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Multi-Faceted 'Context' Remains Key In Mobile Ads For PHD's Wolinetz

wolinetzIn her role as Managing Director of Connected Platforms at media agency PHD, Andrea Wolinetz helps manage client opportunities that are digital but don’t necessarily fit a silo such as “mobile” or “social.” She offers Foursquare as a prime example of this conundrum in the agency: “Should you call your mobile specialist because it’s a location-based application? Are you supposed to call your social specialist because it’s a social-based engagement once you’re in it? Or are you supposed to call your search specialist because all of the platforms in which you would buy, in terms of paid opportunities on Foursquare, require good understanding of bid-based marketing, modelling and keywords?”

Wolinetz spoke to AdExchanger last week about what she’s seeing from her cross-digital-channel agency “seat.”

AdExchanger: Speaking of "connected platforms," is connected TV beginning to provide some scalable opportunities to your clients?

ANDREA WOLINETZ: It’s starting to. In the past 18 months, we have seen the "second screen" moving to the "first screen," if you will.  What I mean is, there’s all this talk about mobile video, mobile viewing opportunities and “second screens,” and yet what I think is interesting about connected platforms is that it’s taking native mobile behaviours and bringing them to a much larger screen.

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Digitas And HuffPost Attempt 'Real-Time' Native Ads

Digitas HuffPo NewfrontAt yesterday's Digitas NewFront, Huffington Post executives said they would offer their native advertising content distribution system exclusively to the Publicis Groupe interactive shop's clients.

While billed as "real-time," the self-serve content system will post marketers' content within a two-hour window of receiving the request. "We're bringing our year-old BrandLive service to HuffPost that will allow us to circumvent the usual ad buying and trafficking process to publish 'Sponsored Stories' on the site," said Tony Weisman, CEO of Digitas North America, referring to the company's "brand newsroom" service on stage at the NewFront with Arianna Huffington, chair, president and editor-in-chief of Aol's Huffington Post Media Group.

But aren't native advertising and real-time – even if we allow for a two-hour lag – generally considered mutually exclusive marketing pursuits? Not so, said Travis Donovan, Huffington Post's executive products editor.

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IPG's Cadreon Gets A Seat At The Grown-Up Table

ipg-argyilanInterpublic Group has made changes to its Cadreon trading desk in North America, uprooting it from its previous home in the Mediabrands Audience Platform and repotting it in the Magna Global media investment arm.

As Adweek reported earlier this month, a new entity called Magna Global North America will absorb the trading desk along with search agency Reprise. MAP, meanwhile, will carry on primarily outside the US.

MGNA is led by Kristi Argyilan, who says that by aligning Cadreon and Reprise with Magna's TV, print and radio buying activities, Mediabrands is laying the groundwork for wider automation of media buying, including traditional placements.

"As the platforms become more sophisticated and the inventory is available for more traditional media, we start to get to cross-channel, real-time optimization," she said.

It's natural to wonder if the change was driven by continued client pushback against desks like Cadreon, WPP's Xaxis, Omnicom's Accuen, and Publicis' VivaKi Audience On Demand. But while those pressures are real (The Kellogg Company and Kimberly-Clark are among the brands that have publicly balked, citing concerns about data security or "black box" bidding algorithms) they do not seem to be in play here. There are a couple reasons why.

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AKQA Talks Up Mobile Commerce And Other Trends At New York Event

AKQAAfter a relatively quiet period following its acquisition by WPP Group for $540 million last year, AKQA's executives popped up in New York on Friday to deliver what the digital agency described as an “experiment” in reaching out to clients and the media.

“We wanted to give back to our customers by sharing with them ideas and trends that we think are having an impact on consumers,” AKQA Marketing Manager Simone Schiefke told AdExchanger.

As part of a roadshow that began in London and will possibly head to San Francisco, AKQA founder and CEO Ajaz Ahmed met with several other executives at the Crosby Hotel and covered the growing importance of mobile commerce, “touch” technology and the concept of apps overtaking TV viewership in a presentation that included a dose of strategy tips.

