Agencies

MAGNA Global, the strategic investment arm of Interpublic Group, revealed Wednesday it would shift $250 million from its TV budget into Google Preferred over a three-year period, making it the latest agency to commit big upfront dollars to YouTube. Other agencies, such as WPP, Publicis and Omnicom, have collectively committed “billions” through the Preferred program to […]

Marketers and CFOs are struggling to speak each other’s languages, and agencies are getting drowned out amidst the noise. When a brand’s marketing and finance teams can’t align on a goal, the agency fails to meet client KPIs. Agency responsibilities are either passed off to new players in the space, like tech firms and management […]

Xaxis is getting its ad tech house in order with the creation of a new role: chief technology officer. Filling those shoes at the WPP programmatic trading desk is Bob Hammond, whose career spans some of the most recent greatest hits in ad tech M&A. Hammond, whose appointment was announced on Tuesday, served as CTO […]

Digital holds a 29.3% share of all media investment in the United States, up from 28% last quarter, according to GroupM’s annual Interaction 2016 report, which aggregates insights from the agency’s digital advertising activities and was released on Monday. GroupM focused its findings around four core issues related to the growth of mobile: the difficulty […]

About one year ago, GroupM quietly introduced a new structure designed to consolidate its real-time ad buying capabilities across programmatic, social, search and mobile. Called Connect, the new group appeared to be the WPP-owned media agency network’s answer to the growing need for programmatic decentralization of programmatic buying. We have seen that decentralization play out across […]

In an unusual partnership between agency and onboarder, DigitasLBi has teamed up with LiveRamp to sharpen and speed up the segmentation capabilities of its advanced analytics platform to drive more targeted campaigns. DigitasLBi said Thursday that it will leverage LiveRamp’s data connectivity services on IDIOM, its advanced analytics platform – still in the process of […]

Programmatic revenues from Omnicom’s trading desk, Accuen, grew $25 million YoY, the holding company noted Tuesday during its Q1 2016 earnings call. Notably, Accuen’s performance since 2014 has reliably shown YoY revenue growth of between $20 million and $40 million. Q1 2016 – $25M Q4 2015 – $45M Q3 2015 – $25M Q2 2015 – […]

More than a quarter of programmatic decisions are made by agencies for their advertisers – up from 20% since September. The revelation was presented by Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I.O conference in San Francisco on Thursday. The figures, which surprised Mahaney, show agencies make 27% of those decisions […]

Agency holding group Interpublic Group is recruiting for at least five new Advanced TV positions for its trading desk and tech unit Cadreon. Cadreon, which employs about 500 globally and 300 in the US, attributes the hiring moves to recent advances by networks like NBCUniversal and Fox to automate digital video, display and now linear TV […]

“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 Leah van Zelm, vice president at Merkle. Those in the people-based marketing business know that customer journey mapping “quick guides” abound. But beware: Their overly simplistic nature can lead marketers […]

When Omnicom Media Group on Friday launched Hearts & Science, its third agency network alongside OMD and PHD, it chose Annalect founder and CEO Scott Hagedorn to lead the effort. The development comes four months after Omnicom grabbed the majority of Procter & Gamble’s $2 billion media account from Publicis Groupe’s Starcom Mediavest. Part of P&G’s […]

“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. When someone says Hershey, you probably think of chocolate. Or when you hear Louis Vuitton, you may envision brown-and-gold monogrammed handbags. But when […]

A little less than a year ago, Snapchat was still at the beginning stages of working out its advertising strategy. Its ad sales team felt small, at least from the perspective of some agency execs, and unable to keep up with agency and advertiser demand. But in recent months, Snapchat seems to be taking itself […]

Publicis Groupe’s Publicis.Sapient platform was a big winner in Gartner Research’s ranking of digital agencies, released Friday. Publicis.Spaients’s three digital agency brands, Razorfish, SapientNitro and Digitas LBI were recognized as “Leaders” in the research firm’s Magic Quadrant for global digital marketing agencies. Gartner reserves the Leader designation for companies that exhibit both completeness of vision […]

AOL rolled out a programmatic self-serve platform for TV buyers on Monday, and Omnicom Group is the first agency partner to test-drive it. While some competing solutions only enable planning, AOL said its platform also handles execution and reporting. AOL thinks its developing device graph under Verizon gives it a competitive advantage in omnichannel media […]

