Agencies

Both Publicis Groupe’s Zenith and WPP’s GroupM have lowered their 2017 ad spend forecasts, due to cost-cutting clients and slow economic growth in global markets. Zenith projects 4% growth for the global ad market by the end of the year, down from its original forecast of 4.2%. GroupM revised its 4.4% forecast down to 3%, […]

Advertisers want measurement that assesses video brand safety. And the latest beneficiary of that need is OpenSlate, a video analytics company that can determine if ads were placed alongside appropriate video content on YouTube. The YouTube measurement partner said Thursday it’s bringing a new brand safety auditing tool for YouTube to market, partnering with independent […]

Mindshare launched a service on Thursday designed to let programmatic planners automate targeting, which lets them create lots of segments quickly. The system, called ANNA, is still in beta and uses AppNexus’ demand-side platform (DSP) and a new API from dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform Jivox. “Physically, you wouldn’t have time to sit in a […]

At agencies, “centers of excellence” are on the outs. Instead, holding companies are moving the specialists who once powered their analytics hubs and trading desks closer to client work by embedding them in account teams at their operating agencies. “The idea is to infuse a data-driven philosophy and culture within agencies and support [them] not […]

WPP cut its growth outlook from 2% to between flat growth and 1% during its Q2 2017 earnings call on Wednesday as clients, particularly CPGs, squeeze their marketing budgets. WPP pegged 2017 growth at 3% at the beginning of the year and reduced it to 2% in Q1. “The key factors here were the trifecta […]

Media agencies know how to find the right person at the right time, thanks to the growth of programmatic. But they’re still trying to pin down how to send the right message. “You want the media to recognize where they were, but you also want to recognize where they were in the conversation,” said Zimm […]

Demand-side platform (DSP) DataXu hired former 4As exec Peter Kosmala as its VP of platform solutions, the company said Friday. With Kosmala, who started in late July and will report to chief revenue officer Ed Montes, DataXu hopes to grow its self-serve business with agencies. “This is about forging even stronger relationships with a channel […]

WPP’s media-buying unit GroupM on Thursday unveiled its own global viewability standard for display and video ads on social media feeds. Display ads must be 100% in view for one second before a user scrolls past to count as viewable. Video ads still have to be 100% in view, but can be initiated as autoplay […]

Facebook is giving advertisers a bit more control over how they buy in-stream video ads within the news feed, through Audience Network and on Watch, its newly launched video tab. In the past, advertisers that wanted to purchase in-stream placements delivered into ad breaks were required to run them in the news feed. Starting Thursday, […]

“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, chief operating officer at Goodway Group. Despite not having an ad-focused business model, Amazon keeps Sir Martin Sorrell up at night and is the most likely candidate to […]

When La-Z-Boy decided to use Oracle’s data management platform, it didn’t want the technology to sit around. Instead, it came up with a turbo-charged strategy to aggressively test, learn and adapt. The furniture maker’s agency, RPA, tested 168 audiences in 10 months using first-party, second-party and third-party data it loaded into the platform. Its audience-focused […]

It’s been six months since GroupM launched mPlatform to unify its agencies’ access to data and technology. Since its inception, the organization has rolled out a data repository containing insights tied to known consumer IDs and now agencies across GroupM and WPP are “building it into the fabric of their networks,” said mPlatform CEO Brian […]

Brian Lesser, CEO of GroupM North America, will leave the company for a role at AT&T, the WPP-owned media buying giant announced on Friday. “Brian has been a key contributor to 24/7, Xaxis and most recently GroupM, and we are sorry to see him go, but wish him every success in his new role,” GroupM […]

Media agency vet Katie Ford was looking for a change. Over 23 years at Publicis Groupe, her passion for technology and data in a changing marketing environment had grown. So she left her role as President and Managing Director of Spark Foundry to become marketing solutions provider Amobee’s first ever chief client officer, the company […]

Agencies are adding new wrinkles to their media-planning processes to make sure campaigns are relevant and informed by expertise across many marketing disciplines. “More timely, adaptive media plans for clients make it easier to respond to things that drive business results,” said Joe Maceda, head of Mindshare’s Invention Studio in North America. And as holding […]

Fox Television Stations, a network broadcast group which owns 28 local TV stations in 17 markets, revealed Wednesday it’s adding more automation to its linear TV inventory through a partnership with WideOrbit. Fox Television Stations first dipped its toes in programmatic in 2014 when it struck a private marketplace deal with Facebook’s LiveRail for cross-platform […]

