Publicis and Omnicom have confirmed their intent to create a merger of equals. The two global ad agency holding companies will form a new entity called Publicis Omnicom Groupe – with ownership structured approximately 50/50 and a market capitalization of $35 billion U.S. (press release) Speaking with press from Paris this morning, CEOs Maurice Levy […]
A merger of Omnicom Group and Publicis Groupe, the announcement of which is expected tomorrow, would result in a sprawling array of media agencies — and digital agencies that buy media — under one corporate roof. Omnicom’s big media agency brands are PHD, OMD, and Resolution Media. The Publicis side is sprawl-ier, consisting of Starcom […]
Data-driven buying methods have boosted media margins at MDC Partners, although programmatic is still small as a percentage of the whole business. On the holding company’s earnings call yesterday, CEO Miles Nadal said digital media stands out in its portfolio of marketing services firms with margins surpassing 20%. “Strategically, our media investments especially digital media […]
Publicis Groupe is hemorrhaging senior digital talent. With his exit for a plum job as CEO of AOL Networks (AdExchanger story), Razorfish CEO Bob Lord became the latest in a string of digital agency CEOs to leave the French holding company. Among the others are Colin Kinsella, former CEO of Digitas North America, who recently […]
“Trading desks, which include WPP’s Xaxis, Publicis’ Audience on Demand, Omnicom’s Accuen and Interpublic’s Cadreon, probably deployed $2 billion of online spending in the US last year, up from around $1bn in 2012 and may spend up to $3bn in 2013. This represents a substantial change in the context of a market which saw $18 […]
For Emmy Spahr, associate media director at Publicis agency Mediavest, “programmatic media” is a phrase that increasingly is part of the agency-client dialogue. As a member of Mediavest Group’s Geo-Commerce Center of Excellence, Spahr focuses exclusively on helping a major American cable company with its acquisition-driven plans. “We’re getting a lot of ‘asks’ for a […]
The growing demand for personalized, “real-time marketing” (think: the doings of Oreo and its digital agency 360i that resulted in “Dunk in the Dark” during the Super Bowl), is one of the forces underpinning the push toward unifying the “human” and “technological” elements of the programmatic equation. AOL’s earlier announcement of a new strategic partnership […]
Bob Lord is leaving his twin posts as Global CEO of Razorfish and CEO of Publicis Groupe’s Digital Technologies Division to take on the role of CEO of AOL Networks, a post that has been vacant since April when former head Ned Brody exited in April for Yahoo, pending his non-compete. However, Lord, who joined […]
On agency holding company Omnicom’s Q2 2013 earnings call today with Wall Street analysts, CEO John Wren and CFO Randall Weisenburger talked “programmatic strategy” as Omnicom’s net income for the most recent quarter increased 2.4% to $289.5 million from $282.7 million in Q2 of 2012. Read the earnings release (PDF). The holding company is looking to […]
Accuen, Omnicom Media Group’s trading desk, is officially opening trading desk operations across 20 markets in Latin America, giving the programmatic unit coverage in 60 countries. Much of the focus on the nations that comprise Central and South America has tended to revolve around the rise in consumer spending by Hispanics in the US and […]
GroupM media agency Mindshare announced in early June that former Digitas exec Jordan Bitterman would become the agency’s new Chief Strategy Officer for North America. While at Digitas, Bitterman co-founded the Digitas NewFront, which was a pre-cursor to the Digital Content NewFronts industry-wide event held most recently in April and May. In an interview last […]
“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 Sacha Xavier, partner, media and innovation director for for Neo@Ogilvy, and Paul Chenier, vice president of national sales at AskMen.com. Are you frustrated by the number of emails and calls […]
The time when the blanket label “video advertising” will replace references to TV, PC, mobile, or tablet ads is still a long way off, but a new marketplace offering from Videology promises to advance that cause by letting buyers and sellers unify guaranteed and non-reserved ad deals. Dubbed “Descartes,” the system is named for the […]
Seven-year-old mobile agency M&C Saatchi Mobile offers strategic consulting, mobile production, and mobile paid media services. The London-based firm, part of independent agency network M&C Saatchi, employs about 75 staff, and its paid media efforts are focused on direct-response campaigns. Eric Mugnier came to New York in 2011 to open M&C Saatchi Mobile’s first US […]
Last week in Cannes, global leaders from the five biggest holding company trading desks convened for a panel discussion hosted by the Rubicon Project. The event took place on a rooftop against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea, while on the sidewalk below creatives scurried between beach parties and celeb-packed sessions at the Palais des […]
It’s been a little more than a year since Kepler Group was spun off (see AdExchanger’s Q&A) from MediaMath, where it had previously been the direct-to-client professional services group. So how’s it going for the world’s first independent agency to be incubated within a demand-side platform? Not bad at all. Kepler is hiring up and […]
At last week’s Merkle client summit, marketing chieftains from Geico and Travelers were present. [Record scratch here.] Wait a second – an agency has two ultra-competitve clients on its roster? Yes, it’s true. As Merkle CEO David Williams readily admitted to AdExchanger last week, the competitive nature of clients does create sensitivity around the data […]
