Agencies

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 […]

Before he tried on agency life, Babs Rangaiah was a bit of a star on the CPG circuit. After more than a decade driving media innovation for global CPG Unilever, a shakeup in Unilever’s marketing org last spring led Rangaiah agency-side. Now, as a partner leading global marketing solutions for IBM’s in-house agency, Interactive Experience […]

The Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) inquisition against nontransparent programmatic media buying rages on. The ANA on Thursday released a study illuminating the often murky fees taken throughout the messy programmatic supply chain, from advertiser, to agency, to trading desk, demand-side platform (DSP), exchange, supply-side platform (SSP) and publisher. Read the study. The survey, conducted […]

Here’s the crisis in the agency world, as Kepler Group CEO Rick Greenberg sees it: “Digital media is still run in an oversimplified fashion.” Agencies often don’t take full advantage of their ad tech because the targeting for their campaigns isn’t granular enough, Greenberg said. “When you aggregate too many targeting variables, it’s really hard […]

French media conglomerate Vivendi on Thursday made a bid for the Bolloré Group’s 60% stake in agency holding company Havas at roughly 9.25 euros per share. The offer values the Bolloré Group’s stake at 2.36 billion euros. Read the release. Yannick Bolloré is CEO of Havas and the son of Vincent Bolloré, chairman and CEO […]

Last week, IPG Mediabrands global CEO Henry Tajer announced he will leave the company and head back to Australia for personal reasons. But executive politics and challenges facing media agencies also factored into his departure. Tajer, a 10-year veteran of IPG Mediabrands, became global head in 2015 after a successful stint as CEO of Mediabrands […]

OpenSlate, a video analytics platform which provided YouTube brand safety ratings long before YouTube’s most recent brand safety crisis, has raised $7 million from North Base Media to fund product development and international expansion. The company has raised about $15 million in total. OpenSlate is also deepening its talent pool by hiring longtime Triad Retail Media […]

WPP cut its growth target for this year from 3% to 2%, citing a tepid economy and lack of new business wins, the company said on its Q1 earnings call on Thursday. Q1 organic growth came in below expectations at 0.8%. WPP is feeling the pricing pressure from CPGs as they struggle to compete with […]

“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 John Montgomery, global executive vice president, brand safety, at GroupM. On Feb. 9, The Times, one of oldest and most venerable newspapers in the world, ran a story titled “Big […]

On IPG’s Q1 2017 earnings call Friday, CEO Michael Roth echoed past statements that he doesn’t see management consultancies as a threat, despite their encroachment onto agency turf. “There is a great deal being written about the convergence that is bringing adjacent industries into each other’s orbit,” he said. “The increased competition that we all read […]

Accenture, which has crept steadily onto holding company turf in recent years, has tapped Universal McCann, part of IPG, as its global media agency of record. WPP’s MEC was the incumbent. UM will handle cross-channel media buying across all lines of business at Accenture, including its agency brand, Accenture Interactive. Programmatic buys for Accenture will […]

Growth at Accuen was flat last quarter as more clients moved away from nondisclosed programmatic buying methods, where agencies procure inventory and resell it to clients with an unrevealed markup, said Omnicom CEO John Wren on the company’s first-quarter earnings call on Tuesday. “A lot of clients have shifted to wanting these services on a […]

Marketing may be a trillion-dollar industry, but its supply chain needs a makeover, says Microsoft’s CMO. “What makes marketing such a unique case is that the labor component is much higher than any other industry,” said CMO Grad Conn. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity to optimize the way we’re working in marketing and […]

About 18 months ago, data services provider Experian Marketing Services sought a new line of business: agencies. Given Experian’s legacy in marketing data, that seems relatively recent. But Kevin Dean, president and GM of targeting at Experian, has an explanation: “The advent of programmatic and addressability has created an environment where brands are as interested […]

MDC Partners’ media agency, Assembly, has forged a strategic deal with Fox’s true[X], whose products give consumers options in their video ad breaks. The deal also gives true[X] more access to Assembly’s brand roster, like Hotels.com. Assembly and true[X] extended their partnership after collaborating on engagement-based ads for clients like the anti-tobacco nonprofit Truth. While […]

Within a year of its launch, Omnicom Media Group’s (OMG) third agency, Hearts & Science, was running two of the world’s largest media accounts. This feat is made more impressive in that when OMG pitched for one of those accounts, Procter & Gamble, Hearts & Science didn’t even exist. “We had to hire 300 people […]

The agency-client relationship is ailing, and fixing what’s broken will involve deep organizational changes on both sides of the table – starting with the marketer. “The brand has to start with itself,” said Brigitte Majewski, Forrester analyst and author of a report released Thursday calling for a new agency operating model. “If you aren’t asking […]

Trading desk CEOs want to change the narrative around programmatic to one of quality rather than cost efficiency. For Amnet co-CEO Art Muldoon, who joined Dentsu Aegis Network when it acquired his programmatic shop, Accordant Media, in August, the ability to tap into a network of creative and data assets helps push that narrative to […]

Amanda Richman, president of activation and investment at Publicis Groupe’s Starcom, used to mostly negotiate rates with TV networks. Today, she helps clients navigate spend on walled gardens, vet ad tech partners and use data to make smarter media buys. “There’s a deep relationship with investment in media inventory and investment from a tech and […]

Both Publicis Groupe’s Zenith and IPG’s Magna attribute growth in online advertising to programmatic targeting and data in their global ad spend forecasts released this week. That momentum will help digital ad spend overtake TV this year for the first time. Magna pegged overall ad spend at $187 billion this year, a 3.7% increase over […]

Media agency employees sitting for Facebook’s Blueprint certification exam may have flashbacks of their experiences taking the SATs. The exam, which certifies agency employees on every Facebook native ad product within its Ads Manager, Business Manager and Power Editor tools, is a multiple-hour affair that requires weeks of prep. Test-takers must roll up their sleeves […]

Targeting a running watch to a broad group like “runners” on Facebook doesn’t cut it anymore. Bold Worldwide, a social media agency with a roster of sports-focused clients, advocates that its brands – including running and cycling watch Polar – massively increase the amount of content they create. With more versions of ads, they can […]

“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. One thing the human brain is conditioned to do is take shortcuts in making assessments and decisions. Without this, we’d be stuck in […]

Cadreon’s global president Arun Kumar has become IPG Mediabrands’ first-ever chief data and marketing technology officer. In addition to overseeing all data, technology and analytics assets within Mediabrands, he will still head up Cadreon. Among Kumar’s top priorities is scaling IPG Mediabrands’ data stack across the unit and IPG at large. “We’ve gotten pretty good […]

Indie programmatic agency Anagram is indie no more. On Thursday, programmatic ad firm Digilant acqui-hired the five-person team behind Anagram in a bid to beef up its custom programmatic ad solutions. “Providing custom solutions is not just about technology,” said Digilant global CEO Alan Osetek. “Technology is only as good as the people who use […]

While major change-management consultancies like Deloitte, Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) have acquired creative and digital design agencies to get closer to the CMO, they’ve haven’t purchased any media-buying agencies. But as these consulting firms move deeper into the digital marketing arena, they’re building media-buying services as well. Here’s how Deloitte, Accenture and PwC are stirring […]