Agencies

Rentrak defended itself late last week against rival measurement firm Nielsen, whose global president Steve Hasker claimed Rentrak “never lets the facts get in the way of a good press release.” Hasker, in a Friday media briefing regarding errors Nielsen had discovered in its national networks ratings going back to March 2, opened fire on […]

Publicis Groupe will acquire 20% of Matomy Media Group, an Israeli performance marketing company that recently went public on the London Stock Exchange, the companies said Monday. The investment will not generate cash for the company’s coffers, going instead to a small group of individual investors, but CEO Ofer Druker said it will result in collaboration […]

At the outset of Advertising Week in New York City, WPP chief Sir Martin Sorrell turned his attention to Amazon’s VP of global ad sales Lisa Utzschneider on the stage they shared with Live Nation, CBSi and ESPN. “Your job, I guess, is to demonstrate the value of Amazon’s data for off-platform advertising,” he quipped. “Your revenues […]

Yannick Bolloré, the newly appointed chairman and CEO of Havas, took to the Times Center stage Wednesday at Advertising Week to talk about changes at the French agency holding company in the wake of last year’s restructuring. Bolloré, a family-owned investment group steered by Yannick’s father and famed French investor Vincent Bolloré, owns a 37% […]

While AOL and Publicis Groupe have been programmatic cohorts since last July, the media giant and the holding company took their partnership to another level by adding video and linear TV to the mix Monday at Advertising Week. The move will link Publicis’ digital arm VivaKi with AOL Platforms, which will become Publicis’ preferred partner for programmatic video. […]

Following ad network Undertone’s summer snap-up of programmatic exchange Upfront Digital Media, the company rolled out on Friday a programmatic platform called Virtuoso. The platform is part of Undertone’s developing ad stack, said cofounder Eric Franchi. The company will stagger the release of Virtuoso’s functions, first beginning with programmatic execution and workflow via the Upfront integration. There’s a […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by John Lee, executive vice president at Merkle. Challenged by an already short digital marketer attention span, the data-management platform (DMP) is already running the risk of going from today’s front-page […]

Mobile ad platform Millennial Media is buying up mobile exchange Nexage and the message to agencies seems fairly clear: We want to be your everything. Announced Tuesday, the $107.5 million deal, a mixture of cash and stock, is expected to close in Q4. The tech integration will start in earnest in the new year. With […]

Cloud CRM stalwart Salesforce.com and agency holding company Omnicom Group are extending their love affair. The companies on Tuesday revealed a CRM data-sharing initiative (they’re calling it a customer engagement platform) extending across Omnicom. This means Salesforce.com will pipe data from email, sales transactions, call center/service requests and mobile data into Annalect’s data-management platform. Previous […]

The first half of 2014 was sobering, to put it mildly, for Publicis Groupe and its CEO, Maurice Levy. In the wake of the holding company’s failed megamerger with Omnicom Group and its weak second-quarter earnings report, Levy needs to show digital strength. Some structural changes announced Tuesday may help it do that. Among the […]