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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Primed For TV  Amazon beefed up its ad-supported OTT ranks with the hire of Maggie Zhang, former EVP of video research and insights at Dentsu Aegis Network. At Amazon, Zhang will develop reach and measurement products for Prime Video advertisers in a role that […]

WPP is slogging along with the rest of the agency market. Q1 like-for-like revenues were down 3.8% to $3.5 billion, the company said Wednesday. In North America, WPP’s largest market, like-for-like revenue was down 1.9% to roughly $1.2 billion. Grey, GroupM and VMLY&R all grew in the region, but revenues began to sag across the […]

Like its competitors, Omnicom expects steep declines in the second quarter as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. “In the preliminary forecasts we looked at, the second quarter was the most traumatic,” said CEO John Wren on the company’s Q1 2020 earnings call Tuesday. Omnicom also declined to give guidance for the rest of the year […]

  Is COVID-19 the beginning of the end for upfronts? Buyers and sellers have long questioned the necessity of flashy presentations, especially as the broadcast TV business declines. Disney chairman Bob Iger recently predicted an end to the antiquated upfront process altogether as a result of the economic crisis. Ad buyers have been pushing to […]

Despite COVID-19, Merkle didn’t think twice about promoting longtime executive Craig Dempster to global CEO last week, sticking to a succession plan two years in the making. “We built a strategy and worked to execute against it,” Dempster said. “We didn’t spend a lot of time debating it.” Dempster, previously president of Merkle in the […]

Mike Law, president of Dentsu Aegis Network’s Amplifi, is thinking hard about what entertainment advertising this year might look like, with production and live events on hold. “You want to have some understanding of what that supply actually is,” he says. “We don’t want to commoditize this to just being about, we’re buying something and […]

Holding companies are being hit hard by the pandemic, and IPG is no exception. The company reported Wednesday that Q1 2020 net organic growth was 0.3% YoY to $1.97 billion, compared to 6.4% growth during the same period a year ago. Revenue was negatively impacted by account losses and the coronavirus pandemic in certain regions, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Third Time’s A Charm Bryan Wiener and Sarah Hofstetter joined the ecommerce software company Profitero as CEO and president, respectively. This is the third business Wiener and Hofstetter have jointly led, following their long tenure at 360i before it was acquired by Dentsu and […]

Work/life balance is a myth, especially in the age of coronavirus. More often than not Amanda Martin, VP of enterprise partnerships at Goodway Group, goes upstairs to grab some laundry … and ends up drifting over to her computer where she immediately gets sucked back into work. “I don’t call it work/life balance, I call […]

This story has been updated to reflect Tuesday’s earnings call.  Publicis Groupe said Monday it will cut the salaries of chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun and executive chairman of the supervisory board Maurice Lévy by 30% in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The company will also reduce compensation by 20% for management board members. For […]

Dentsu Aegis Network, the international arm of Japanese agency conglomerate Dentsu, will cut all employee salaries by 10% in response to the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Senior executives took a higher salary deduction, a Dentsu Aegis spokesperson said, but declined to specify how much. Dentsu Aegis Network employs about 45,000 people across 145 […]

Sir Martin Sorrell thinks the term “social distancing” could use a rebrand, since we’re actually communicating more than ever, albeit virtually. “I think social distancing is not the right way of putting it,” he says. “It’s physical distancing.” As founder and CEO of S4 Capital, Sir Martin is keeping an eye on his 2,500 employees […]

“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 Jay Friedman, president and partner at Goodway Group. During this unprecedented time, it’s important to keep an eye on the future. Where will we be in a few weeks and months, following […]

Brands are avoiding “coronavirus”-related keywords like they’re the actual coronavirus. And in times like these, it’s up to the buy side to start an open conversation about brand safety tolerance, said GroupM executive Oscar Garza. “It’s understandable some brands don’t want to be associated with tragedy, but at the same time, news is news,” he […]

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 […]