Agencies

Marketing and agency veteran Wendy Clark will become the global CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN), the company said on Monday. She is the first female CEO of a global agency network. She will start in September and report into Tim Andree, DAN’s global chairman, who took on the global CEO role after Jerry Buhlmann […]

Bowing to pressure from agency holding companies, Ascential has canceled the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for 2020. The ad industry’s largest annual event was postponed on March 18 from its regular timing in late June to late October 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The festival will now resume in June 2021, when […]

Over the last two weeks, there probably wasn’t a lawyer in America who didn’t field at least one phone call from a stressed-out client asking about activating force majeure to get out of a contract. With events on ice for the foreseeable – media buys either canceled or postponed and commercial productions ground to a […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. How To Finnish The Job In Finland, social media influencers join jobs like doctors, bus drivers and grocery store workers as “critical operators” who continue working during a crisis. It seems like a strange designation (especially in the United States, where some influencers have […]

  March Madness. The Olympics. The NBA and NHL playoffs. Brand marketers spend billions on tentpole sporting events annually, but with live sports either canceled or postponed for the year, they must now figure out where to repurpose that budget – or decide if they can use it at all. Here’s how marketers are adjusting […]

M&A is at an all-time low due to coronavirus fears, but some deals are getting done even in challenged sectors. On Tuesday, Bain Capital divested itself of SRDS, a 101-year-old business within Kantar that compiles contact info, audience insights and ad rates for more than 6,700 B2B and consumer-facing US-based traditional media sources. The acquirer […]

In this new podcast series, AdExchanger editors break the cabin fever by talking with the top thought leaders and practitioners in digital and data-driven advertising – all while under social isolation. On a normal day, Christian Juhl juggles his job as global CEO of the world’s largest media buying firm with being a single dad. […]

Working with clients in travel, brick-and-mortar retail, hospitality and live entertainment right now is a bit of a hot mess. These brands are pausing their ad spend as their businesses get completely shut down – which makes it tricky for media agencies to perform their regular duties. “It’s volatile, chaotic, uncertain and ambiguous, and on […]

Magna’s latest 2020 global ad spend figures, released Thursday, are pretty bleak. Global ad spend will be down 2.8% this year to $217 billion in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. That’s revised downward from Magna’s December forecast, which anticipated 6.6% growth to in 2020. Linear will be hit the hardest, thanks to the postponement […]

While programmatic campaigns for ecommerce clients can optimize to sales in real time, CPG clients get the short end of the stick. When sales surge and change unpredictably – such as during the coronavirus pandemic – it severely reduces marketing agility. To weather these changes, Goodway Group gained access to a CPG client’s critical real-time, […]

Agencies, used to face-to-face meetings, are grappling to pivot to a remote workforce in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Navigating client uncertainties, making urgent changes to in-market campaigns and pausing long-term projects to make room for pressing work are top concerns as agencies adjust to work-from-home life. Here’s how a handful of large digital and […]

Industry executives can put away their magnum rosé bottles until October. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity will postpone its annual June gathering until Oct. 26 to 30, the organizers said on Wednesday. All sponsorships, passes and bookings for official customers will roll over for the postponed event. Read the release. “As always, the […]

Acxiom’s new global CEO Chad Engelgau, appointed in early March, has a big job ahead of him, navigating clients through privacy laws and browser restrictions while integrating the business with parent company IPG. Engelgau, a 12-year Acxiom vet, reports directly to Arun Kumar, IPG’s chief technology and data officer. Acxiom sits alongside IPG’s programmatic unit […]

Quibi, the much-hyped short-form mobile video service, has racked up an exorbitant $1.75 billion in funding ahead of its April 6 launch – closing on a second round of $750 million just last Wednesday. With a bet that people will pay $4.99 per month for 10-minute scripted series supported by ads, Quibi is attracting major […]

The new coronavirus is wreaking havoc worldwide as uncertainty reigns, and marketers aren’t immune. This week on The Big Story, the team diagnoses the effect of COVID-19 on 2020 ad budgets, work productivity and the industry conference circuit. Advertisers won’t necessarily spend less, but they will probably start shifting budget to channels where they know […]

