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.
Podcast advertising is getting a bit more measurable. The IAB Tech Lab updated its Podcast Measurement Guidelines on Wednesday to include definitions and best practices for measuring audience reach and downloads. The original guidelines, released in September, focused on defining ad delivery and how to count it consistently. “But podcast measurement is for more than […]
Mobile creative is a Catch-22. While rich media units are engaging, they’re expensive to make and tougher to scale than programmatic banners. But banners look bad on mobile and get a bad rap for ruining the user experience. Shazam and Waze are two apps championing beautiful mobile creative, but they can do so by relying […]
Accenture Interactive, a subsidiary of the management consultancy Accenture, is the world’s largest digital agency by revenue. The digital network has 18,000 employees in 40 offices around the globe. It brought in $4.4 billion last year, roughly 13% of its parent company’s total revenue. With projected revenue at $6 billion for 2017, Accenture Interactive ranks […]
In the future, brands will have to navigate a world in which consumers use their eyeballs to search for content and next-generation artificial intelligence layers connect our brains to the cloud. At least that’s the future envisioned by Omnicom media agency PHD and its worldwide planning and strategy director, Mark Holden. “The technology now facing […]
As automation takes hold of the advertising industry, media planning and buying agencies are being forced to take a cold, hard look in the mirror. “We’re dealing with a lot of forces of commoditization,” MEC CEO Tim Castree told AdExchanger. Castree is in a delicate spot. Following MEC’s merger with sister GroupM agency, Maxus, he’ll […]
As agencies struggle to transform under continued fee pressure from clients, executives are reassessing whether descending on the French Riviera for a week of endless rosé and parties on yachts sends the right message about the state of the industry. “If clients are using zero-based budgeting, let’s use it for Cannes,” WPP CEO Sir Martin […]
“There are three big issues: technological disruption, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and activist investors,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told AdExchanger at the Cannes Lions festival. “The first involves continuous experimentation,” he said, and WPP has certainly walked the talk on that front. Under Sorrell’s leadership, the company has invested in tech far more aggressively than […]
For Snap, there are benefits to being a latecomer to ad tech. The app, which entered the programmatic playing field last year when it launched APIs and self-serve tools that allow marketers to place automated buys on its platform, is avoiding many mistakes made by a predecessor that it’s often compared to: Facebook. “Snap has been […]
The in-housing trend continues to reshape agency and ad tech relationships. CPG giant Unilever announced on Wednesday that along with WPP it will invest $15 million in mobile creative management platform Celtra. The move aligns with Unilever CMO Keith Weed’s rather blunt approach to marketing strategy. “Get out of marketing if you’re not going to […]
Leo Burnett, one of the most iconic advertising agencies in the game, is evolving the way it thinks about creative. “I’ve been focused on infusing technology, data and analytics to make creative more relevant, personalized and effective,” said Andrew Swinand, CEO at Leo Burnett. For Swinand, who spent time on the media side as president […]
Oath is having its coming-out party in Cannes. On Monday, AOL executives officially launched Oath at the advertising festival in Cannes, following the close of Verizon’s $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo last week. The execs also clarified lingering questions about how it will integrate assets from AOL and Yahoo into Oath’s pending ad tech […]
Programmatic and data-driven creative will likely be a buzzworthy topic at the 2017 Cannes Lions festival. Programmatic creative has progressed since last year, thanks to the maturation of machine learning and standards released by the IAB for dynamic content ads that makes it easier to customize ads for audiences and publisher sites. But media and […]
Three years after dissolving its VivaKi trading desk, Publicis Groupe has launched a data-driven center of excellence for its media agencies. The group, called Precision, formed about two years after VivaKi melted down its Audience on Demand trading desk and redistributed its staff to operating agencies. The new centralized group will offer support to programmatic […]
Broadcast radio is getting a data-driven boost with the help of Nielsen Marketing Cloud. Nielsen announced on Wednesday that broadcast radio network Westwood One will use Nielsen’s data-management platform (DMP) to segment audiences across its broadcast and digital inventory. That makes Nielsen Marketing Cloud the first exclusively audio DMP on the market, said Damian Garbaccio, […]
Dentsu Aegis Network said Thursday that its media agency brands in the US will use Merkle’s PII-based M1 platform for centralized data planning and activation. Dentsu’s media agencies have been piloting M1 for a few months, and it’s now officially being deployed as a self-service tool at Carat, iProspect and 360i, as well as at […]
