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Martin Sorrell Q&A: WPP Will Broaden Its Tech Footprint

sir-martinThe six global ad holding companies (WPP, Publicis, Interpublic, Omnicom, Dentsu, and Havas) are basically legal roosting boxes for advertising agencies, but a few years hence we may see them very differently. Or, a few of them anyway.

Speaking with AdExchanger today, CEO Martin Sorrell said, "I think our business has changed dramatically in the last 5 years, and a lot of people aren't prepared to accept that."

Sir Martin is prepared, as he showed yet again this week with a $70 million investment in Latin American software developer Globant. The Buenos Aires-based company employs 2,500, mostly engineers, who work on Intranets, data architecture projects, and mobile integrations.

We spoke with Sir Martin about the Globant stake and WPP's direction…

How far afield of traditional marketing services is WPP willing to go? Do you aim to become more competitive with technology consultants like Accenture and Deloitte?

SIR MARTIN SORRELL: Less so the Accentures or the Deloittes and more the Sapients and Cognizants. Our traditional target is the marketing function or the CMO – now it's moving more toward the CIO and the information and technology function. What's happened is CMOs have started to build websites … I liken it to the back of the television set. You get a little spaghetti at the back of the TV set and it's very confusing. We're trying to do a common platform on the back end. CMOs can play on the front end.

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WPP Accelerates Tech M&A With Stake In Argentina's Globant

wpp-globantWPP Group has taken a 20% stake in Globant, a fast growing Latin American marketing and software development firm.

Buenos Aires-based Globant blends engineering and design-driven driven approaches. It employs 2,700 in six countries -- including Brazil, Argentina, and Columbia -- and offers its clients software development, data architecture, e-commerce applications, design, and mobile development services. American Express, LinkedIn, and Google are among its customers.

The $70 million investment, which closed on Dec 27, reinforces WPP's long-stated determination to grow through technology M&A. It has said it wants digital revenues to reach 35+ percent of total revenues by 2016. But the deal is unique in that it represents a  significant departure from what we think of as "marketing."

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How MediaCom Does Data

vik-mediacomAs a WPP Group agency, MediaCom works closely with the holding company's Xaxis trading desk to execute data-driven media strategies. In such relationships between agencies and trading desks, it can be hard for a client to know where the desk stops and the operating agency begins. That creates a tricky problem, since first party data is sensitive and the more "hands" on that data, the higher the perceived risk.

In a recent talk with AdExchanger, MediaCom Managing Partner Vik Kathuria acknowledged the sensitivity and said his agency deals with it by making sure client teams drive programmatic media strategy.

"You're going to need intensive data insights," he said. "That's something you have to be very clear, that in no way, shape, or form are you willing to cede control of."

Kathuria describes Xaxis as a crucial partner on execution. "We use Xaxis extensively across multiple clients and we've seen stellar results."

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Marketers Moving From Product-Centric To Customer-Centric Says Merkle CEO Williams

MerkleWhen David Williams bought Merkle in 1988, the first online display banner was still a few years away. But that doesn’t mean marketing tech wasn’t a part of his CRM agency from the get-go as Merkle ‘grew up’ building platforms for direct mail, and then the phone, and then email as the Internet made its appearance.

According to Williams, who is the company’s CEO today, his next bet is that cross-channel addressability – across social, mobile, search and display - is approaching and everything will be more measureable over time. He believes that just 12 months from now, we'll see "a meaningful difference" from what we're seeing today across digital.

AdExchanger spoke to Williams recently about his company, industry trends and what that “meaningful difference” is.

AdExchanger: Given the transformation with Merkle, how do you see your competitive set today?

DAVID WILLIAMS: Our competitive set is clearly fragmenting. Five or 10 years ago, our competitive set was the classic marketing service provider. An Axciom, an Epsilon, an Experian - people like that.  We still compete in that segment primarily in marketing technology, data warehouse development.

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VirKet Growing With Mexican Internet Marketing And Kenshoo

VirKetInternet marketing agency VirKet based in Mexico City, Mexico announced last month that it had signed on with Kenshoo and its search engine marketing (SEM) platform products - Kenshoo Enterprise (for large, corporate clients) and Kenshoo Local (for managing many smaller advertisers). See the release.

Daniel Molano, Chief Strategy & Product Officer at VirKet, discussed the deal and internet marketing momentum in his region with AdExchanger.

AdExchanger: You were involved in adopting Kenshoo Enterprise, Kenshoo Local as well as reviewing its capabilities initially. What was the trigger for deciding to go with Kenshoo?

DANIEL MOLANO: We felt we had already heard many things about Kenshoo in the past, and Google, who we are doing some things with, recommended them.

We have about 20 of the top – call them "Fortune 100" - Mexican companies as clients. We also are managing campaigns for almost 4,000 SMBs, so we needed a platform that would allow us to manage multiple firms at the same time. Our main objectives since the beginning of the company has been not to just provide raw clicks and impressions to clients, but rather performance and ROI-oriented business models.

