Agencies

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 […]

Late last year, we asked a handful of senior execs at platform companies to answer the question, “What will happen next year in marketing and advertising that hasn’t happened before?” This year we invited some of those same contributors to evaluate their earlier forecasts and update them for 2014. The below is from Mark Grether, chief […]

Since its IPO in September – in which its share price more than doubled from $29 to $62 – media buying platform provider Rocket Fuel has pretty much shot the moon. In November, during its premier quarterly earnings disclosure, it reported top-line revenue growth of 132% and customer expansion from 406 in Q3 2012 to […]

WPP Group’s 24/7 Media – which will soon be absorbed into Xaxis – has acquired 12-year-old semantic ad-tech company Crystal Semantics and its 15 employees from previous owner Ad Pepper Media. London-based Crystal’s technology can be applied a few ways, said Rob Schneider, 24/7 Media’s SVP of corporate strategy and platform development. First, it offers straightforward […]

Publicis Groupe media shop ZenithOptimedia and its rival, IPG’s Magna Global, predict the global growth of ad spend through 2016 will come from a number of new channels – namely more dollars allocated to mobile and social buys as well as the penetration of programmatic in more countries. Mobile wave: While analysts have predicted that […]

Both agencies and ad partners draw comparisons between Twitter’s launch on Thursday of retargeting product Tailored Audiences and Facebook Exchange (FBX). Just how technically similar they are remains to be seen, but the industry is buzzing about the ad product’s cross-channel targeting potential. We asked some Tailored Audience partners, media agencies and a beta tester to […]

Omnicom Media Group’s trading desk, Accuen, has expanded its reach in the BRIC countries over the past year, and Jun Yuan, head of Accuen China, is navigating the unique challenges of the market. “As an agency, we started our RTB business in China last year, in April,” Yuan told AdExchanger, noting that the team is […]

In 2007, that WPP Group made big waves with its acquisition of display media technology firm 24/7 Media, worth $649 million. By bringing a publisher-facing ad server and network in-house, the holding company had staked out a tech ownership strategy that continues today. Today that premise lives on at WPP, but the 24/7 Media brand does […]

Consulting businesses are popping from the foliage like so many munchkins in Oz, eager to guide bewildered marketers – lost, perhaps dealing with head trauma – through a fragmented and hallucinatory media landscape to the yellow-brick…well, you get it. Last month, Starcom MediaVest Group took the wraps off a new advisory business called Zero Dot. The […]

The largest purveyor of Latin American-influenced food products in the United States, Goya Foods has come a long way from the “Goya, oh boy-a!” tagline it popularized in the 1980s. After reaching $1.3 billion in revenue last year, according to Forbes, the New Jersey-based, family-owned and -operated food company will continue to tap its core […]

With his company’s roots in lead generation, Vizury CEO Chetan Kulkarni is unequivocal about the importance of first-party data and the value it can create for advertisers. But, before one can begin using first-party data effectively, Kulkarni suggests defining it. “Let’s say we’re talking about a transaction – for first-party data, you need to ‘map’ […]

A progenitor of the agency trading desk concept and key advocate for programmatic buying within the agency world is leaving his multifaceted role at MDC Partners. For the past six years, Darren Herman’s business cards have carried titles including chief digital media officer at MDC media agency The Media Kitchen; CDMO at Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal […]

According to Merkle, Facebook’s Custom Audiences program and its related lookalike modeling tools lead the pack when it comes to customer prospecting. Merkle bills itself as a CRM agency, so the company knows a thing or two about database matching online. Paul Steketee, head of paid social and emerging media, said match rates on Facebook […]

Latin America marks great opportunity for media buyers and brands looking to monetize and scale their reach in emerging markets. In Mexico alone, eMarketer estimates total media ad spend was $5.2 billion in 2012. Yet understanding the cultural nuances of each Latin American country is as important as the financial and operational intricacies of the […]

Omnicom is going “all in” with a singular Data Management Platform offering that will support audience segmentation and ad optimization across its two key media agencies, OMD and PHD. Driving the platform consolidation is a deal with Aggregate Knowledge, a DMP recently acquired by Neustar for $119 million. Like many agencies, Omnicom already supported DMP functionality, but […]

Resonate has debuted a platform that measures consumers’ online motivations to help agencies better target campaigns across mobile, social and video. Dubbed Resonate Analytics for Agencies, the software is based on 4-year-old technology that statistically models people’s behavior online against in-depth, survey-based knowledge about their personal values to track how those values motivate the way […]

Google and Publicis Groupe’s MediaVest have signed an upfront agreement, with the media agency committing to spend a “significant amount” of ad dollars on YouTube and Google’s other display and mobile properties, including its ad networks. The deal is “open-ended” and simply involves the promise of spending a set amount in advance, perhaps up to […]