Snap’s acquisition of location data company Placed, announced Monday, shows the platform is getting serious about attribution. While Snap has robust location data on its 166 million daily active users, Placed’s ID graph, which collects geodata on a panel of 150 million opted-in mobile devices, broadens those insights to people who don’t use Snap and […]
Marketers spend a lot of time and money testing their digital campaigns across channels, creative formats and audience targets. Marketing research and development platform Quantifi aims to ease that strain by automating the process. The company launched on Tuesday with $2 million from a number of strategic investors including High Alpha Capital, a VC firm […]
The podcast universe is developing fast, and NPR is shaping it. NPR, which began making podcasts over a decade ago, has a US audience of 11.4 million listeners and 80 million downloads monthly across 36 podcast shows. It’s been ranked consecutively for 13 months as the top podcast publisher by measurement firm Podtrac. “Even before […]
WPP’s media buying unit GroupM said Thursday that it merged media agencies MEC and Maxus to cut costs, since the two agencies have overlapping capabilities. The yet-to-be-named firm drives a billion dollars in revenue and will be led by MEC CEO Tim Castree. “Combining [MEC and Maxus] gives us scale but also flexibility to invest […]
Major publishers like Hearst, Vice, Time Inc., The New York Times and Meredith have either built or acquired agency capabilities and content studios over the past few years to create synergies between their content and the brands that monetize it. Being owned by a publisher allows digital agencies to tap editorial expertise for engaging creative […]
The past couple of years have been tough for CPGs, as consumers move toward fresher and healthier items and ecommerce disrupts the way goods are sold. The Q1 earnings season has only reinforced the trend. At Kellogg’s and Kraft-Heinz, net sales fell about 3% year over year in Q1 2017. Mondelez grew organically a meager […]
Clients want more insight into the complicated process of programmatic buying. So French holding company Havas on Tuesday launched the Client Trading Solution (CTS), a customizable dashboard that allows advertisers to track their programmatic campaigns and fees across different demand-side platforms (DSPs) and exchanges in real time. So far, Spanish telco Telefónica is using the […]
Maxus CEO Lindsay Pattison has a big job ahead of her as chief transformation officer at GroupM: transforming WPP’s mammoth services business into modern and agile solutions provider for clients. In her new role, which she assumed on Thursday, Pattison will lead change initiatives across WPP to ensure it remains relevant to clients as they […]
The Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) inquisition against nontransparent programmatic media buying rages on. The ANA on Thursday released a study illuminating the often murky fees taken throughout the messy programmatic supply chain, from advertiser, to agency, to trading desk, demand-side platform (DSP), exchange, supply-side platform (SSP) and publisher. Read the study. The survey, conducted […]
Here’s the crisis in the agency world, as Kepler Group CEO Rick Greenberg sees it: “Digital media is still run in an oversimplified fashion.” Agencies often don’t take full advantage of their ad tech because the targeting for their campaigns isn’t granular enough, Greenberg said. “When you aggregate too many targeting variables, it’s really hard […]
Programmatic native is cleaning up its act. Content recommendation engines like Taboola and Outbrain provide an easy incremental revenue stream for publishers. But their cost-per-click model, which favors performance over quality, enables traffic arbitrage and creates brand safety risks. To account for those concerns, native exchanges like TripleLift, Connatix, Nativo and Sharethrough have leveraged direct […]
Snapchat may have disappointed investors in its first-ever earnings disclosure on Wednesday, but agencies aren’t ready to bail just yet. Snap missed the mark on both user and revenue growth as it continued to fend off relentless copycatting from Facebook and Instagram. But because the platform pulls in the highest engagement rates among millennials, it’s […]
French media conglomerate Vivendi on Thursday made a bid for the Bolloré Group’s 60% stake in agency holding company Havas at roughly 9.25 euros per share. The offer values the Bolloré Group’s stake at 2.36 billion euros. Read the release. Yannick Bolloré is CEO of Havas and the son of Vincent Bolloré, chairman and CEO […]
Last week, IPG Mediabrands global CEO Henry Tajer announced he will leave the company and head back to Australia for personal reasons. But executive politics and challenges facing media agencies also factored into his departure. Tajer, a 10-year veteran of IPG Mediabrands, became global head in 2015 after a successful stint as CEO of Mediabrands […]
Snap reported earnings for the first time on Wednesday, and based on the results, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg must be feeling pretty smug. Snap reported Q1 revenue of $150 million, a 286% increase from this time last year but below the expected $158 million. Net losses totaled $2.2 billion. Daily active users (DAUs) for the […]
