Lowe's' first campaign under its new CMO includes humor. The 70-year-old home improvement chain is debuting "Make Your Home Happy." The first spots, which bring inanimate objects like magnets or lawn ornaments to life, break today. One commercial features a unicorn lamenting that his "tiny unicorn legs" don't afford him a better view of the lush green lawn. Another features a preening lawn flamingo.

Cloud marketing has become the backbone of Pep Boys' retargeting and prospecting strategies, helping the marketing team maximize their spend. Cookie pools are huge, but you can't re-market to everybody. How do you best leverage your dollar? The foundation of any marketing cloud strategy is finding the right vendor.

Lane Bryant is accusing TV networks ABC and NBC of refusing to air a body-positive lingerie ad featuring plus-size models. "This Body," created by MDC-owned Laird+Partners, features "Sports Illustrated" swimsuit model Ashley Graham alongside industry colleagues Precious Lee, Tara Lynn, Denise Bidot and Georgia Pratt, wearing little or no clothing while boxing, breastfeeding and striking poses, delivering confident lines about their curvy bodies.

Do drug ads provide useful information, as the pharmaceutical industry maintains? Or do ads just promote wasteful use of expensive new drugs, justifying regulation to rein them in? Advertising increases drug sales; the studies are consistent on that. It does so for the promoted drug, as one would expect. But it also increases sales of other, non-advertised drugs for the same condition.

Capital One has once again packed Charles Barkley, the NBA player-turned-analyst into a car with Samuel L. Jackson and Spike Lee for a new series of Final Four road trip commercials, reprising an award-winning campaign it ran with the same stars last year.

There's no better way to project a warm and fuzzy image amongst both employees and the public than by allowing folks to bring their pets to work. At Kimpton, some hotels even have a "Director of Pet Relations," an employee-owned dog posted at the front desk that helps greet guests.

Virtual reality is still in its infancy, but brands are finding creative ways to film and post 360-degree clips. Liberty Mutual picked Facebook as the go-to platform. The brand's spot promotes Liberty Mutual's 24/7 roadside assistance and is set up in the style of a quiz.

Thanks in large part to such companies as Adidas, Anheuser-Busch, Mondelez, Nike, Under Armour, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, sponsorship spend on soccer in the U.S. is expected to set a record of $333 million in 2016. That is up nearly 10% from 2015, according to research firm IEG, Chicago.

Apple has long been the master of emotional involvement. It got us to care about computers and phones when, before, they were just utilitarian machines. Now, however, it faces a far bigger task to get us to care. It wants us to care about encryption.

Several marketing trends surfaced this year at SXSW and could greatly impact how brands and consumers interact. They include virtual reality (it's everywhere!), social messaging, artificial intelligence/emotive robotics, dark social and "connected everything."