Agencies

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 […]

There’s no more US presidential election or splashy Summer Olympics to prop up ad spend, but there is still growth to be found – especially on the mobile front. Although the growth rate in total ad spend has slowed, global mobile advertising is on pace to reach $110 billion this year, surpassing the $100 billion mark […]

Programmatic and data-driven creative will likely be a buzzworthy topic at the 2017 Cannes Lions festival. Programmatic creative has progressed since last year, thanks to the maturation of machine learning and standards released by the IAB for dynamic content ads that makes it easier to customize ads for audiences and publisher sites. But media and […]

“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. The fun is over. For everyone. That includes the publishers jamming in 10 header tags and 50-plus tracking cookies into their site […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. This week’s podcast guest, Kieley Taylor, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC IO New York conference on October 25-26 on a panel titled “Battle of the Platform APIs.” Social media advertising continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, driven by video, a new generation […]

Three years after dissolving its VivaKi trading desk, Publicis Groupe has launched a data-driven center of excellence for its media agencies. The group, called Precision, formed about two years after VivaKi melted down its Audience on Demand trading desk and redistributed its staff to operating agencies. The new centralized group will offer support to programmatic […]

Amazon on Monday quietly launched a self-serve platform called Advertiser Audiences, which lets advertisers upload their audience lists and CRM information, enabling tactics like audience matching and lookalike modeling. Advertiser Audiences is similar to solutions Facebook and Google released earlier, though Amazon’s tool has some key differences. The biggest strength, said Wunderman North America Chief […]

Like the packaged products he helps market, Omnicom Media Group Chief Research Officer Jonathan Steuer wishes data segments disclosed their ingredients on the side of the label. “You really have to dig to figure out what’s in [a segment] right now,” Steuer said Monday at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement Summit in Jersey City. […]

Dentsu Aegis Network said Thursday that its media agency brands in the US will use Merkle’s PII-based M1 platform for centralized data planning and activation. Dentsu’s media agencies have been piloting M1 for a few months, and it’s now officially being deployed as a self-service tool at Carat, iProspect and 360i, as well as at […]

Cycle Media, which launched Monday, hopes to break the mold of the traditional media holding company. The company is the result of a merger between Cycle, a social content and influencer network formed in 2016, and Laundry Service, a marketing agency with deep roots in social, founded by Stein in 2011 and acquired by sports marketing […]

WPP’s media buying unit GroupM said Thursday that it merged media agencies MEC and Maxus to cut costs, since the two agencies have overlapping capabilities. The yet-to-be-named firm drives a billion dollars in revenue and will be led by MEC CEO Tim Castree. “Combining [MEC and Maxus] gives us scale but also flexibility to invest […]

Major publishers like Hearst, Vice, Time Inc., The New York Times and Meredith have either built or acquired agency capabilities and content studios over the past few years to create synergies between their content and the brands that monetize it. Being owned by a publisher allows digital agencies to tap editorial expertise for engaging creative […]

The past couple of years have been tough for CPGs, as consumers move toward fresher and healthier items and ecommerce disrupts the way goods are sold. The Q1 earnings season has only reinforced the trend. At Kellogg’s and Kraft-Heinz, net sales fell about 3% year over year in Q1 2017. Mondelez grew organically a meager […]

Clients want more insight into the complicated process of programmatic buying. So French holding company Havas on Tuesday launched the Client Trading Solution (CTS), a customizable dashboard that allows advertisers to track their programmatic campaigns and fees across different demand-side platforms (DSPs) and exchanges in real time. So far, Spanish telco Telefónica is using the […]

Maxus CEO Lindsay Pattison has a big job ahead of her as chief transformation officer at GroupM: transforming WPP’s mammoth services business into modern and agile solutions provider for clients. In her new role, which she assumed on Thursday, Pattison will lead change initiatives across WPP to ensure it remains relevant to clients as they […]