Agencies

Temu’s US ad spend grinds to a halt; Publicis posts a strong Q1; and creative personalization tech is back in vogue.

Omnicom Group CEO John Wren told investors during Tuesday’s earnings report that the first quarter represented a “good start to the year” for the ad agency holdco. 

Jason Colon, until recently Publicis’ EVP and managing director of retail media, has taken a new role as EVP of Commerce Media at Horizon’s retail media agency Night Market.

Agencies around the globe weigh in on principal-based buying; live sports are king, but new sports like F1 are having trouble gaining traction; and Adobe gets roasted by Bluesky’s artist community.

WPP has bought InfoSum, a data clean room and collaboration startup. Terms of the deal, announced on Thursday, were not disclosed.

Why is programmatic media buying so dang complicated? That question was an ever-present topic at the 2025 ANA Media Conference in Orlando, Florida this week.

Industry experts agree that the bot activity analyzed in the latest Adalytics report is among the easiest type of invalid traffic to spot.

An Adalytics report released Friday details numerous instances of brands serving ads to known bots that appear on the IAB Tech Lab’s International Spiders and Bots list and TAG’s Data Center IP List.

As the newly appointed president of Horizon Media Holdings, Bob Lord is dubious that megamergers between holding companies are actually good for the client. “Bigger is not always better,” Lord says.

The process of setting up curated private marketplaces for bespoke audiences and vetting what inventory gets included can be incredibly time-consuming for agency teams.

Getting dozens of ad agency partners around the world to work together is like herding cats – but Colgate-Palmolive was able to do it.

Where principal media has gone wrong is that buyers have commoditized it due to an overreliance on vanity metrics in contractual agreements.

Omnicom and IPG have both received additional information requests from the FTC about their merger. Plus, publishers don’t know how AI overviews fit into their referral traffic.

Sonos’s woes ding The Trade Desk; WPP’s AI investments may not keep Coke from switching to Publicis; and feminized Swedish tobacco products find an audience in the US manosphere.

Publicis Groupe continued its years-long streak of acquiring non-agency ad tech and data sales companies with the announcement on Thursday that it has bought Lotame, a data management system for advertisers and publishers.

Amazon’s ad tech ambitions are crowding out Amazon specialists; EU regulators have concerns about Apple ATT; and Google says breaking it up could threaten national security.

What does it take to serve midsize brand clients? How is AI transforming media buying? And why, for the love of god, is measurement still so messed up? Mediastruction CEO and Founding Partner Marilois Snowman has a few thoughts.

Google has been spotted triple serving ads to search pages. Plus, good luck getting ads next to Oscars content this year.

Pinterest is being overrun with low-effort generative AI slop. Plus, Stagwell partially credits its 14% growth last year to – you guessed it – AI.

WPP shares dipped to a four-year low on after posting its 2024 earnings results. Plus: How brands are courting virality.

Like Kendrick Lamar during the Super Bowl halftime show, Interpublic Group CEO Philippe Krakowsky had a message for all the haters out there: the impending Omnicom merger won’t affect IPG’s ability to do business in the meantime.

The Google Chrome team is getting closer to deciding on its cookie consent mechanism. And  Paramount resolves its four-month standoff with Nielsen, as the mechanics behind currency change forever.

Publicis looks to capitalize on potential fallout from the Omnicom/IPG merger; Google Cloud is seeing an influx of ad sales talent; and Spotify advises investors to be patient with its growing programmatic ads biz.

Why worry about AI replacing jobs when a megamerger might make them redundant?

Ad buyers agree that Nielsen’s decision to pivot from panel-only ratings is a step in the right direction for TV ad measurement. But some also suggest it may be too late for Nielsen to recover the ground it ceded to competitors.

Nielsen told ad buyers that it plans to drop panel-only ratings later this year. The decision signals an inflection point in media measurement that publishers and buyers have both been waiting for.

Criteo’s Brian Gleason shared how it is working with agencies to capitalize on curation and measurement opportunities in retail media and CTV.

It’s not easy competing for business with massive holding companies (which are only getting more massive). But the Omnicom-IPG deal “also creates opportunities for the rest of us,” says Remy Stiles, North America CEO of programmatic agency Kepler.

For many advertisers and agencies, returning to TikTok this week felt a bit like remote working through a natural disaster: Business as usual, except not really.

What do toasters have in common with transparency and online advertising standards? Quite a lot, actually, says Ben Hovaness, chief media officer at OMD Worldwide. No, really.