Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Crystal Ballin’
Global ad spend will hit $563 billion this year, according to a Dentsu Aegis Network forecast. Digital ad spend, expected to grow roughly 15% this year to $191 billion, will drive the overall growth. TV advertising, on the other hand, will grow 0.5%. And in an important moral victory, digital will overtake TV as the largest advertising medium. Within digital this year, the Dentsu says online video will grow by 32%, social will grow by 29% and programmatic will grow by 25%. “We are reaching a tipping point in ad spend now as digital overtakes television, mobile overtakes desktop and paid search overtakes print,” says Dentsu Aegis Network CEO Jerry Buhlmann. “Digital and data must now be the default settings for advertisers.” Read the report. Related: Magna released its own 2017 ad forecast.
Advancing Viacom
Viacom has debuted an advanced advertising division headed by Bryson Gordon, who previously led data strategy for the network. Like Fox, which just promoted its head of advanced TV to a plum position as president of ad sales, Viacom sees more opportunity to fuse advanced analytics and ad product innovation into its broader organization. Viacom, one of the founding members of cross-network TV consortium OpenAP, is also looking to its advanced TV group to spearhead more audience data and targeting initiatives. More.
Well, that was quick. Two weeks after announcing it would collapse media buying agency Maxus into MEC [AdExchanger coverage], GroupM is shuffling some of the Maxus leadership to its Essence data-driven digital group. Steve Williams, CEO of Maxus in the Americas, will become North American CEO at Essence. Nick Baughan, CEO of Maxus UK, will become CEO of EMEA for Essence. And Maxus CSO Damian Blackden will continue in the same role at Essence. GroupM hopes that consolidating Maxus and MEC will generate savings and help Essence expand its data-driven buying expertise into new markets. It remains to be seen what will happen to Maxus’ clients as its executive ranks split into different WPP agencies. More at WSJ.
The Big Game
One year after snapping up Supercell for $8.6 billion, Tencent is pursuing Rovio, the Finnish mobile game studio that developed “Angry Birds.” The rumored deal is worth upward of $3 billion, one person with knowledge of the potential acquisition tells The Information. Tencent is by far and away the world’s biggest collector of overall gaming revenue – ahead of traditional video game companies like Sony, Activision and EA and tech platforms like Apple and Google.
But Wait, There’s More!
- Sky Teams With Virgin Media To Counter Facebook And Google – Financial Times
- US Invests $258M In Supercomputing Race With China – WSJ
- Nielsen Catalina Announces New Media Measurement Deals – release
- TrustX Exits Proof-Of-Concept With 33 Pubs For Programmatic Collab – Adweek
- Factual and Adform Partner On Location Data In Europe – release
- Bloomberg Businessweek Goes Behind A Paywall – Bloomberg
- Smaato Expands Integration With Google DoubleClick – release
- State Of Marketing Report: Marketing Embraces The AI Revolution – Salesforce
- Appboy Accelerator For Agencies Propels Growth With Addition Of VML – release
- Apple Makes Aggressive Moves Into Medical Data, Applications – CNBC
- LiveRamp Debuts People-Based Search – release
- More Controls For Advertisers To Blacklist Or Avoid Publishers – Facebook
- Spotify Surpasses 140 Million Global Monthly Active Listeners – blog
- Why I’m Investing In Advertising And Marketing Tech Startups – The Drum
You’re Hired!