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Digital Agency Booyah Advertising Sprouts Trading Desk Unit

matt-thompson-booyahFull-service digital agency Booyah Advertising has launched a trading desk, led by new hire Matt Thompson, previously with Mindshare in London. The trading desk will employ four people, all in Denver.

Booyah the agency is part of Booyah Networks, which also owns video ad marketplace SpotXchange. Booyah Advertising did $100 million in media last year, according to Thompson, and plans to do $125 million this year, with a focus on national clients in the U.S. including Vitamin Shoppe, Little Tikes, Ancestry.com, and DISH Networks.

Thompson joined three months ago as director of RTB trading. At Mindshare he worked on international digital media campaigns for HSBC and NBA.com.

"We want to pick up on all the opportunities that present themselves in the programmatic space," Thompson said. That includes building relationships with private exchanges and other "premium programmatic" opportunities. Booyah plans to leverage the video chops of corporate sibling SpotXchange to capture TV dollars as they migrate to video, including video RTB.

But how does a midsize agency like Booyah capture client business that may already reside with a holding company trading desk or an independent desk such as Digilant or Accordant Media? By integrating horizontally, Thompson says.

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Media Agency Chiefs Spar Over Transparency And 'Transparency' At 4A's

Verklin at 4asThe growth of online media has upended the way media is bought and sold, and the traditional ad agency model is under greater pressure than ever before. On one side of the office are established account planners and media buyers; on the other side sits the trading desk. A group of media agency heads kicked off the third day at the 4A's Transformation: The Idea Effect conference in New Orleans with a lively debate on the future of the business, including how to reconcile established creative and media businesses with the emerging programmatic one.

Moderating the panel was David Verklin, former CEO of Aegis Media Americas and current operating partner with investment firm Calera Capital. He asked GroupM Global Chairman Irwin Gotlieb how trading desks can be fair to clients.

Gotlieb responded, "Transparency is of the essence. Having said that, it doesn’t say in Genesis that everything we do has to be on a fully disclosed basis to clients. We compete with parties that are equity funded where profitability isn’t an issue. We must develop technology, create structures to exploit it for the benefit of our clients."

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Will The Agency Business Survive? Look To 'Flying Cockroaches' As The Model

Rishad Tobaccowala at 4a'sIf you're attending an ad industry conference, it's a safe bet you're going to hear a lot of cheerleadering and hyperbole about how great things are. And while there are any number of ardent defenders for the ad agency model out there, few could muster a level of encouragement as spirited as the one laid out by Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Publicis' VivaKi, in a presentation at the 4A's Transformation: The Idea Effect conference in New Orleans.

Commenting on the sometimes negative portrayal of the state of ad agencies today, versus the so-called Mad Men era of bold creativity and even bolder behavior, "It makes you want to shoot yourself. You come away reading these things thinking no one will want to join us. Google will eat our lunch," Tobaccowala said, pacing the stage. "Bull----! The last I looked, we had not been disrupted. If you invested in four holding companies, you would be better off than investing in Apple, Google, or Facebook. Wall street has realized that our growth has just begun. And there are plenty of reasons why."

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Will GroupM Pull A McKinsey With New Consulting Practice? Not Exactly

ernie-simon-usethisWhen you think of big consulting firms operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, names like McKinsey and Deloitte come to mind. GroupM? Not so much.

But WPP Group's media investment arm aims to change that with a new consulting unit led by Ernie Simon, previously the chief strategy officer at Omnicom's OMD.

Unlike those management consultants, Simon said GroupM Consulting Services will focus entirely on the marketing function. It will work at both the brand and enterprise level to advise on marketing decision-making and resource needs in technology and other areas.

GCS has not yet staffed up. Simon, whose title is president, will use the coming weeks to identify priorities and plan headcount.

