Agencies

Interpublic Group has made changes to its Cadreon trading desk in North America, uprooting it from its previous home in the Mediabrands Audience Platform and repotting it in the Magna Global media investment arm. As Adweek reported earlier this month, a new entity called Magna Global North America will absorb the trading desk along with […]

Since being acquired in September 2012, Paul Cimino’s Brilig Data Exchange serves not only its own customer base but also that of its new owner, Merkle, and all of the first- and third-party data it looks to leverage on behalf of its Merkle clients across marketing campaigns. In an ongoing effort to understand how data […]

After a relatively quiet period following its acquisition by WPP Group for $540 million last year, AKQA’s executives popped up in New York on Friday to deliver what the digital agency described as an “experiment” in reaching out to clients and the media. “We wanted to give back to our customers by sharing with them […]

Marketers worldwide are pouring more money into digital ads, according to a new report from GroupM. Internet ad spending is expected to reach $113.5 billion worldwide this year, a 14.6% increase from last year and representing more than 21% of advertising budgets, reports the media buying agency, which polled marketers from 28 countries. North America […]

“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. Have you seen recent articles about the Firefox cookie-blocking privacy debate? I don’t blame those of us in the digital media community for going […]

Full-service digital agency Booyah Advertising has launched a trading desk, led by new hire Matt Thompson, previously with Mindshare in London. The trading desk will employ four people, all in Denver. Booyah the agency is part of Booyah Networks, which also owns video ad marketplace SpotXchange. Booyah Advertising did $100 million in media last year, […]

The old thinking: social media channels like Facebook and Twitter will be the death knell of traditional publishers. The new thinking: they need each other desperately. And just maybe, they can actually generate a worthwhile amount of ad dollars and audience engagement through mutual benefit. That was the consensus at the opening panel of the […]

The growth of online media has upended the way media is bought and sold, and the traditional ad agency model is under greater pressure than ever before. On one side of the office are established account planners and media buyers; on the other side sits the trading desk. A group of media agency heads kicked […]

If you’re attending an ad industry conference, it’s a safe bet you’re going to hear a lot of cheerleadering and hyperbole about how great things are. And while there are any number of ardent defenders for the ad agency model out there, few could muster a level of encouragement as spirited as the one laid […]

When you think of big consulting firms operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, names like McKinsey and Deloitte come to mind. GroupM? Not so much. But WPP Group’s media investment arm aims to change that with a new consulting unit led by Ernie Simon, previously the chief strategy officer at Omnicom’s OMD. Unlike […]

Sapient is a company with many faces, and revenue sources. About 70% of its business comes from the SapientNitro digital agency. Another 25% derives from Sapient Global Markets, which serves the capital and commodity market needs of clients in the financial and energy sectors. And 5% is in government services, where it has done work […]

RBM Co-founder and CEO Elliott Easterling is a believer. For his San Francisco-based performance marketing agency, which has broadened its scope beyond search to display as well as other channels, agile marketing works – and the $6 million in net revenue last year is the proof. Ignited by Silicon Valley startups and its agile product development […]

In a recent conversation with San Francisco-based independent agency Mediasmith and its CEO David Smith, AdExchanger discussed the company’s technology practice and how it balances the need to stay ahead of the automation of advertising while servicing the client. For CEO Smith, it begins with what he calls the Mediasmith tech stack. See it. AdExchanger: […]

By folding MPG and Media Contacts into Havas Media Group, Havas has created what it believes will be a better, integrated approach to addressing client needs.  So says Havas Media EVP of Product Development Rob Griffin who also admits that internally the agencies had become too decentralized and “siloed” into specialized business units. Griffin believes […]

“Look, complexity is our friend. There’s no doubt about it, because the more fragmented the market is and the more complex it is in terms of reaching the target audiences, it takes more very, very smart insightful people to accomplish that. That’s a long-term trend, and it continues.” “[The] technological ability to do things, and […]

Technology vendors, through mergers and acquisitions, are moving more into the marketing field, as the CMO’s role continues to evolve to include more technology functions. Highlighting the actions of companies such as Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce, The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc. (JEGI) has proposed a framework it calls the “Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) Stack,” […]