Do you have a sense of the differences between the Mexican market that you’re serving and the United States or Europe, for example?

I always say that the Mexican market is about five years behind. When we started out, we had no competition whatsoever - or very little. If there was any competition, it was the traditional media agencies trying to do traditional media online, therefore they didn’t know what they were doing. In SEO (search engine optimization), we still have no competition here in Mexico.

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How Universal McCann Does Data

Any media agency will tell you it's innovating hard around data in campaign planning and reporting. But what does that mean exactly?

For Universal McCann, the global media arm of McCann Worldgroup, today's challenge in analytics isn't methodological. It's all in the follow through – creating standardized measurement approaches and then getting insights into the hands of media planners in a predictable and repeatable way.

To meet that challenge, UM set up a unit called Decision Sciences, led by Managing Partner Michael Horn. Horn, whose background straddles agency (R/GA, OMD) and media (NPR), describes Decision Sciences as "incremental to the agency's research and advanced analytics functions."

He recently spoke with AdExchanger…

How do you operationalize analytics in the Decision Sciences team?

MICHAEL HORN: Every team optimizes, reports, and projects performance and benchmarks. The question is, how well and how efficiently do they do it? We found there was a tremendous lack of efficiency and training skills management in the junior levels.

If you look at the teams from media director to associate director on down, there's a lack of important technical skills and the translation of methodology to actual planning and optimization.

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Traffiq Embraces Agency Model, CEO Goldberg Talks Tech DNA

Traffiq is among the few companies to cleanly jump the fence from a product-centric to a services-centric model. One year ago, it was focused on developing and marketing a self-service marketing workflow tool. Over time however it became clear prospective customers weren't ready.

"We were building a model that could be self-serve, and what we found was that they really wanted our services team to do the work for them," CEO Lori Goldberg tells AdExchanger.

In the below interview, she touches on Traffiq's current market position, "programmatic premium," and the evolving role of the digital agency.

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Publicis Digital Hub VivaKi Becomes Standalone Unit, As CEO Klues Retires

In the summer of 2008, Paris-based ad holding Publicis Groupe had started working on CEO Maurice Lévy's pledge to derive at least 25 percent of the agency's revenues from digital. The problem was that digital was still a sideline to the main business of creating and buying ads for TV, print and out-of-home. With those categories deeply set in their individual "siloed" disciplines, the company came up with the idea of forming a digital hub that would touch on the company's various media buying and digital creative service functions. It called the unit VivaKi.

Now that digital dollars are generating over 35 percent of Publicis' annual revenues, the company is ready to give VivaKi billing as a standalone company with its own P&L. As VivaKi moves on to its next phase, the man who helped form and run it as CEO, Jack Klues, announced he would be retiring at the end of the year. He will hand the reins to CFO Frank Voris.

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R/GA's Fledgling Media Services Unit Finds Its Stride

 

R/GA's decision to launch a media division one year ago was an unusual step for an agency deeply associated with its creative product. The firm has always talked a good game about data, for instance using personal health data to support the award winning Nike+ and Fuel Band products. But that's a far cry from executing media buys using first and third-party audience data and optimizing those campaigns on the fly.

Tony Effik is Managing Director of Media & Connections, as the department is called. He believes a creative agency can bring something original and valuable to the online media equation. For example, he says R/GA brings a content-centric approach to media trading and to working with algorithms such as Facebook's EdgeRank.

Effik spoke with AdExchanger about the R/GA's unique approach to trading digital media.  

What have you learned in the first year?

TONY EFFIK: Well, the first year has been fascinating, interesting, challenging and a lot of hard work. I did already have a small media practice, though. It was always in the background. There wasn't really something that the agency had really committed to in a deep and meaningful way. The way that it was working wasn't really working with the DNA of R/GA, which is essentially about innovation and doing stuff that other people are not doing. That was when Bob Greenberg, our chairman, decided to really ramp up on media. The brief basically was to do something different to challenge the status quo. That's what we've been trying to do.

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iProspect Is a Harvester of Intent, Says Prez Kaminski

Speak the name iProspect and what's the first thing that comes to mind? If you were around during the first wave of online marketing, the answer is certainly "search." The agency was one of the first independent search marketing agencies to go global with offices in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere before its 2004 acquisition by Aegis.

But iProspect is repositioning itself for a world defined by the interplay of search with other channels including display, mobile, and social. It's now very focused on the growing challenge around conversion attribution.

AdExchanger spoke with US President Brian Kaminski.

iProspect was one of the first global search agencies. What is it today?

We really consider ourselves a global digital performance agency. And that is obviously a very loaded yet somewhat meaningless statement, all at once. Basically, in a nutshell, we view ourselves as an agency that helps our clients identify where their consumers are living, breathing, and playing online and help to harvest the intent that those users have and help to drive connections and engagements with our clients.

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