Agencies

Independent full-service agency MARC USA is beefing up its digital planning and buying prowess following its acquisition of Boston-based media agency Results:Digital in September. The Pittsburgh agency has 270 employees and $370 million in annual billings, according to Jason Russo, who founded Results:Digital in 2011 and now serves as president of MARC’s Boston office. MARC’s […]

Healthcare and advertising is a complex pairing because of a variety of regulations around consumer targeting. While the sector has been slow to adopt programmatic, Publicis’ health arm, Publicis Health Media (PHM), is diving into automation with its programmatic platform AOD Health, released in October though a partnership with VivaKi, though the company declined to […]

Matt Mobley has spent more than 14 years tinkering with databases. He served as Acxiom’s VP of European consulting, followed by a stint as SVP of solutions consulting at Epsilon, and is now chief marketing technology officer (CMTO) for CRM and database marketing agency Merkle. Under CEO David Williams, Merkle has moved in on search, mobile and […]

KBM Group might be the data services unit of WPP agency Wunderman, but don’t think of it as just a database manager. “Our job is to provide strategic leadership, not simply be a database vendor when clients need one,” said William Burkart, who became KBM Group’s president and COO in late September. So if you […]

Publicis Groupe will snap up Sapient, a digital-centric agency and communications company known for experience design and digital-retail integrations, for $3.7 billion. The all-cash transaction comes directly on the heels of Publicis’s acquisition of programmatic platform RUN, and may bring some closure to the holding company’s disastrous courtship of Omnicom Group. Sapient CEO Alan Herrick (AdExchanger Q&A) will become CEO of Publicis.Sapient, a new […]

Interpublic Group’s (IPG) integrated agency Hill Holliday has launched its own programmatic unit, headed up by EVP and Chief Media Officer Cindy Stockwell. Faithful followers of the agency will recall this isn’t the first time Hill Holliday has offered programmatic-type services. But changing client demands spurred the agency’s decision two months ago to move away […]

“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 David Williams, chairman and CEO at Merkle. The world of addressable media continues to gain scale and momentum. Every day, new addressable audience platforms, such as Apple, Amazon and Walmart, […]

Publicis Groupe reported a meager 1% organic growth rate for 2014’s Q3 on Thursday, with the displeased CEO Maurice Lévy blaming key account losses at Razorfish and lingering “distraction” on the failed Omnicom fusion. Publicis’ revenue in Q3 grew 4% YoY to reach $2.21 billion. “We have been too much focused on [the merger] and […]

Interpublic Group (IPG) reported Q3 revenue of $1.84 billion, an 8.3% increase YoY and an organic increase of 6.3%. IPG Chairman and CEO Michael Roth attributed the solid quarter to strategic digital developments and to the competitiveness of its agencies. IPG’s media agencies are housed in its Mediabrands entity and include Initiative, BPN, ID Media […]

Omnicom Group’s programmatic buying discipline is still in its early days, the agency holding company emphasized during its Q3 2014 earnings call Tuesday. Programmatic buying constitutes just south of 2% of the company’s overall revenue, which reached $3.75 billion during the quarter, up 7.4% YoY. Most of the growth came from the North America region, […]

A change is on the horizon for Annalect, Omnicom’s analytics and marketing technology arm. Omnicom agencies – both its media traders and its creative firms – use Annalect when they need data-driven expertise for their clients’ campaigns. As such, Annalect has a wealth of data scientists and technologists, 250 relationships with third-party data sources and a […]

Rentrak defended itself late last week against rival measurement firm Nielsen, whose global president Steve Hasker claimed Rentrak “never lets the facts get in the way of a good press release.” Hasker, in a Friday media briefing regarding errors Nielsen had discovered in its national networks ratings going back to March 2, opened fire on […]

Publicis Groupe will acquire 20% of Matomy Media Group, an Israeli performance marketing company that recently went public on the London Stock Exchange, the companies said Monday. The investment will not generate cash for the company’s coffers, going instead to a small group of individual investors, but CEO Ofer Druker said it will result in collaboration […]

At the outset of Advertising Week in New York City, WPP chief Sir Martin Sorrell turned his attention to Amazon’s VP of global ad sales Lisa Utzschneider on the stage they shared with Live Nation, CBSi and ESPN. “Your job, I guess, is to demonstrate the value of Amazon’s data for off-platform advertising,” he quipped. “Your revenues […]

Yannick Bolloré, the newly appointed chairman and CEO of Havas, took to the Times Center stage Wednesday at Advertising Week to talk about changes at the French agency holding company in the wake of last year’s restructuring. Bolloré, a family-owned investment group steered by Yannick’s father and famed French investor Vincent Bolloré, owns a 37% […]

