Agencies

GroupM said Friday that global Chairman Irwin Gotlieb will step back from his role to become a senior adviser to the company. Gotlieb was GroupM’s founding CEO in 2003 and ran the company until transitioning to Chairman in 2012. GroupM’s global CEO Kelly Clark will continue to lead WPP’s media-buying unit. Gotlieb has made a […]

NBCUniversal is about to do something TV companies have talked about for years: transact TV in a similar way as digital – on impressions. NBCU revealed Thursday that it would begin to measure live, on-demand and time-shifted TV ad buys using a common impression-based metric called CFlight. CFlight will be part of NBCU’s upfront pitch and […]

Kepler Group, a New York-based agency focused on programmatic, media activation and CRM, revealed Wednesday it has been acquired by kyu, a collective of marketing, consulting and design companies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. kyu operates under Hakuhodo DY holdings, one of Japan’s largest marketing holding companies behind Dentsu. While kyu’s agencies, which […]

WPP confirmed Tuesday that its board has hired an independent counsel to investigate CEO Martin Sorrell for misuse of funds and allegations of inappropriate behavior. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news. The advertising giant issued the following statement regarding the investigation: “The Board of WPP has appointed independent counsel to conduct an investigation […]

Facebook’s announcement Wednesday that it would ban third-party data partners from directly targeting on its platform hit ad buyers hard. Previously, buyers could directly apply third-party data segments to their targeting on Facebook through suppliers like Acxiom, Oracle and Experian to enrich Facebook’s data with offline segments. Now, marketers using segments from third-party data brokers […]

Accenture Interactive has made a sport of snapping up digital agencies and folding them into its organization, a strategy which has turned it into the largest digital agency group in the world, with revenues north of $4.4 billion. On Thursday, Accenture Interactive revealed it acquired MXM, the digital and CRM agency owned by magazine publisher […]

Oscar Garza, EVP of media activation at Essence, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO conference on April 10-11 at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. Brands concerned about brand safety, transparency and media budget control are sweetening to the idea of taking programmatic in-house. But marketers often don’t realize there’s a lot more to programmatic than […]

Since Guillaume Lelait was promoted March 20 from Fetch’s US managing director to its first-ever US CEO, he’s inherited a wealth of operations and clients. He’s also inherited an ongoing lawsuit with former client Uber. Last September, Uber sued Fetch for $40 million after accusing the agency of buying click fraud to take credit for […]

Gartner’s annual digital agency magic quadrant, released last Friday, placed Digitas, AKQA, MRM//McCann, Isobar, SapientRazorfish, R/GA, IBM iX, iCrossing, Ogilvy & Mather, Accenture Interactive and VML as leaders with deep capabilities in business transformation and strategy. The quadrant ranked agencies with at least $175 million in digital marketing services revenue in 2017, and provide services […]

Ad tech companies grew roughly five times faster than the digital advertising market from 2010 to 2016, according to an ad spend forecast released by Zenith on Monday. The forecast tracked the revenues of 14 publicly traded ad tech companies including Adobe Marketing Cloud, Criteo, The Trade Desk, Rubicon Project, Rocket Fuel (taken private under […]

Holding companies are in a period of slow growth and organizational upheaval as clients cut spending while demanding new services and business models from their agencies. Of the big six holding companies, Publicis Groupe has undergone the biggest disruption since it purchased Sapient for a whopping $3.7 billion in 2014 and later wrote down the […]

When Andrew McKechnie left the role of global creative director at Apple to become Verizon’s first-ever chief creative officer in February 2017, he had a tall order. McKechnie, who reports directly to Verizon CMO Diego Scotti, was tasked with developing the brand’s own in-house creative agency. Named 140, after the group’s digs at 140 West […]

Erica Schmidt, Cadreon’s former EVP and managing director in North America, has been promoted to global CEO of the programmatic unit, the company said Wednesday. Schmidt takes over the role from Arun Kumar, chief marketing and data technology officer of IPG Mediabrands, who oversees the group’s central media, data and technology practice as well as […]

Ever since AT&T hired GroupM honcho Brian Lesser last August to lead its new advertising and analytics business, he’s been on a hiring spree. And many of the recruits share one thing in common: They’ve earned their programmatic stripes in some capacity. Time will tell how the AT&T Advertising & Analytics division will develop should […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Jay Friedman, our podcast guest this week, came up with the concept for a recent AdExchanger comic depicting a marketer running on a “brand safety” treadmill while scarfing down “cheap CPM” cupcakes. The point: You can’t have it both ways. In this week’s episode, Friedman […]

