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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 […]

TV’s got Nielsen (sort of), but there’s no universal metric for video content quality across platforms and the open web. OpenSlate wants to fill that gap with a revamped SlateScore, its rating tool that grades video content quality for engagement, consistency, momentum, reach and brand safety. Starting Thursday, SlateScore will extend from YouTube to in-stream […]

Direct-to-consumer brands in need of scale are increasingly turning to out-of-home – the only traditional media that’s showing growth. But the OOH media market is a fragmented place for brands that first cut their teeth in digital. “A lot of these brands don’t have an education about the space,” said Brian Rappaport, an IPG and Publicis […]

When the boutique programmatic agency Jellyfish sold a majority $550 million stake last November to French holding company Fimalac, it did so to transform from an agency into a global network. Jellyfish started as a Google Marketing Platform (GMP) reseller and programmatic in-houser. It will make this transition by acquiring specialist companies that can enhance […]

“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 Krish Sailam, global senior vice president of programmatic solutions at DWA, a Merkle company. Some may think artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) personalization is all about altering banners and landing pages. […]

It’s taken longer for real-time auctions to make their way into the app world than on the web. But programmatic is finally starting to take hold and change the way developers buy media thanks to several parallel trends. And a new crop of opportunistic startups is emerging to help developers take advantage of the shift […]

“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 Peter Vandre, chief analytics officer at Dentsu Aegis Network Media. The idea of a safe place where marketers can analyze sensitive data has been around at least since the early […]

“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 Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer at Publicis Groupe and author of “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data” (Harper Collins, publishing on Jan. 28, 2020). […]

Generation Z consumes media differently than millennials, but brands don’t always understand that. To help brands better relate to younger audiences, former Wavemaker exec Noah Mallin left a career in agencyland to join Gen Z-focused media company IMGN as its first chief brand strategist, the company said Monday. IMGN owns the social media handle of […]

“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. National linear addressable television is one of the key trends in video. It holds the promise of delivering targeted ads to only […]

WPP CEO Mark Read will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference in New York on Jan. 28-29, 2020. WPP CEO Mark Read has worked to make the holding company faster, simpler and more collaborative. Since taking on the top role a little over a year ago, Read reshaped the world’s largest holding company, notably folding […]

Ad buyers aren’t thrilled about Google Chrome’s decision to phase out third-party cookies, but they’re thankful it’ll take about two years; Safari and Firefox didn’t extend such a courtesy. During that time, most buyers intend to rebuild their targeting and measurement strategies. But Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox solution is still too theoretical for there to […]

Dentsu Aegis Network said Tuesday it has acquired E-Nor, a California-based consulting firm that specializes in Google Analytics and is a major reseller and sales and service partner of Google Marketing Platform. E-Nor and its roughly 45 employees will fold into Cardinal Path, the marketing and analytics consulting group Dentsu acquired in 2016. Cardinal Path […]

If there’s one thing that gets Martin Sorrell’s goat, it’s the accusation that he doesn’t care about creativity. “People say I’m a bean counter or an accountant, and I don’t mind that, they’re just having a dig,” said Sorrell, executive chairman of S4 Capital, the digital-focused holding company upstart he founded on his exit from […]

When it comes to data, IPG CEO Michael Roth has said in the past: “Why buy it when you can rent it?” But that thinking changed last year when Acxiom went up for sale. When IPG bought Acxiom, it was able to build new offerings around first-party data management. In October IPG launched Kinesso, a […]

S4 Capital, Martin Sorrell’s scrappy new holding company, acquired Mexico City-based multicultural digital content agency, Circus Marketing, on Wednesday – its 11th deal in just over a year. Here’s why: an expanded footprint, more capacity in existing markets and data, data, data. “It’s a smart deal that makes sense for their strategy,” said Jay Pattisall, a […]

Last decade saw a spate of data broker acquisitions by agency holding companies. But are these deals too focused on owning data, rather than using it to derive insights? “You have to look at broad groups of data to understand consumption,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. Rather than purchase a data broker, Omnicom […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. It’s Vox’s Forte Are you an advertiser in need of publisher first-party data? Then Vox has a holiday gift for you! The company, which made a big-scale play in 2019 when it merged with New York Media, has launched an advertising platform called Forte […]

The advertising industry today is largely the product of tremendous M&A activity. AdExchanger looked at the acquisitions that made the biggest impact in the past decade. Impact can mean many things. Some of these startups flourished under their new owners, showing worth far more than their deal price. Others, purchased during their downfall, reflect the […]

The 2010s was a decade of tectonic shifts for the TV industry. Linear TV networks can no longer avoid the digital revolution. As eyeballs shift to streaming platforms and buyers demand more automation and better measurement, new players, like Hulu and Roku, have risen as prime media sellers, while broadcasters evolve their businesses to capture […]

It’s almost 2020, and data and technology have revolutionized media. So why has the industry still not been able to crack data-driven creative? After six years at media agencies, Oleg Korenfeld asked himself that same question. In December he left Wavemaker, where he was global chief platforms officer, to join LA-based branding and experiential agency […]

Nick Brien, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network in the Americas, will leave at the end of the year after 2 1/2 years on the job, the company said Friday. He will be replaced by Jacki Kelley, who joined Dentsu in March as president, chief client officer and CEO of creative in the United States. Kelley […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Welcome To The Club Sam’s Club has agreed to acquire advertising technology and some executives from Triad, its retail ad tech partner and sales rep, Ad Age reported. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Along with the technology, Sam’s Club will pick up […]

The programmatic industry is known for its breakthroughs in data and media. But when it comes to creative formats, innovation has fallen short. Programmatic ad units are largely still the same banners and pre-roll videos of 10 years ago, which don’t perform as well as the in-feed native ads consumers see on social. Instagram and […]

“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. Some kids go straight from high school to Harvard. Others take a gap year ­to “find themselves,” tinker in their friend’s garage or simply […]