Agencies

Times Square was abuzz this week with talk of the elusive “agency of the future.” “Agencies will need to be far more empathic, far nimbler and more agile,” said Paul Gunning, CEO of DDB Chicago, on Tuesday at Advertising Week in New York City. “The holding company getting rid of silos is the foundation of […]

Facebook is being raked over the coals about measurement at Advertising Week in New York City. For the last two years, Facebook was only counting videos that were seen for three seconds or more, resulting in exaggerated reported average view times. The heat was so great that Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP for global marketing solutions, […]

Welcome to the first episode of AdExchanger Talks, a new podcast on data-driven marketing. Following this discussion with GroupM’s North America CEO, Brian Lesser, we will publish new episodes twice monthly. Let us know if you like it, and please subscribe if you haven’t already, at iTunes or by pasting this link into the iOS podcast […]

Xaxis is placing three bets on how it can evolve programmatic buying, according to global COO Nicolle Pangis. One, it wants to understand the entire consumer life cycle. That means using historical data and a team of data scientists to figure out when someone enters the market for an item and the best time to […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in programmatic TV and video. Today’s column is written by Jay Friedman, COO at Goodway Group. I spent the first 10 years of my career in traditional media. The past 10 have been in digital. When I made the transition I was astounded by […]

Agencies that don’t comply with the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ (4As) Transparency Guiding Principles of Conduct (TGPC) will risk losing their memberships. Under the new rule, which the agency trade body blogged about on Monday, anyone (from marketers to executives from other agencies) who finds an agency is not compliant with the 4As’ guidelines […]

If time is money, agencies and publishers are still working out how to bill for it. At a Wednesday event hosted by IAS in Manhattan, Mitch Weinstein, SVP of ad ops at IPG Mediabrands, shared research that found time in view was more important in driving ad effectiveness than the number of in-view pixels. In […]

Publicis-owned agency Zenith had many high-profile exits in the last year, like Julian Zilberbrand moving to Viacom and John Nitti going to Verizon, but the agency is doubling down on recruitment. Increasing competition from systems integrators and consultants like Deloitte and Accenture have forced Zenith to rethink its talent requirements. “We’re recruiting people who can […]

A tough global economy has given way to cost-conscious marketers, short-tenured CMOs and squeezed agencies. These are the challenges Maxus Global CEO Lindsay Pattison must work through as she sets the vision for the GroupM agency. “We are the challenger group in the family,” said UK-based Pattison. “We are more data-driven. We didn’t come out […]

Over the last year Omnicom went on a tear, poaching big-brand clients from its competitors. Omnicom Media Group (OMG) lured Procter & Gamble from Publicis Groupe’s Starcom Mediavest and built the data-driven agency Hearts & Science to support it. AT&T also consolidated its business under Omnicom when it moved its media account from WPP’s MEC to Hearts […]

As the ad industry races to embrace mobile, social, data targeting and ad tech, Young & Rubicam (Y&R) CEO David Sable says it’s forgetting about the consumer. Audience targeting? Misses out on potential customers. Ad blocking? A reflection of the unchecked proliferation of ads. Sponsored content? It’s been around forever. But he also realizes ads […]

When Vice needed to diversify its distribution beyond Facebook and YouTube, it didn’t look to other digital platforms. Instead, said CEO Shane Smith, Vice partnered with HBO and hatched plans for a TV network. “We realized we couldn’t be hostage to Facebook and YouTube. We had to go off-platform,” he told WPP head Martin Sorrell […]

Mobile has been reshaping the way advertisers spend on digital, but the pace is picking up significantly, setting the stage for desktop ad spend to contract even faster than legacy channels. As advertisers shift spend to mobile, desktop advertising will shrink faster than newspapers and magazines, according to Zenith’s Advertising Expenditure Forecast, released on Monday. […]

This is the third installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world. Read previous interviews with Nazanin Jazayeri and Andrew Klein. Data is a vehicle for great storytelling, according to Ella Chinitz, group vice president of data science at Razorfish. “[It’s about] deriving insights out of […]

The digital takeover of global ad spend ain’t here yet, according to Carat’s global ad forecast. “Not to discount digital by any stretch of the imagination, but we’ve seen somewhat of a resurgence of what’s going on with linear TV,” said Andy Donchin, chief investment officer at Dentsu Aegis Network, which owns Carat. Some advertisers […]