On May 25th, when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect, media agencies will be subject to a new set of laws around targeting European consumers. The GDPR, which makes it illegal for businesses to use EU citizens’ data without proper basis or consent, will limit media agencies’ ability to target […]

Despite a slight uptick in CPG volumes in Q4 2017, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell still predicts cyclical budget cutting from the sector due to pressure from activist investors and zero-based budgeting (ZBB). “What we see in packaged goods, certainly, is a continued caution,” he said on WPP’s Q4 and FY 2017 earnings call Thursday. “I […]

Spend on Omnicom’s trading desk Accuen continues to decline as brands increasingly favor disclosed programmatic buying models. Accuen’s Q4 revenue declined by $12 million globally and $17 million in the US year over year. Before Q3, when Accuen’s revenues first began declining YoY,  Accuen’s revenue had grown between $18 million and $45 million each quarter […]

Publicis Groupe’s massive transformation is starting to pay off – but the business still has a way to go before its new model is complete. The holding company reported earnings on Thursday with organic growth of 2.2%, reaching $3.2 billion for the quarter. Organic growth for all of 2017 was 0.8%, hitting roughly $12 billion. […]

As the first homegrown WPP agency, GroupM’s Mindshare has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. “We were born in Asia when Madison Avenue and the high street of London told us you can’t have a media independent,” said Mindshare’s US CEO, Adam Gerhart. “That provocateur and internal upstart mentality is pervasive in everything we do.” The […]

Advertisers want to market using the type of rich data provided by walled gardens – but that’s not possible on the open web. So the major holding companies have each developed data platforms to meet their clients’ needs. The question is: What’s the difference between their offerings? Publicis Groupe’s Spine, IPG’s AMP, WPP’s mPlatform, Dentsu […]

Dentsu Aegis Network has spent the past year furiously integrating with publishers so advertisers can target consumers using PII-based identifiers. These identifiers let Dentsu clients target more precisely, consolidate reach and frequency management around a single ID and optimize marketing spend. Advertisers get the benefits of walled gardens without the wall. The program, known as […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Dominique Netto, head of client services at [m]PLATFORM – GroupM. After the brand-safety sagas of 2017, Alphabet appears to be using some of that $27.7 billion Q3 revenue to further develop brand safety across YouTube. There […]

While most agencies are still trying to wrap their heads around programmatic, digital agency Essence is expanding into the linear world. When it launched as a digital agency in 2005, Essence didn’t bother investing in traditional media, said Global CEO Christian Juhl. Instead, it would wait until traditional media became digitized and the market naturally […]

When Wavemaker, the agency born from GroupM’s joining of MEC and Maxus, hired former Publicis exec Oleg Korenfeld last month, it asked him to build a platform to facilitate media planning, buying and strategy across eight major markets. The agency knows that having globally scaled technology is key to its ability to consolidate. Korenfeld is […]

When Facebook updates Ads Manager or tests a new ad placement, agencies – and even their account reps – are sometimes the last to know. In some cases, new features are enabled by default without any overt communication from Facebook, which can be “par for the course,” said Anita Walsh, director of social strategy at Horizon […]

Within the context of Publicis Groupe’s broader restructure, Publicis Media was born to simplify the group’s media offering while leveraging a more modern definition of scale. “Although it’s become so much more complex, media has always been about scale and insight,” said Steve King, CEO of Publicis Media. “We weren’t leveraging that scale effectively.” Publicis […]

IPG purges its media plans of any ad tech companies that fail to provide value. “We’ve been talking to all of the ad tech companies we work with to make sure we’re optimizing for the effectiveness of media – and, frankly, if they can’t do that, we look for providers that can,” Michael Roth, chairman and […]

Although connected TV buyers have become pretty sophisticated at targeting and delivering an ad to individual users, managing frequency across video providers is a work in progress. But despite the industry’s recognition that consumers demand better ad experiences, many viewers find themselves bombarded with the same ad. Worse, those ads sometimes run within the same […]

Although GroupM has invested aggressively in programmatic and data-driven marketing technology, Chairman Irwin Gotlieb still adheres to the importance of top funnel marketing. “I believe strongly in a marketing funnel, and that broad targeting will continue to remain an essential part of marketing,” he told AdExchanger. “If I focus my effort on picking the lowest […]