Agencies

Agency holding companies have spent $12 billion on data assets over the past five years but have yet to successfully deploy those assets at their creative agencies, according to a Forrester report released Monday. “It’s still very much a media proposition,” said Jay Pattisall, Forrester analyst and author of the report. “[Creative] seems to be […]

Despite Xandr’s positioning as the TV platform of the future during its Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara last week, agency buyers want to see more progress toward that goal. Certainly, Xandr has the right assets and strategy to create a programmatic marketplace for TV. Over the past year, Xandr launched a publisher network called Community, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. I Spy  A study from Princeton University and the University of Chicago revealed the extent of ad tracking on OTT platforms like Roku and Amazon Fire TV, as well as the lack of controls to manage trackers. According to the study, 89% of channels […]

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing budgets are starting to include larger-scale media, which is having a massive impact on national TV ad spend, according to Magna’s fall 2019 ad spend forecast, released Thursday. Marketing spend in the DTC category increased 30% YoY in Q2 2019. And DTCs spent 50% more on national TV in particular. “These new […]

S4 Capital had a solid second quarter earnings report on Wednesday, with revenue up 41.6% to $108.5 million in the first half of 2019. But that didn’t stop CEO Martin Sorrell from spending a significant portion of the earnings call throwing shade at his competitors, especially his former empire WPP. When asked whether S4 needs […]

“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 Nico Neumann, assistant professor and fellow, Centre for Business Analytics at Melbourne Business School. Advertising agencies are often masters of creating and developing brands. To survive and keep striving, they […]

IPG revealed a series of changes to its executive suite on Monday that brings media leadership to the top of the organization. Philippe Krakowsky, IPG’s chief strategy and talent officer and CEO of IPG Mediabrands, will assume the newly-created position of chief operating officer. He will retain his duties as chief strategy and talent officer […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Hold Up In the event of an economic downturn, holding companies – specifically WPP and Publicis – could be in a vulnerable position. Both companies are saddled with debt and plummeting stock values that will be difficult to recoup, especially as clients bring more […]

The Martin Agency is best known for its iconic creative ideas. Who hasn’t seen the Geico Gecko? But in addition to doing creative work for blue chip clients such as Geico, Oreo and Buffalo Wild Wings, The Martin Agency is transforming into a sophisticated media organization. The creative agency has had media as part of […]

Dentsu-owned performance agency iProspect said Wednesday it has acquired independent performance agency MuteSix. Terms of the deal, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, were not disclosed. MuteSix does creative production and performance marketing for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, including Theragun, Burst Oral Care and Grunt Style, and enterprise clients such as Petco and Shell. The […]

Two days after LinkedIn announced its Audience Engagement API, Omnicom has released a product built around it – an analytics tool called “Professional Audiences.” Omnicom released its B2B analytics tool Thursday, and it’s designed to help creative, business development and media teams generate insights for campaigns or pitches, said Slavi Samardzija, global CEO of Annalect, […]

The agency holding companies all face the same external struggles – new competition, slowing growth and the need for new skills. But they’re taking different paths to confront these challenges. Traditionally, holding companies followed the same playbook: growth by acquisition to amass the scale that gave them clout across major clients. But the shift to […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Come Together The CBS-Viacom merger is full speed ahead. Variety reports that there’s been significant headway in the negotiation process since last Friday, and the final details are being worked out. But there are still some serious wrinkles, the biggest being an agreement on […]

As audiences erode on linear TV, supply is shrinking and pricing is going up on scarcity value. Advertisers have already shifted a significant amount of money out of linear TV as audiences flock to digital. According to Zenith, digital will make up more than half of ad spend globally for the first time in 2021, […]

“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. Today, leaders are more challenged than they have ever been, with many of the next generations skeptical of our capabilities, integrity and […]

“On TV and Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Maggie Zhang, senior vice president of video research and insights at Dentsu Aegis Network. Call it irony, but the topic of capturing a customer’s attention now dominates the attention of brand marketers. As anyone in the […]

Kantar didn’t have much flexibility under WPP to buy companies and solutions to modernize its traditional market research business. “We’ve been out of the market for three or four years,” said Kantar CEO Eric Salama on a press call held Thursday to provide an update on its strategy under its new owner Bain Capital. But […]

Content is increasingly available across platforms and devices, but most media agencies still take a channel-based approach to planning.  Linear and digital planners not only operate in silos, but the former use demographic data as their source of truth while the latter use behavioral data, creating a divide in both how agencies plan media and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Pulling The Plug Companies that use a plug-in to display Facebook’s ‘like’ button on their websites are jointly liable for any customer data transferred through the widget under GDPR, the EU’s top court ruled on Monday. The court was looking at the case of […]

Ad tech startup Ad/Fin saw an opportunity to build a business by partnering with the ANA and Ebiquity on a programmatic study. Here’s the story of how it made enemies of agency holding companies – and got caught up in the industry’s transparency reckoning. In early 2016, Ad/Fin met with leadership at Ebiquity and the […]

The B2B marketing discipline, worth some $120 billion in annual spending, is in flux. Brands like Microsoft, John Deere, HP, GE and Adobe have migrated from a one-size-fits-all approach to one that is far more targeted. This week on the podcast, we cover the impact of new methodologies, technologies and data on enterprise marketing, with […]

TikTok isn’t developed enough yet to be a fully-fledged contender for ad dollars, but it’s growing like #area51, and advertisers have finally noticed the short-form video app. Roughly 60% of the app’s 26.5 million monthly active users in the US are between 16 and 24, according to a TikTok pitch deck circulated to US ad […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Asking About Acxiom IPG outperformed its peers in Q2 with organic revenue growth of 3% to $2.1 billion. While the group will continue to face headwinds from client losses through the rest of the year, it was able to offset losses in the […]

GroupM has a new global boss. Christian Juhl, the former global CEO of Essence, was named global CEO of media buying giant GroupM on Tuesday. Juhl takes over for Kelly Clark, who joined as global CEO in 2016 with a three-year commitment to the role. Essence has not yet named a successor for Juhl, but […]

Publicis Groupe grew 0.1% to $2.5 billion in Q2, returning to positive growth after a rocky first quarter. Organic growth was down 0.7% for the first half of the year. Despite the positive quarter, investors were skeptical of Publicis’ $4.4 billion acquisition of Epsilon, which closed in July. Many wondered why the company has such […]

If you’re still confused about what’s motivating global consulting firms to move in on agency turf, who better to explain than a longtime holding company executive who defected to the other side? Nikki Mendonça, global president of Accenture Interactive Operations, spent 28 years in marketing services, including 16 years at Omnicom. She left in 2018 […]

Omnicom does not intend to buy a data company, even after Publicis Groupe bought Epsilon ($4.4 billion), IPG bought Acxiom ($3.2 billion) and Dentsu Aegis bought Merkle ($1.5 billion). Omnicom steadfastly believes that owning a data company would compromise its neutrality when serving advertisers. “Our systems have always been open and unbiased,” CEO John Wren […]

WPP said Friday it has sold a 60% majority stake in Kantar to Bain Capital in a deal that values the company at around $4 billion. Read the release. The news marks the end of a months-long bidding process that involved Apollo Global Management and Vista Partners. Bloomberg reported earlier in July that Bain had […]

“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 Auren Hoffman, CEO at SafeGraph. Organizations are awash in data. They are creating more and more of their own data, and they are now starting to buy increasing amounts of external […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.  Today’s column is written by Jay Friedman, president and partner at Goodway Group. Buying connected TV ad inventory is fragmented at best and complex at its worst. Channels we are familiar with from the corded TV days – TLC, HGTV, Bravo […]