While AOL and Publicis Groupe have been programmatic cohorts since last July, the media giant and the holding company took their partnership to another level by adding video and linear TV to the mix Monday at Advertising Week. The move will link Publicis’ digital arm VivaKi with AOL Platforms, which will become Publicis’ preferred partner for programmatic video. […]

Following ad network Undertone’s summer snap-up of programmatic exchange Upfront Digital Media, the company rolled out on Friday a programmatic platform called Virtuoso. The platform is part of Undertone’s developing ad stack, said cofounder Eric Franchi. The company will stagger the release of Virtuoso’s functions, first beginning with programmatic execution and workflow via the Upfront integration. There’s a […]

“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 Lee, executive vice president at Merkle. Challenged by an already short digital marketer attention span, the data-management platform (DMP) is already running the risk of going from today’s front-page […]

Mobile ad platform Millennial Media is buying up mobile exchange Nexage and the message to agencies seems fairly clear: We want to be your everything. Announced Tuesday, the $107.5 million deal, a mixture of cash and stock, is expected to close in Q4. The tech integration will start in earnest in the new year. With […]

Cloud CRM stalwart Salesforce.com and agency holding company Omnicom Group are extending their love affair. The companies on Tuesday revealed a CRM data-sharing initiative (they’re calling it a customer engagement platform) extending across Omnicom. This means Salesforce.com will pipe data from email, sales transactions, call center/service requests and mobile data into Annalect’s data-management platform. Previous […]

The first half of 2014 was sobering, to put it mildly, for Publicis Groupe and its CEO, Maurice Levy. In the wake of the holding company’s failed megamerger with Omnicom Group and its weak second-quarter earnings report, Levy needs to show digital strength. Some structural changes announced Tuesday may help it do that. Among the […]

Marketers are under enormous pressure to target users from tablets to connected TVs, but the supply side needs to feel incented in order for programmatic TV to take hold. This was a theme emerging from the DMEXCO show Thursday where a mashup of marketers, agencies and tech companies mixed for two days in Cologne, Germany. […]

KBM Group, a data services business and division of Wunderman, revealed its partnership Wednesday with Provenir, a move designed to improve the predictive targeting capabilities of the former’s IMPACT 360 Customer Engagement Platform. The partnership, the companies hope, will enable brands to consolidate interactions that occur across numerous channels like mobile, social, display and more traditional […]

ICrossing, a digital marketing agency owned by publishing giant Hearst, unveiled Wednesday the beginning phases of a long-term partnership with marketing software provider Kenshoo. ICrossing will integrate its Connected Marketing Platform (CMP) with Kenshoo’s tools that automate and add intelligence to bids in paid search campaigns. The ability to automate campaign functions is a key […]

Publicis Groupe will make Adobe Marketing Cloud technology available to clients across its agency portfolio, the companies revealed Wednesday. Under the deal, the Paris-based holding company’s agencies will package Adobe MediaOptimizer and Adobe AudienceManager as part of a solution with the name Publicis Groupe Always-On Platform. It’s not the first time the companies have worked together on a large […]

“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 by John Lee, executive vice president at Merkle. First-party data-driven marketing is becoming increasingly pervasive. Marketers use data to individually match and engage their own customers and prospects on addressable platforms like […]

It wouldn’t be the first summer weekend French agency holding company Publicis Groupe sent shock waves through the advertising ecosystem. Close to the anniversary of the infamous ad merger of equals that never quite materialized as Publicis Omnicom Group (POG), French pub Boursier reported on a rumor the holding company could be close to extending […]

You could be forgiven for not thinking of WPP Group-owned agency POSSIBLE as a media agency. It’s not, of course – certainly not compared to the dedicated media advertising shops beneath WPP’s GroupM umbrella. But POSSIBLE does have an in-house media practice. “We have many clients for which we provide comprehensive media services, but we […]

“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 by Megan Pagliuca, VP and GM for digital media at Merkle Inc. It was penned in response to Rob Griffin’s recent piece, “The Death of the Third-Party Ad Server.”   Rob Griffin’s […]

San Francisco-based agency Nice Advertising services small-to-midsize CPG brands like Jelly Belly, Sunsweet and Crystal Geyser. The independent agency is creating a programmatic buying outfit in-house, partnering with TubeMogul as its dedicated video demand-side platform. The growth in programmatic spend is most striking. Since the agency’s Director of media and analytics Eliot Kent-Uritam joined Nice […]