Spending cuts in the CPG sector had a negative impact on revenue growth at IPG this past half year. The holding company saw revenue decrease in both Q2 and H1 at -1.7% to $1.9 billion and -0.6% to $3.6 billion, respectively, the company announced on its earnings call Tuesday. Growth at Mediabrands and McCann Worldgroup […]

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), like other management consultancies in its competitive set, wants to grow its services to meet the needs of the modern chief marketing officer (CMO). “The role of the CMO is changing so much,” said Chris Vollmer, global advisory leader for entertainment and media at PwC. “It’s not just messaging anymore, but architecting the […]

Both Publicis Groupe and Omnicom focused on the need to transform their clients’ businesses and their own during their respective Q2/H1 earnings on Thursday. “We want to be the leader in marketing and business transformation,” Arthur Sadoun told investors on his first-ever earnings call as Publicis Groupe CEO. “Our clients need to transform.” Publicis saw […]

Performance agencies are expanding their relationships with big brands as they move more budget to digital and the upper funnel becomes more measurable. “Everything has become performance,” said Michael Kahn, CEO of Performics, Publicis Media’s performance agency and specialty practice. “Clients need to know that a brand-building effort led to a revenue outcome as well.” […]

Two years ago Hearts & Science didn’t exist. Today, it employs more than 500 to serve an expanding roster that includes two of the world’s largest marketers: AT&T and Procter & Gamble. In a recent interview, CEO Scott Hagedorn described some tenets of the Hearts & Science services model. Technology Sprints “We’re gearing up for […]

Being proficient at programmatic means nothing if an advertiser can’t nail the ad-delivery basics, such as proper frequency caps. But the reality is that advertisers rely on myriad solutions, including DSPs, DMPs and ad servers, to execute a single campaign, and the lack of consistency in KPIs can hurt frequency management – the main culprit […]

If you’re an organization in dire need of digital transformation, who ya gonna call? While an enterprise software company might not initially come to mind, that’s exactly who brands like Coca-Cola and Philips turned to. For Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox Film, it’s moved from primarily a B2B company focused on partners like broadcasters, retailers, […]

Accenture Interactive, a subsidiary of the management consultancy Accenture, is the world’s largest digital agency by revenue. The digital network has 18,000 employees in 40 offices around the globe. It brought in $4.4 billion last year, roughly 13% of its parent company’s total revenue. With projected revenue at $6 billion for 2017, Accenture Interactive ranks […]

In the future, brands will have to navigate a world in which consumers use their eyeballs to search for content and next-generation artificial intelligence layers connect our brains to the cloud. At least that’s the future envisioned by Omnicom media agency PHD and its worldwide planning and strategy director, Mark Holden. “The technology now facing […]

As automation takes hold of the advertising industry, media planning and buying agencies are being forced to take a cold, hard look in the mirror. “We’re dealing with a lot of forces of commoditization,” MEC CEO Tim Castree told AdExchanger. Castree is in a delicate spot. Following MEC’s merger with sister GroupM agency, Maxus, he’ll […]

As agencies struggle to transform under continued fee pressure from clients, executives are reassessing whether descending on the French Riviera for a week of endless rosé and parties on yachts sends the right message about the state of the industry. “If clients are using zero-based budgeting, let’s use it for Cannes,” WPP CEO Sir Martin […]

“There are three big issues: technological disruption, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and activist investors,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told AdExchanger at the Cannes Lions festival. “The first involves continuous experimentation,” he said, and WPP has certainly walked the talk on that front. Under Sorrell’s leadership, the company has invested in tech far more aggressively than […]

The in-housing trend continues to reshape agency and ad tech relationships. CPG giant Unilever announced on Wednesday that along with WPP it will invest $15 million in mobile creative management platform Celtra. The move aligns with Unilever CMO Keith Weed’s rather blunt approach to marketing strategy. “Get out of marketing if you’re not going to […]

Leo Burnett, one of the most iconic advertising agencies in the game, is evolving the way it thinks about creative. “I’ve been focused on infusing technology, data and analytics to make creative more relevant, personalized and effective,” said Andrew Swinand, CEO at Leo Burnett. For Swinand, who spent time on the media side as president […]