As a staff reporter at AdExchanger, Alison covers advertising agencies and the digital audio landscape. Previously a copywriter at MarketSmiths, she has written digital marketing copy and produced campaigns across multiple verticals. Prior to that Alison worked in editorial at award-winning travel journalism site Fathom. She has a B.A. in International Studies and Spanish from the University of Michigan.
Brand safety has become such a hot-button issue for advertisers that competing holding companies and agencies are ditching their territorial natures to fight it together. The 4As said Tuesday it has formed an industry consortium called the Advertiser Protection Bureau (APB), a cross-holding company and agency effort to better share knowledge around brand safety incidents […]
In 2016, financial services brand John Hancock spent 80% of its media dollars on linear television. Two years later, the brand eschewed TV ads to launch an all-digital awareness campaign last month for its retirement planning services. That abrupt pivot to digital was driven by a need to find a more addressable audience outside of […]
Agencies are calling 2018 “Mediapalooza Two” as brands review an inordinate amount of accounts, following a pattern that began in 2015. Since January, brands including Microsoft, Shell, Asda and Mondolez have put a collective $10 billion worth of media accounts up for review, according to research firm ID Comms. But this year, brands are putting […]
GroupM said Friday that global Chairman Irwin Gotlieb will step back from his role to become a senior adviser to the company. Gotlieb was GroupM’s founding CEO in 2003 and ran the company until transitioning to Chairman in 2012. GroupM’s global CEO Kelly Clark will continue to lead WPP’s media-buying unit. Gotlieb has made a […]
Altice USA launched an advanced TV business on Thursday called A4 to provide marketers and MVPDs with audience-based, multiscreen advertising solutions. A4 is the culmination of multiple acquisitions by Altice, starting with Cablevision in 2015, said A4 President Paul Haddad, who heads the 500-person team. Altice also has acquired digital platform Audience Partners and programmatic […]
A blog post by Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer on Wednesday detailed restrictions on data access for a number of its APIs, including events, groups and pages. Read it. (The blog also revealed in that post that Cambridge Analytica had harvested 87 million profiles, rather than 50 million, as was originally widely reported.) Developer […]
Kepler Group, a New York-based agency focused on programmatic, media activation and CRM, revealed Wednesday it has been acquired by kyu, a collective of marketing, consulting and design companies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. kyu operates under Hakuhodo DY holdings, one of Japan’s largest marketing holding companies behind Dentsu. While kyu’s agencies, which […]
WPP confirmed Tuesday that its board has hired an independent counsel to investigate CEO Martin Sorrell for misuse of funds and allegations of inappropriate behavior. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news. The advertising giant issued the following statement regarding the investigation: “The Board of WPP has appointed independent counsel to conduct an investigation […]
Facebook’s announcement Wednesday that it would ban third-party data partners from directly targeting on its platform hit ad buyers hard. Previously, buyers could directly apply third-party data segments to their targeting on Facebook through suppliers like Acxiom, Oracle and Experian to enrich Facebook’s data with offline segments. Now, marketers using segments from third-party data brokers […]
Accenture Interactive has made a sport of snapping up digital agencies and folding them into its organization, a strategy which has turned it into the largest digital agency group in the world, with revenues north of $4.4 billion. On Thursday, Accenture Interactive revealed it acquired MXM, the digital and CRM agency owned by magazine publisher […]
When metasearch travel site Kayak decided to take programmatic in-house in the spring of 2016, it needed to select a group of vendors that could help it buy media both more efficiently and effectively. After settling on DoubleClick Bid Manager for display buying, Kayak realized it didn’t have an automated or transparent way to buy […]
Oscar Garza, EVP of media activation at Essence, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO conference on April 10-11 at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. Brands concerned about brand safety, transparency and media budget control are sweetening to the idea of taking programmatic in-house. But marketers often don’t realize there’s a lot more to programmatic than […]
Since Guillaume Lelait was promoted March 20 from Fetch’s US managing director to its first-ever US CEO, he’s inherited a wealth of operations and clients. He’s also inherited an ongoing lawsuit with former client Uber. Last September, Uber sued Fetch for $40 million after accusing the agency of buying click fraud to take credit for […]
Gartner’s annual digital agency magic quadrant, released last Friday, placed Digitas, AKQA, MRM//McCann, Isobar, SapientRazorfish, R/GA, IBM iX, iCrossing, Ogilvy & Mather, Accenture Interactive and VML as leaders with deep capabilities in business transformation and strategy. The quadrant ranked agencies with at least $175 million in digital marketing services revenue in 2017, and provide services […]
