Agencies

Independent media agency Mediasmith has a new owner – but clients might not notice. The San Francisco-based agency, launched in 1978 by David Smith and Karen McFee, has sold to four members of its management team. COO John Cate, SVP and media director Greg Pomaro, VP of insights and technology Marcus Pratt and finance director […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

The Big Story is a breezy new podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. WPP and Nike have some new spokespeople. While Mark Read’s appointment at WPP was expected and uncontroversial, Colin Kaepernick headlining Nike’s new campaign was […]

WPP may have a new CEO, but it still has the same old problems. During its Q2 earnings report Tuesday, the holding company posted its first quarter of growth in a year, with like-for-like revenues up 1.6% for the first half of 2018 and 2.4% for Q2 to $9.6 billion. But the company’s strongest region, […]

WPP is set to knight its new CEO. Multiple publications Tuesday reported that as early as next week, the holding company is set to name Wunderman and WPP Digital CEO Mark Read the firm’s second-ever chief executive, following the departure of founder and longtime leader Martin Sorrell in April. (Update: WPP confirmed Read’s ascension on […]

In Netflix’s original film “Like Father,” the cruise line Royal Caribbean literally sets the stage for the movie – the brand is actually part of the story. While this sort of product placement isn’t new, it’s coming at a time when content providers are trying to decrease their ad loads and experimenting with new ways […]

Over the past year, GroupM media agency Essence has reduced its investment in third-party data segments for certain clients by more than half. While the decline has been most prominent in Europe, it began well before GDPR took effect and is totally independent of the regulation, said Ryan Storrar, Essence’s head of media activation in […]

This is the latest installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world.  Lindsay Pattison isn’t messing around about increasing diversity in WPP’s top ranks. The former global CEO of GroupM agency Maxus was promoted to chief transformation officer of WPP last year. While the job’s purpose […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

“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. For media buyers today, ad tech platforms can be bucketed into two categories: the must-haves and nice-to-haves. For many, Google, Facebook and Amazon […]

Believe it or not, many marketers still use last-click attribution. Goodway Group President Jay Friedman has had enough of it. So, he’s pushing the indie programmatic platform to tie all campaign measurement to lift-based metrics. “By requiring a lift-based approach, we can avoid vanity metrics,” he said. “It’s changed the dynamic of our relationships with […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Slow Death What happened to the cable bundle? While the reason people are dropping their cable subscriptions is obvious (they’re expensive, relative to streaming options), what’s less obvious is how the cord-cutting trend started, Bloomberg reports. Many blame Netflix, because talent and shareholders looking […]

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. This episode of AdExchanger Talks is supported by Tealium. Programmatic may have cut its teeth as a direct response medium, but advertisers are also starting to embrace it for upper-funnel campaigns. However, if branding is your goal, the rules of engagement are different. This week on AdExchanger […]

It’s no longer a secret that Amazon is becoming a dominant player in the digital advertising industry. It’s also no secret among agency buyers that Amazon’s platforms are notoriously difficult to use. While forgiving Amazon’s ad platform for being a work-in-progress, agencies complain of clunky interfaces, limited automation and minimal reporting granularity. The lack of […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Omnicom said Thursday it had acquired Credera, a small management and technology consulting firm with offices in Denver, Dallas and Houston. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Credera works with Fortune 500 companies including Southwest Airlines, Chili’s and The Container Store to build consumer tech platforms, integrate mar tech systems and consult on organizing […]

After a three-year stint as Havas CEO, David Jones realized the agency model needed more than a revamp. It needed a complete restart. “It got to a point where it would be far easier to build a technology company that does marketing than to try to change a big legacy business into that,” he said. […]

Adam Heimlich, the newly minted SVP of media at MDC digital agency GALE Partners, enjoys telling it like it is. “Traditional agencies blew it in digital and there’s a big market gap there – a lot of money at stake,” said Heimlich, who left Horizon Media in June after nearly five years at the agency, where […]

Many in the ad tech industry view demand-side platforms (DSPs) as commodities. Sizmek is hoping to prove otherwise, as it took the wraps off a revamped buying platform Tuesday. Made from the old Rocket Fuel DSP, the new offering, according to Sizmek CEO Mark Grether, has a more streamlined user interface than its previous iteration, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Read Favored To Run WPP Speculation has swirled for months about who will succeed Martin Sorrell as CEO of WPP, and we may finally have an answer. Mark Read, CEO of Wunderman and co-COO at WPP since Sorrell’s departure, has emerged as the top […]

Forward-thinking public relations firms are becoming savvy programmatic media buyers as the worlds of earned and paid collide. Paid social has been a core skillset for PR professionals for some time, but PR firms are now hiring talent from media agencies and building sophisticated programmatic strategies as clients ask for more measurable outcomes. “PR is […]

IPG beat the holding company sector in Q2 with a strong organic net revenue YoY increase of 4.6% to $1.95 billion. Meanwhile, Omnicom and Publicis, which reported Q2 earnings last week, were down 0.9% and 2.1%, respectively. WPP has not reported Q2 earnings yet, but saw just 0.8% growth in Q1. IPG is raising its […]

The inability to manage reach and frequency is the biggest threat to digital advertising, according to Merkle CEO David Williams. Merkle has spent the past two years trying to solve that issue for the open ecosystem with M1, a media-buying platform that uses PII-based IDs to target known individuals. Merkle also has a publisher network, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. WPP In A China Shop WPP is exploring selling 20% of WPP China, its agency subsidiary in the market, to the Chinese media triumvirate of Tencent, Alibaba and China Media Capital Holdings, reports Sky News. The discussions are in the early stages, but WPP […]

Publicis Groupe’s performance dipped in Q2 as clients pulled programmatic spend in response to GDPR. Organic growth was down 2.1% for the quarter and 0.4% for the half-year. Net revenues for the first half of the year dropped 8.2% to $5 billion. In Europe, net revenues were down 3.6% YoY to $745 million. Overall, Publicis […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. SaaSy Publisher Vox Media will license its digital publishing software Chorus to other publishers, The Wall Street Journal reports. Twenty media companies are in talks to license Chorus already, which allows publishers to create, monetize and distribute articles for a recurring fee. In the […]

Omnicom is shedding nonstrategic assets to invest in data, technology and analytics. That strategy was made clear by management on the company’s Q2 and H1 earnings call Tuesday, when Omnicom reported organic growth in North America was down 0.9% for Q2 and 0.5% for the first half of the year. Worldwide revenues for the quarter […]

The only common currency for advertising is attention. And that’s where Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn is betting the farm. “The common currency of reach is not legit,” he said. “Attention is a finite resource. It’s the one element that binds TV and digital.” Hagedorn, a longtime Omnicom exec, is trying to help his […]

Launching a people-based data platform is the agency holding company trend du jour. Omnicom on Thursday announced its own version of such a platform, called Omni, that connects the media planning, buying and creative process across a single audience definition. “We’re moving some components that were in activation closer to planning,” said Slavi Samardzija, global […]

This is a new podcast from AdExchanger. It will be available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.  The Big Story is a breezy new podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about, well, the biggest stories that broke over the past week. In our inaugural episode, Managing Editor Ryan Joe and staff writers Alison Weissbrot […]