Agencies

Merkle keeps piling on agency services. The CRM and database marketing company has acquired Chicago-based New Control, a “digital and direct” agency with a focus on financial industry clients including Chase, Fifth Third Bank, PNC Bank and Visa. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Merkle EVP and digital agency lead Craig Dempster told AdExchanger the […]

Mobile app install ads have proven to be lucrative for Facebook, and sources say Twitter is close to releasing its own version of such ads along with a new mobile app install partner program. “Given the prevalence of Twitter app usage in mobile, which has an even higher percentage of mobile vs. desktop than Facebook, […]

The brand-agency relationship used to be relatively simple. True, brands would have multiple agencies – social, digital, media-buying, for instance – but most of the spend would focus on a single area, usually television. But as other digital channels become more important to consumers, brands are beginning to realize that stuffing too much money in […]

You walk into a Honda dealership, and a Toyota ad pops up on your cell phone. The future of programmatic is destined to get more mobile and more local as ad exchanges and agencies team up on innovations that will target consumers more specifically, even when they’re on the move. Christina Lee, a senior digital […]

Marc Landsberg knows agencies. Landsberg previously served as the former EVP at Leo Burnett and president and CEO of Arc and MRM Worldwide. As the current CEO of Chicago-based social agency socialdeviant, he says the traditional media-buying process has been turned upside down and the players flipping the tables aren’t the platform providers. Comcast’s planned […]

Digital think tank and research consultancy L2 is looking to corner the market on prestige brand and CPG strategy. A new investment round of $16.5 million from General Catalyst Partners (a HubSpot investor) received Wednesday also underscores the intersection of the management consultancy and digital agency. “The two primary buckets for this investment will be […]

Interpublic Group’s (IPG) out-of-home advertising agency Rapport Worldwide will automate media planning and buying activities using outdoor advertising technology platform ADstruc, the holding company said Monday. As part of a strategic agreement between the two companies, IPG will deploy the technology across Rapport’s five offices globally, which will significantly improve agency efficiencies. Additionally, IPG has […]

When The New York Times discontinued in February its director of programmatic advertising position, held by Matt Prohaska, partners and advertisers wondered how this would affect the publisher’s programmatic initiatives. Certainly the Times sought to alter its structure, saying in a statement it was “re-imagining and growing [its] programmatic organization and strategy with a focus […]

Agency holding company MDC Partners has rebranded its Maxxcom Global Media unit as MDC Media Partners. It has also rolled two prior agency acquisitions, TargetCast and RJ Palmer, into a new, 250-person-strong media agency called Assembly, which will function as a unit within MDC Media Partners. Assembly combines resources from independent media communications agency TargetCast […]

Consulting activity around marketing technology continues to gain steam, with interest coming both from small boutique firms such as Unbound Company and Freestyle Consulting (both established by former Mediabrands executives) and large established advisory companies such as Deloitte and Accenture. The latest company to join the fray is Concept Corridor, a one-man consulting play founded […]

Is the union between Oracle and BlueKai, in the words of Ovum Research Senior Analyst Gerry Brown, a case of “the cat amongst the pigeons?” There might be some credence to the idea. As Brown points out, BlueKai is (or has been) a champion of open systems. Oracle is not. “Certainly few BlueKai partners will […]

Marketers need to fundamentally rethink the traditional purchase funnel if they want to effectively target media and messaging in the future, says Kate Sirkin, EVP and global research director of Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG). Leading a discussion at Publicis Groupe’s New York headquarters Thursday alongside social analytics agency Mashwork, Sirkin discussed how social data is unlocking […]

Enterprise social media management company Sprinklr has acquired social data analytics and services firm Dachis Group for an undisclosed sum, the latest venture from Razorfish’s cofounder and former CEO Jeff Dachis. As a combined entity, Sprinklr, founded in 2009, and Dachis Group will employ 300 with offices in New York, London, and Austin, and serve […]

Investing in new and existing creative and digital talent in 2014 will be a key development pillar for Interpublic Group (IPG), the holding company said in its Q4 call. IPG revealed full-year 2013 revenue of $7.12 billion, an organic increase of 2.8% from $6.96 billion in 2012. Fourth quarter revenue was $2.12 billion, compared to […]

Companies can spend millions on ads, SEO, search, content marketing, social and so on, but never maximize those dollars because they lack a good way of stringing together data about the interactions that result from that investment. With no singular picture into each customer’s cross-channel journey, brands don’t have the power to make real-time business […]

