s CMO explains why it needed a
refresh. Hulu is “like a playground” for brands, its
chief marketing officer Kelly Campbell told me in a recent video
interview.

ABC’s latest
sponsorship deal signals a push at parent company Disney to sell
longer-term, custom ad deals to brand executives, CMO Today
reports. The network, which typically gets a
different sponsor per day for its “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show, has
Google sponsoring the five-day show for an entire week starting
today.