What you need to know in advertising today

Sears 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.

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