Annalect Group, the digital and analytics division of Omnicom Media Group, will use Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud to support the social marketing offerings across Omnicom’s agencies, according to the companies. Omnicom already uses various Salesforce.com products such as Radian6 and Social.com. Today’s news highlights the company’s efforts to further “bundle” its work with the cloud software […]
For major publishers that built their businesses on print and glossy magazine pages, there is a clear sense that programmatic ad sales methods are becoming mainstream. What’s less clear is how to address the problems that programmatic has forced on them, namely, the struggle over developing a common metric and how to define terms like […]
In pitching the marketer-centric audience at Merkle’s customer summit about the benefits of DIRECTV’s addressable televison advertising product, the company’s VP of Advanced Advertising, Tom Hagopian, identified two of its challenges, too. The first was the limited scale of the addressable TV market. The second… “On the TV buying side, we are constantly involved in […]
Recounting an anecdote in his opening keynote yesterday at Merkle’s customer summit, Merkle CEO David Williams illustrated what a “game-changer” Facebook’s Custom Audience product has been for Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) companies like his. Williams said that Facebook executives initially told him it would not only never let email addresses match to Facebook login data […]
Pointing at its own 350 person-strong digital team and “hyper growth” for its products and services related to the digital channel, Merkle kicked off its “CRM Executive Summit” today in Charleston, South Carolina. Merkle CEO David Williams recounted for customer attendees how it was only four years ago that “the stars were aligning” and true […]
From math teacher at the US Military Academy in West Point more than 20 years ago to his new role as Chief Strategics Analytics Officer of agency DraftFCB, Ken Beatty has sampled a unique set of perspectives on data and its impact on people. Today, like any good agency “soldier,” he says he wants to […]
Twitter has shown aggressiveness over the past few months in developing its advertising business, and this morning’s global data-sharing deal with WPP Group represents another significant advancement. Read the release. The relationship is through WPP’s Data Alliance, which includes the holding company’s media buying and planning umbrella GroupM, the analytics provider Kantar and digital creative […]
WPP Group’s trading desk Xaxis is known for its proprietary approach to technology. The GroupM unit has incubated numerous ad platforms, a legacy of WPP’s 2007 acquisition of 24/7 Media. It offers these products to clients as an alternative to licensing from vendors. By contrast, trading desk rivals VivaKi AOD (Publicis), Cadreon (IPG), and Accuen (Omnicom) are […]
When Publicis Groupe launched it five years ago, VivaKi Audience On Demand was among the first holding company trading desks. And Google was its key partner, supporting a great majority of AOD’s ad serving and auction-based display media buying. But those days are over. As of Q1, Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager (formerly Invite Media) is […]
In her role as Managing Director of Connected Platforms at media agency PHD, Andrea Wolinetz helps manage client opportunities that are digital but don’t necessarily fit a silo such as “mobile” or “social.” She offers Foursquare as a prime example of this conundrum in the agency: “Should you call your mobile specialist because it’s a […]
At yesterday’s Digitas NewFront, Huffington Post executives said they would offer their native advertising content distribution system exclusively to the Publicis Groupe interactive shop’s clients. While billed as “real-time,” the self-serve content system will post marketers’ content within a two-hour window of receiving the request. “We’re bringing our year-old BrandLive service to HuffPost that will […]
Ad network Pulse 360, a subsidiary of Seevast, is on the brink of shutting down and may have closed its doors already, AdExchanger has learned. Pulse 360 issued a company-wide layoff in April and began looking for a buyer or new investor, according to a former employee who asked to remain anonymous. Pulse 360 founder […]
WPP Group has shared some new details on revenue performance and strategy for its Xaxis trading unit. Xaxis grew its revenue by 28% during the first quarter, said Pivotal Research Analyst Brian Wieser in a research note. WPP had previously stated the business had 2012 media billings of $270 million and a headcount of 200. […]
PubMatic has run more than 30 fully autonomous, end-to-end agentic campaigns through the SSP’s AgenticOS platform, in addition to more than 1,000 direct publisher deals.
TTD CEO Jeff Green laid out the DSP’s plan for winning in a new world of advertising that – AI aside – necessitates major changes in how marketers behave.
TTD confirmed that this CTV publisher’s errors would have made its UID2s useless for ad targeting. But TTD also said it wouldn’t have had enough information to flag the issue.
Criteo shares dropped by 20% Wednesday morning after the company reported shaky Q1 earnings and revised its guidance downward for the rest of the year.
On Wednesday, Josh D’Amaro led his first earnings call as the new CEO of Disney. The company closed last quarter with $25.2 billion in revenue, a 7% year-over-year increase. Disney Entertainment advertising revenue rose 5% YOY, but ESPN ad revenue was down 2% YOY, although subscription and affiliate revenue was up 6%.
People Inc. previewed plans to downsize by focusing mainly on its key properties. The strategy makes sense considering its publishing portfolio has lost about two-thirds of its Google traffic.