TV is becoming more addressable around the world. GroupM is getting in on the trend with the expansion of its addressable TV business Finecast to Canada on Thursday as its first North American market. Finecast was launched in the fall of 2017 in the United Kingdom to help buyers and sellers target audiences on linear […]

Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts.Accenture Interactive has grown massively in the 11 years since its founding. Accenture Interactive has grown massively in the 11 years since its founding. The agency division of consulting giant, Accenture has annual revenue of $10 billion and is […]

The coronavirus outbreak has caused marketers to rethink their 2020 budgets, delay campaign launches, sit out conferences and experiment with remote work. Despite this disruption, we’re still largely in wait-and-see mode in terms of how the virus will impact operations in the United States. Here’s the quick lowdown on how COVID-19’s warpath through the world […]

The supply-side platform Index Exchange and WPP’s media buying unit GroupM are approaching publishers with an unusual partnership. According to three publishers who were briefed about the deal, GroupM will begin to rout a majority of its demand through Index Exchange as part of a supply-path optimization (SPO) effort. Concentrating demand on Index’s pipes will […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Empire Strikes Back Amazon Prime smashed brick-and-mortar retail with a combination of price discounts, speedy shipping guarantees and a raft of other benefits, with the biggest being the Prime Video streaming service. Now Walmart plans to launch a paid membership service with a focus […]

Omnicom Media Group is already rethinking how to monetize attention, in light of Google’s decision to remove third-party cookies from Chrome in two years. “We are starting to push clients to think about attention as dynamic and be more considerate in how we activate against it,” said OMG CEO Scott Hagedorn. But rethinking customer attention […]

“On TV and Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Maggie Zhang, executive vice president of video research and insights at Dentsu Aegis Network. One of the value propositions of over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) advertising is its TV-like co-viewing activity. Watching video content and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Fox And The Tubi Fox has reportedly expressed interest in buying Tubi as the streaming wars kick into high gear. The deal could be valued at more than $500 million, sources tell The Wall Street Journal. The purchase would put Fox in the […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.  Today’s column is written by Jay Friedman, president and partner at Goodway Group. Change only occurs when there is sufficient dissatisfaction with the status quo. For the last 20 years, the number of events that have dissatisfied publishers has been building, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Stick To It GumGum began life as an image-recognition startup that served contextual ads alongside relevant images. The company muddled along during a period when contextual was not exactly in vogue, but now appears well positioned to seize on headwinds faced by user-level addressability. […]

IPG’s investors are struggling to grasp exactly what kind of data Acxiom works with and how the $3.2 billion acquisition positions the holding company in a privacy-centric world. “When we bought Acxiom, everyone misunderstood it to be InfoBase, which is the third-party data management offering,” CEO Michael Roth said on IPG’s Q4 earnings call on […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Subscription Overload? The amount of time consumers spend with media increased by one hour and 24 minutes between 2018 and 2019 to almost 12 hours per day – and that time continues to fragment across media channels as new content offerings hit the market, […]

Merkle on Tuesday launched Merkury, an identifier designed to allow marketers to continue targeting audiences online without using third-party cookies. Merkury uses technology from Merkle’s recent acquisition of 4Cite, a first-party publisher tag that lets media owners retarget audiences over email and on platforms such as Facebook by matching hashed email addresses. Here’s how it […]

Brand marketing is starting to get more measurable, and budgets are beginning to follow. Adidas, Topshop and others have been vocal about the need to spend more on brand building, and DTC brands also want scale beyond digital – but that doesn’t mean blindly tossing money into TV and hoping for brand lift. “Digital isn’t the […]

It was the same old story at Publicis Group in 2019: lagging organic growth as it tried to overcome a struggling creative business and assemble the pieces from a long transformation. Organic growth dipped 2.3% to $12 billion in 2019, and declined 4.5% to $3.2 billion in Q4, in line with lowered expectations the company […]