Ad tech companies grew roughly five times faster than the digital advertising market from 2010 to 2016, according to an ad spend forecast released by Zenith on Monday. The forecast tracked the revenues of 14 publicly traded ad tech companies including Adobe Marketing Cloud, Criteo, The Trade Desk, Rubicon Project, Rocket Fuel (taken private under […]
The lack of a standard measurement protocol has been an issue for the podcast industry for years. When podcasts are streamed, only the owner of a podcast player app knows how long a person listened to an episode, where they skipped and stopped in that episode or whether they heard an ad. That makes it […]
Pandora has been vocal about its need to increase its ad tech capabilities since CEO Roger Lynch took the helm in November. With Wednesday’s acquisition of programmatic audio platform AdsWizz for $145 million, Pandora has gone from a programmatic newcomer to one that could control the market. “We’ve invested in proprietary ad tech for a […]
Holding companies are in a period of slow growth and organizational upheaval as clients cut spending while demanding new services and business models from their agencies. Of the big six holding companies, Publicis Groupe has undergone the biggest disruption since it purchased Sapient for a whopping $3.7 billion in 2014 and later wrote down the […]
The almighty duopoly is losing share – but just a little bit. Google and Facebook will take a 56.8% share of US digital ad spend this year, down from 58.5% in 2017, according to a report published by eMarketer on Monday. The report also predicted the duopoly’s share of new digital ad dollars entering the […]
Erica Schmidt, Cadreon’s former EVP and managing director in North America, has been promoted to global CEO of the programmatic unit, the company said Wednesday. Schmidt takes over the role from Arun Kumar, chief marketing and data technology officer of IPG Mediabrands, who oversees the group’s central media, data and technology practice as well as […]
Ad tech companies floundering in the public markets have increasingly turned to private equity firms to reinvent their businesses away from the glare of Wall Street’s harsh spotlight. Some PE firms buy ad tech to wring out costs before putting them back on the market or selling to another PE house. Others, like Sizmek, which […]
Verizon Connect, the telco’s telematics business unit that helps companies keep track of their truck fleets, has been around for almost a decade. But after acquiring two smaller companies in 2016, it was time to relaunch its brand and its value prop. On Tuesday, it launched a digital campaign that targets automakers and businesses that […]
On May 25th, when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect, media agencies will be subject to a new set of laws around targeting European consumers. The GDPR, which makes it illegal for businesses to use EU citizens’ data without proper basis or consent, will limit media agencies’ ability to target […]
Despite a slight uptick in CPG volumes in Q4 2017, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell still predicts cyclical budget cutting from the sector due to pressure from activist investors and zero-based budgeting (ZBB). “What we see in packaged goods, certainly, is a continued caution,” he said on WPP’s Q4 and FY 2017 earnings call Thursday. “I […]
Spotify filed its F-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, forgoing a traditional IPO for a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Read the filing. The direct listing means Spotify can directly post its shares on the stock exchange rather than going through the traditional process of hiring a bank […]
When Kimpton Hotels became part of the Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG) in 2014, it saw potential synergies around data and technology it could share with its parent company and sister hotel groups. IHG has more than 5,000 hotels around the world from brands such as Candlewood Suites, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and InterContinental. By tapping […]
Each year, Delta deploys a campaign to thank its SkyMiles Medallion loyalty program members. Past campaigns used emails sent to top Medallion members. In 2016, Delta began leveraging its members’ travel habits to personalize the campaign, showing each member stats about their year with Delta, said Julieta McCurry, managing director of US marketing communications and […]
Jelli is taking the old-school medium of broadcast radio into the 21st century. The programmatic radio platform launched in 2014 to automate and target traditional radio buys. Now, it has a demand-side platform as well as ad servers installed at 2,300 radio stations across the country. It also powers radio’s two major programmatic exchanges: Expressway […]
With local outposts in cities across the country, Gannett has an insider’s view into American communities and what their residents want and need from big brands. “Big, national brands often don’t want to be perceived as big, national brands,” said Kevin Gentzel, chief revenue officer at Gannett. “They want to feel embedded in local communities, […]
Call it fashionably late: Pandora has finally showed up to the programmatic audio party. The digital audio platform said Tuesday buyers can now purchase its audio inventory programmatically through a private marketplace (PMP) via The Trade Desk, MediaMath and AdsWizz’s AudioMatic DSP. Pandora is testing the PMP in a pilot program with five to 10 […]