Steve Katelman, EVP, Omnicom Media Group. took a slightly different tack with our round-up question on “When Is A Startup No Longer A Startup?” From his agency perch, Katelman opted for defining the startup. The “startup” company became famous in the late nineties during the dot.com boom/bust, and even though those days are long behind […]

Like many big companies, Kimberly-Clark ramped up its investment in data-driven display media last year. The personal care giant, whose brands include Kleenex, Kotex, Cottonelle, and Huggies, started looking into a display “desk” a couple years back, and set one up last year in partnership with its media agency, WPP Group’s Mindshare. Jeff Holecko, who […]

As audience buying in digital hurtles forward, the major ad agency holding companies have produced different “flavors” of their agency trading desk (ATD) strategies. For Interpublic Group (IPG), its Mediabrands Audience Platform (MAP) unit spearheads ATD strategy and begins by defining markets according to geographic clusters. North America is one cluster and matched by MAP […]

The incursion of procurement on the marketing organization has caused no shortage of pain at agencies — and some startups as well. Among the concerns are that creative process will be devalued, client services squeezed, and strategic account planning shrunk to a line item by procurement agents who may lack marketing experience. But procurement exists […]

Two years into their existing partnership, ad holding company Interpublic Group is making an unspecified investment in Kiip, a company that promises to connect marketers and consumers through the use of “unexpected” targeted rewards to mobile app users and gamers. Apart from help in continuing to build the San Francisco startup, Kiip co-founder and CEO […]

Essence Digital has acquired Point Reach, a Seattle-based agency with 19 employees and significant mobile capabilities. The deal brings Essence’s global headcount to 233, with the bulk of those staff concentrated in London, New York, and, most recently, San Francisco. The Bay Area presence materialized last September with the acquisition of SF-based Black Bag Advertising […]

Creative agencies, media agencies, PR agencies, “general” agencies. All have faced significant technology disruption in the form of shifting consumer behaviors, disintermediation by vendors, and relentless waves of “marketing tech” requiring evaluation and training. To understand the changes afoot in marketing services business models, we asked a number of senior execs who should know to […]

The six global ad holding companies (WPP, Publicis, Interpublic, Omnicom, Dentsu, and Havas) are basically legal roosting boxes for advertising agencies, but a few years hence we may see them very differently. Or, a few of them anyway. Speaking with AdExchanger today, CEO Martin Sorrell said, “I think our business has changed dramatically in the […]

WPP Group has taken a 20% stake in Globant, a fast growing Latin American marketing and software development firm. Buenos Aires-based Globant blends engineering and design-driven driven approaches. It employs 2,700 in six countries — including Brazil, Argentina, and Columbia — and offers its clients software development, data architecture, e-commerce applications, design, and mobile development […]

As a WPP Group agency, MediaCom works closely with the holding company’s Xaxis trading desk to execute data-driven media strategies. In such relationships between agencies and trading desks, it can be hard for a client to know where the desk stops and the operating agency begins. That creates a tricky problem, since first party data […]

When David Williams bought Merkle in 1988, the first online display banner was still a few years away. But that doesn’t mean marketing tech wasn’t a part of his CRM agency from the get-go as Merkle ‘grew up’ building platforms for direct mail, and then the phone, and then email as the Internet made its […]

Internet marketing agency VirKet based in Mexico City, Mexico announced last month that it had signed on with Kenshoo and its search engine marketing (SEM) platform products – Kenshoo Enterprise (for large, corporate clients) and Kenshoo Local (for managing many smaller advertisers). See the release. Daniel Molano, Chief Strategy & Product Officer at VirKet, discussed the deal and […]

Any media agency will tell you it’s innovating hard around data in campaign planning and reporting. But what does that mean exactly? For Universal McCann, the global media arm of McCann Worldgroup, today’s challenge in analytics isn’t methodological. It’s all in the follow through – creating standardized measurement approaches and then getting insights into the […]

Traffiq is among the few companies to cleanly jump the fence from a product-centric to a services-centric model. One year ago, it was focused on developing and marketing a self-service marketing workflow tool. Over time however it became clear prospective customers weren’t ready. “We were building a model that could be self-serve, and what we […]