Stephan Beringer is in for a ride. Earlier this week Beringer was named president of Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi Audience On Demand (AOD) trading desk. He succeeds Kurt Unkel, a respected agency leader and progenitor of the trading desk idea, who will exit at the end of February for a hometown job as chief digital officer […]

Yesterday, mobile ad network Millennial Media announced the hire of industry – and programmatic-media – veteran Michael Barrett as its new CEO. As Barrett told AdExchanger’s Judith Aquino yesterday, “Buying programmatically is certainly a big interest with a lot of our advertisers, publishers and developing partners, and we’ll continue going down that path. [But] Millennial is also […]

“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 Paul Steketee, head of paid social and emerging media capabilities at Merkle. The growth rate of mobile is kind of like China’s economy: impossible to really track. The rapid takeover of […]

Kurt Unkel is stepping down from VivaKi Audience On Demand (AOD), where he has for the past five years been a key figure in evolving Publicis Groupe’s entry in the trading desk space. Adweek’s Noreen O’Leary first reported the news earlier today, noting Unkel has accepted the chief digital officer role at WPP’s Ford agency, […]

IPG Mediabrands’ Global CEO Matt Seiler says the advertising industry thinks too much about media in the context of the individual medium. “It drives me crazy that the way media is procured is still the way media is procured,” he said during “The Unfolding Strategy and Services Sector” session at Industry Preview 2014, where he […]

Social data analytics company 4C Insights has raised $5 million in Series B funding from Jump Capital. 4C originated last fall when ecommerce ad-tech company The Echo System merged with Twitter Ads API partner and Facebook PMD Voxsup, founded by Northwestern University Professor Alok Choudhary. 4C currently employs between 30-40 people, but expects to grow […]

Sean Corcoran, SVP and director of digital media and social influence at Boston-based digital agency Mediahub/Mullen, says that while the company is “a little bit more of…a ‘right-brain’ agency” because of its creative focus, data and analytics can still drive that innovation. Mediahub/Mullen serves clients like VH1, JetBlue and Adidas, and Corcoran spoke with AdExchanger […]

You’ve got to hand it to Razorfish for even having a media practice. Considering the clout of corporate siblings like Starcom Mediavest Group (SMG) and the growing power of media agencies in general, it would not be surprising to learn that – four years after its acquisition by Publicis Groupe — the digital agency’s media […]

Shortly before its acquisition by global management consultancy Accenture last May, digital marketing and ecommerce services provider Acquity Group went public in 2012, recording revenues of more than $140 million that year. Accenture also acquired UK design and creative agency Fjord last year, which, along with Acquity, was rolled into the Accenture Digital division designed […]

WPP Group-owned media agency GroupM’s launch Monday of spinoff Modi Media, intended to improve targeted television ads, expands WPP’s authority on addressable and interactive TV tools and services. Michael Bologna, GroupM’s former director of emerging communications who was named as Modi’s president, said Modi will operate as a separate business unit with access to clients […]

Years after the major ad holding companies like Publicis, IPG, WPP, Havas and others created trading desks for accessing ad exchanges, Japan’s largest advertising company, Dentsu, finally launched on Dec. 19 its own real-time bidding (RTB) platform, called Dentsu Audience Network. Read the release. Dentsu has been active in developing a programmatic business since 2010, […]

The IPG Media Lab is a media test kitchen for parent company IPG Mediabrands. Every week, the tricked-out tech playground plays host to CMOs and brand strategy execs that walk its aisles for inspiration on emerging devices and media-types to augment in their marketing strategies. Through a series of informal relationships with media and technology […]

A change has happened among creative agencies in which they’re now using cloud-based solutions to develop their in-house creative ideas. Part of this has to do with the changing demands of business clients and the growing acceptance of crowdsourced content for marketing purposes. “Agencies are now being tasked with delivering high-quality content at a price […]

Beijing-based BlueFocus Communications has bought a majority stake in We Are Social, strengthening its Western presence and gaining a global social marketing capability. Under the deal terms, BlueFocus paid an initial $30 million for an 82.8 percent position in We Are Social, with additional incentive-based compensation doled out over the next three years. London-based We Are […]

WPP Group’s digital and direct marketing agency Wunderman and its media-buying agency MEC have launched a joint venture called CHOREOGRAPH to address converging client demands in paid, earned and owned media. The proliferation of cross-channel marketing campaigns and the subsequent need to marry transactional, customer and demographic data with audience-level information drove CHOREOGRAPH’s creation. “Over […]