Jonathan Hsia will discuss advertiser perceptions of ad tech on April 13 at PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. While ad tech capabilities have matured, marketers still need to catch up, said Jonathan Hsia, Mindshare North America’s head of digital investment. “It really is more a question of: What do marketers need to do to leverage ad tech in a […]

Deloitte Digital, which describes itself as a “digital creative consultancy,” has been hiring to offer better services around streaming media/entertainment businesses. Part of its growth over the last three years, from 1,000 people to about 7,000 today, was to staff up to accommodate new business opportunities like TV everywhere services as more TV companies go […]

Shaina Boone will discuss viewability, fraud and supply chain issues on April 14 at PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. Talking about fraud and viewability is one thing – but “actually managing it is an entire program,” said Shaina Boone, managing director of marketing sciences at OMD USA, where she helms the analytics practice. Managing advertiser expectations is […]

Accenture Interactive, the $2.9 billion digital and marketing services arm within the massive management consultancy, sees itself as a new breed of agency. Instead of taking a campaign-based approach, Accenture Interactive instead blends commerce, design and analytics to make marketing more experiential. “If you looked at the old KPIs for grocery and retail, they wanted […]

A handful of ad tech employees who started out at agencies are now returning to senior-level agency roles. And they’re bringing a particularly valuable blend of skills with them. According to Accuen CEO Megan Pagliuca, that initial agency experience is key. “There’s a big con of hiring people from ad tech [without an agency background] […]

Almighty, an independent digital agency in Boston, revealed on Wednesday the launch of a division called Almighty(X), designed to help clients evaluate their technology stacks from budget and optimization standpoints. The goal is to provide more transparency in the agency-client relationship. Almighty(X) will be headed up by Rob Griffin, a former senior executive at French media giant […]

“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, COO at Goodway Group. The ability to attribute offline sales to digital media is within reach. While every sale is not yet attributable, the results generated by measuring the […]

Automated guaranteed has been the slowest part of programmatic to get off the ground. But one of its biggest proponents is the Dentsu Aegis-owned trading desk Amnet, which sees the technology as key to making programmatic a central part of everything an agency does. From January to December last year, budgets going to automated guaranteed […]

It’s been a year since Publicis Groupe forced a big transition of its programmatic operation that many saw as the future of data-driven agency services: It decentralized its seven-year-old trading desk, VivaKi AOD, and reassigned its employees to new jobs within the holding company’s media agencies. Today, its grand experiment is seriously strained by a […]

Xaxis, WPP’s programmatic media company, is a bit of lightning rod in the advertising industry for a few well-documented reasons. However, it’s undeniable that the ad net/trading desk/tech shop combo invests a lot into its own data, partnerships and technologies. Consider, for instance, the $25 million it put into its proprietary data management platform Turbine […]

Merkle on Wednesday revealed its purchase of UK-based Comet Global Consulting, a provider of CRM and marketing solutions. It did not disclose terms. This acquisition marks the third and largest for Merkle within nine months, growing its European employee base to more than 500. The deal comes at the end of Merkle’s five-year global growth […]

The Association of National Advertisers and the 4As might be mending fences, but transparency – or the lack thereof – is still an issue. It’s why programmatic agency Anagram decided to start setting its clients up with their own direct platform contracts, rather than stepping in as the middleman. Anagram founder Adam Cahill calls it “radical […]

“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 Nick Illobre, director of enterprise media solutions at Merkle. As we think about the evolution of programmatic media buying, we can all reminisce about having to explain what “programmatic” was […]

Devices and hardware will come and go. “Which is why the future is absolutely about mobility,” said Lisa Donohue, CEO of Publicis Groupe’s Starcom. “Mobility and understanding a consumer’s movements, the decisions they make and why they make them.” It’s a philosophy Starcom applies to “new establishment” clients like Airbnb and to more “classic” brands […]

The Trade Desk has grown faster than probably any other DSP in recent years, as founder and CEO Jeff Green sought to capitalize on what he saw as strategic errors by rivals. “We saw that most of the DSPs had created channel conflicts for themselves,” said Green, a reference to some other DSPs’ media company […]