When Dentsu Aegis Network bought programmatic shop Accordant Media on Thursday, it was the Japanese holding company’s second major tech acquisition in less than a month, following the majority stake Dentsu took in CRM agency Merkle. “Programmatic is the way of working in the future and we’ll continue to invest in people who have the […]

This is the second installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world. Read the first PII interview with Nazanin Jazayeri. As associate director of social experience and custom product at Publicis’ Mediavest | Spark, Andrew Klein loves discovering new technologies and platforms. That wasn’t how […]

Dentsu has snapped up Accordant, a well-regarded independent programmatic technology and services firm. The acquisition comes on the heels of Dentsu’s roughly $1.5 billion deal to acquire database marketer Merkle. Accordant is among the most recognized independent programmatic services providers in the United States – a group that also includes the Goodway Group and Kepler Group. […]

Agencies are straining to recruit and retain data-driven talent. Prospects with a strong background in statistical analysis and data mining – the second most popular skill on LinkedIn as of January – aren’t necessarily looking to work at a media agency. And it’s hard for agencies to retain employees due to a business culture that […]

This is the first installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world. Nazanin Jazayeri is a translator. As director of advanced analytics at Mindshare, she’s part of a team that bridges product developers, media planners and buyers by interpreting the massive streams of data that […]

Xaxis, despite scrutiny of its principal-based buying methods in the ANA’s June report, will grow at a forecasted rate of 25% year over year, WPP said on an investor call Wednesday. Based on the holding company’s H1 earnings report, neither WPP nor Xaxis have yet taken a major hit from the ANA’s findings. Advertising and […]

When DigitasLBi appointed Emily Macdonald as its first head of programmatic on Thursday, it wanted to ensure all employees across planning, buying, data and analytics teams are trained on programmatic buying. The newly created international role comes from Publicis Groupe’s recent reshuffle to integrate programmatic as a service across all of its agencies, beginning last year […]

“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. We’ve seen clearing prices for display inventory rise more than 100% in the last two years, and video inventory grow more than 50%. […]

As publishers embraced header bidding, many programmatic buyers observed the trend from the sidelines. Since header bidding boosts yield for publishers by increasing competition, it follows that buyers may be paying more. But buyers wouldn’t necessarily know if that’s the case, since SSPs don’t note whether the impression comes through a header or not. If […]

Dentsu Aegis’ Isobar will launch a new unit by merging its consulting capabilities with those of two corporate siblings at Dentsu, the agency announced on Thursday. Copernicus Marketing and Forbes Consulting, both subsidiaries of Dentsu, will be merged as an integrated division under the Isobar agency network. David Forbes, founder of Forbes Consulting, and Peter […]

While media bartering isn’t commonly discussed, the ANA’s two reports on agency transparency referenced the practice 49 times. Here’s how it works: A barter agency might agree to buy an advertiser’s surplus product, such as an airline’s unsold flight tickets at full price, which it would give to employees for business travel. In return, the […]

Facebook introduced a page-loading protocol on Tuesday that makes its ads almost indistinguishable from Facebook content, and thus prevents ad blockers from working on its site. Andrew Bosworth, the social media company’s VP of ads and business platform, said the change forces ad blockers to choose between not blocking ads or severely undermining the user […]

If Dentsu Aegis Network’s majority investment in Merkle goes through, the CRM and performance marketing agency will support Dentsu’s media-buying agencies. Those media agencies will gain access to Merkle’s proprietary tools, including a cross-device identity management system, a CRM-matching database for publishers and, most notably, the M1 audience platform. “The intent is that every agency […]

When Mark Read became Wunderman’s global CEO in January 2015, he brought with him a great deal of digital know-how gleaned from his time leading WPP Digital. Wunderman had been in a state of continuous transformation, changing from a direct marketing agency to a digital one. Over the past 10 years, it has tripled in […]

Japanese holding company Dentsu Aegis Network will acquire a majority stake in Maryland-based Merkle – a CRM and performance marketing specialist – and one of the largest independent digital agencies. It did $436 million in revenue in 2015, a 14% increase over the year prior. While terms were not disclosed, the deal values Merkle at […]