Agencies

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 […]

Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer at IPG Mediabrands, will play a central role in integrating Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) into the holding company. The $2.3 billion acquisition, announced last week, gives IPG 1,600 data scientists, 200 product and technology specialists and first-party data on 2.2 billion global consumers. With AMS, IPG also […]

Martin Sorrell’s new holding company, S4 Capital, just snatched Dutch digital production agency MediaMonks from the clutches of his former team. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reports S4 agreed to pay about $350 million for the agency. Clarity Partners in London and JEGI in New York advised on […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Grow Big Or Go Home HBO is at a crossroads and its new corporate manager plans to make a change, a recording from a recent company-wide town hall meeting suggests. John Stankey, the AT&T executive who now oversees the Time Warner media properties, says […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Zuck Abides Readers might be forgiven for thinking this has been a brutal year for Facebook, given the long string of scandals and investigations the company has faced. But in some important ways, Facebook is humming along as smoothly as ever, according to […]

Programmatic audio has been in desperate need of scale. Pandora hopes its March acquisition of digital audio platform AdsWizz will bring that scale to a growing marketplace. Pandora’s inventory won’t be available programmatically until later this year (there’s no official date yet). When it does, AdsWizz will become the largest programmatic audio exchange on the […]

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

Summer Of Our Missed Consent Google is causing consternation and potential GDPR violations by delaying its implementation of the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework, a collaborative model for publishers to gather consent and transmit that consent up the supply chain, Reuters reports. Google promised to fully integrate with the industry framework by August, but […]

Times are changing at IPG. The holding company used to tout its neutrality around data and technology, with CEO Michael Roth using the phrase, “Why buy it when you can rent it?” But IPG’s $2.3 billion acquisition Monday of Acxiom Marketing Solutions changes all that. “What’s interesting is the world has changed,” Roth said on […]

Looks like Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) is an agency business after all. Interpublic Group said Monday it acquired Acxiom’s legacy data management business for $2.3 billion. AMS represents about three-quarters of Acxiom’s total revenue. Dennis Self and Rick Erwin will serve as co-presidents of AMS, which will remain a standalone unit aligned with IPG Mediabrands. […]

Consultants, in-housing and other negative talk about the agency business doesn’t bother IPG CEO Michael Roth. Rather, he sees it as a validation of his sector. “Clients are faced with disparate questions about how to navigate their dollars,” he said. “Our job is to help them do that.” IPG, which outperformed its peer set in […]

 Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The GDPR Pipe Cleaner Programmatic ad spend has rebounded a bit in Europe after contracting a month ago when GDPR came into effect. Clients cut programmatic by as much as 50% in the days following enforcement, since many publishers lacked consent technology and advertisers […]

Ebiquity shook the industry when it dropped its report on media transparency two years ago. Advertisers and agencies alike still reel from its impact. As a consultancy Ebiquity isn’t as flashy as others, like MediaLink or Accenture – both of which plastered the Croisette with their branding. Still, some of Ebiquity’s activities after the K2 […]

It’s been two years since the Association of National Advertisers, working with  consultancy Ebiquity and investigative firm K2, dropped a damning report on agency transparency. And everything’s better now, right? Quite the contrary, said Bill Duggan, the ANA’s group EVP, during a Cannes rooftop panel hosted by Mastercard. “Trust between clients and agencies is at […]

It’s been a heck of a couple of months for Mark Read. The Wunderman CEO was promoted to co-chief operating officer of WPP in April after then-CEO Martin Sorrell stepped down amid an investigation into misuse of company funds. Read shares his role with Andrew Scott, WPP’s COO for EMEA, who focuses on the commercial […]

Cannes is reaching peak consulting firm. After steadily acquiring small digital and design agencies for the past decade, the agency divisions of major consulting firms, such as Accenture, PwC and Deloitte, are making their presence known on the Croisette this year. Deloitte Digital had a far lighter touch at Cannes last year, with a cabana […]

As media agencies become more skilled at programmatic buying, they’re working with fewer demand-side platforms (DSPs) than ever before. According to Pathmatics, advertisers have cut the number of DSPs they work with by 40% over the past two years, to about four per month on average. In part, that’s because the market is consolidating. Big-name […]

MDC Partners CEO Scott Kauffman runs his agency network a bit differently than his peers. While the agency founders’ culture has come under fire recently by some, Kauffman, who has been CEO at MDC since 2015, actively facilitates it. MDC takes a majority stake in agencies and lets its entrepreneurs drive their own growth rather […]

Last year, when Publicis Groupe said it would pull out of the Cannes Lions festival and awards show and reinvest the funds in an artificial intelligence platform, it sparked other holding companies to rethink their presences. Many had become concerned that the festival, which takes place every June along the beach in the south of […]

Kantar is facing a lot of speculation about its future at WPP. Since Martin Sorrell resigned as CEO of WPP in April, analysts and investors have buzzed about how the holding company can unlock value for shareholders in a period of slow growth. Many say selling the Kantar market research business, whose growth has lagged […]

WPP reelected its board with 84.5% of shareholder votes at its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, despite concerns about slow growth and leadership. Reported revenue was down 3.4% for the first four months of the year to roughly $6.4 billion. Some investors, however, expressed concern and discontent about how the company handled CEO Martin Sorrell’s […]