He spoke with AdExchanger yesterday.

When I think of big technology consultants, McKinsey, Accenture, and Deloitte come to mind. Are you competitive?

McKinsey does this as part of their larger consulting practice -- where they talk about the overall way to organize change or logistics. We're trying to keep this very tight to what we do in terms of marketing and advertising, and generating demand.

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CEO Alan Herrick On Technology, Creative, And The Sapient Way

herrick-sapientSapient is a company with many faces, and revenue sources. About 70% of its business comes from the SapientNitro digital agency. Another 25% derives from Sapient Global Markets, which serves the capital and commodity market needs of clients in the financial and energy sectors. And 5% is in government services, where it has done work for the Library of Congress, National Cathedral and others.

Even within the SapientNitro agency, there are many angles. The company bought an above-the-line agency, Nitro, in 2009. More recently it has acquired firms (IOTA Partners, Second Story) that do work around digital experiences for retail stores and other physical environments. One of its big clients in this area is Vail Resorts, for whom it created a robust experience built around RFID chips embedded in season lift badges. Such place-based executions can spin off all kinds of data that can be used to customize future media and creative.

Sapient also recently bought MPhasize, which provides mix modeling capabilities to support media investment decisions.

These investments come at a challenging time for digital agencies, many of which are struggling to escape their primary client association as web development shops, ill equipped to take the lead on creative branding assignments or on global media execution. But Sapient appears well positioned, according to financial analysts.

"We continue to view SAPE as one of the best-positioned agency stocks...as peers begin to follow SapientNitro's lead in e-commerce platforms,"  BMO Capital Markets analyst Dan Salmon wrote recently. "And with the IT services businesses ramping back up, investors can now look out and see an accelerating revenue story again."

Many traditional agency businesses, and some technology consultants, are embracing Sapient's way of doing things. In a recent AdExchanger interview, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell said it views itself as increasingly competitive with "the Sapients and Cognizants" -- i.e. companies that embrace an integrated approach to marketing and technology.

In the below interview, CEO Alan Herrick talks about Sapient's recent M&A, its plans for media, and the future of marketing technology.

AdExchanger: What role should technology play in the agency model? And how does SapientNitro tackle this question?

ALAN HERRICK: This goes back to various beliefs that we've held for probably 20 years. When you look at the role of technology in people's lives, it often fails. When you look at technology done well, the creative element and the technology elements are inextricably woven together. That has been one of the key tenets in our thinking for a long time -- how this whole ecosystem around storytelling and experience and technology and kiosks and tablets comes together.

It's all about, how do we get the creative and technology together to really help tell a participatory, interactive, compelling story that goes on in perpetuity? That's been a core part of our ethos for a long time.

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Agency RBM Has Systems Integration Aspirations Says CEO Easterling

rbm-agencyRBM Co-founder and CEO Elliott Easterling is a believer.

For his San Francisco-based performance marketing agency, which has broadened its scope beyond search to display as well as other channels, agile marketing works - and the $6 million in net revenue last year is the proof.

Ignited by Silicon Valley startups and its agile product development movement, agile's approach to marketing claims to be opportunistic and brings unique, iterative development to the client's plan – and even the agency itself.  Easterling says, "With the fragmentation occurring in the marketplace today, the data that's available, a changing market landscape with lots of new channels coming up, it's impossible to put a yearly marketing plan in place.  You need to be constantly pivoting your business."

Don't mistake RBM (a.k.a. Red Bricks Media) for strictly a bottom-of-the-funnel direct response agency, though.  Performance should include a brand "experience" management according to Easterling, who adds, "We optimize an overall experience in terms of determining the right channel mix with content as the fuel."

Meanwhile, on the client side, data-driven digital is bringing new requirements to clients' staffing, technology and media mix modeling needs. Regarding technology, Easterling notes, "We call ourselves systems integrators. We're integrating sophisticated marketing technologies into our clients' businesses."

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