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.
Brian Wieser has never been busier – and that includes his time as an investment banker on Wall Street. “Every day is like learning 10 years of information,” he said. As GroupM’s global head of intelligence, Brian absorbs massive amounts of economic and governmental data surrounding the crisis and modeling out different scenarios. He drills […]
The art of the pitch has changed since the pandemic, with employees having to let go of body language, physical cues and handshakes as they reorient around video conferencing. While pitches got delayed thanks to the lockdown, now they’re back in full force. So not much has changed in terms of volume, but meetings […]
Roku isn’t immune to advertiser pullbacks during the pandemic. Platform revenue, which includes advertising, grew 73% year over year in Q1 and now represents almost two-thirds (73%) of Roku’s revenue. But campaign delays and cancelations increased in early March as stay-at-home orders were implemented, especially in hard-hit verticals such as travel, quick-serve restaurants, cinema and […]
Horizon Media said Thursday it has partnered with TransUnion to provide the people-based identity layer for its data platform, Blu. TransUnion’s deterministic identity graph covers all US adult individuals with privacy compliant, PII-based data spanning names, addresses, emails, mobile IDs and home IP addresses. Clients can append first- and third-party data sets to TransUnion’s identity […]
Anyone down for a road trip? Travel brands including Disney Resorts, Wyndham and Hilton are looking toward regional and local travel experiences as a way to generate some demand as the coronavirus plays out. “We’re retooling our approach to go-to-market … to be much more about local business and, in the beginning, drive to business,” […]
National broadcast and cable TV took a beating in Q1 as live sports and events were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ad revenues in the first quarter fell 5.4% YoY to $10.8 billion across broadcast, cable and syndicated programming, according to Standard Media Index, which measures TV ad revenues based on billings from the […]
When Xandr launched in 2018, it had a grand vision to be the data-driven platform and ad marketplace for the TV industry. But from the start, industry insiders were skeptical that plan would ever come to fruition, and few were surprised when Xandr announced last week it would fold into WarnerMedia. “We kind of thought […]
CEO and founder Lara Vandenberg had been planning to launch her new venture, Publicist, in mid-March. Then COVID-19 happened. But the idea behind the startup, an online platform that connects freelance marketing talent with brands and agencies, is doubly relevant in a rocky economic environment. Publicist launched on Tuesday. Vandenberg had been testing the platform […]
IPG CEO Michael Roth believes that post-pandemic, aspects of work-from-home life will definitely stick at agencies, and business travel policies will be dramatically changed. “Working from home has turned out to be fairly attractive,” he said. “It’s amazing how the world and commerce go on.” Overall, the tone from IPG clients is pretty erratic. Travel, […]
AT&T said Thursday it will combine TV ad tech division Xandr with WarnerMedia. Xandr Chief Business Officer Kirk McDonald will continue to lead the group and report into WarnerMedia Chief Revenue Officer Gerhard Zeiler. Zeiler reports to John Stankey, AT&T’s new CEO. “Xandr and WarnerMedia have always worked hand-in-hand to benefit our incredible advertising partners,” McDonald said in a statement. […]
WPP is slogging along with the rest of the agency market. Q1 like-for-like revenues were down 3.8% to $3.5 billion, the company said Wednesday. In North America, WPP’s largest market, like-for-like revenue was down 1.9% to roughly $1.2 billion. Grey, GroupM and VMLY&R all grew in the region, but revenues began to sag across the […]
TikTok on Tuesday said it has opened up its advertising API to Sprinklr as its first beta partner for video ad creation and management. Sprinklr is a full-service marketing platform that allows brands to buy, optimize and measure campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn. “Sprinklr is a partner for one of our […]
Like its competitors, Omnicom expects steep declines in the second quarter as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. “In the preliminary forecasts we looked at, the second quarter was the most traumatic,” said CEO John Wren on the company’s Q1 2020 earnings call Tuesday. Omnicom also declined to give guidance for the rest of the year […]
Is COVID-19 the beginning of the end for upfronts? Buyers and sellers have long questioned the necessity of flashy presentations, especially as the broadcast TV business declines. Disney chairman Bob Iger recently predicted an end to the antiquated upfront process altogether as a result of the economic crisis. Ad buyers have been pushing to […]
Despite COVID-19, Merkle didn’t think twice about promoting longtime executive Craig Dempster to global CEO last week, sticking to a succession plan two years in the making. “We built a strategy and worked to execute against it,” Dempster said. “We didn’t spend a lot of time debating it.” Dempster, previously president of Merkle in the […]
Mike Law, president of Dentsu Aegis Network’s Amplifi, is thinking hard about what entertainment advertising this year might look like, with production and live events on hold. “You want to have some understanding of what that supply actually is,” he says. “We don’t want to commoditize this to just being about, we’re buying something and […]
The podcast industry has been on a crazy ride for the past month and a half. As people spend more time at home, listeners are still gravitating toward their favorite programs, but they’re engaging at different times of day and through home devices such as smart speakers. In the initial days of the pandemic, podcast […]
Holding companies are being hit hard by the pandemic, and IPG is no exception. The company reported Wednesday that Q1 2020 net organic growth was 0.3% YoY to $1.97 billion, compared to 6.4% growth during the same period a year ago. Revenue was negatively impacted by account losses and the coronavirus pandemic in certain regions, […]
Snap is seeing a boost in user activity but a dip in advertiser spend in the wake of COVID-19. Daily active users reached 229 million in the first quarter, growing across all regions and on Android and iOS, the company announced Tuesday in its Q1 2020 earnings report. That represents a 20% increase from the […]
Even if digital video continues to grow through the COVID-19 crisis, growth rates will decline dramatically in the first half of 2020 from previous estimates, according to an eMarketer forecast released Friday. Digital video ad spend in the United States could potentially grow 7.8% during the first half of 2020 to $17 billion or, on […]
Brands launching campaigns in response to the COVID-19 crisis must tread carefully. Consumers largely don’t want to hear about irrelevant products or buy nonessential items during a recession. They can also see right through brands with COVID-19 responses that don’t offer something relevant. That leaves brands balancing the need to distribute important information without coming […]
At the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, DTC sleepwear brand Lunya had to furlough staffers, shut down retail stores and lay off part-time workers to break even through the downturn. “It was painful pivoting,” said Lunya’s Founder and CEO, Ashley Merrill. But there were bright spots. Lunya’s business is more than 80% ecommerce. The company […]
The Ad Council said Thursday it has launched a programmatic private marketplace (PMP) for public service announcements related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This initiative is its first major foray into donated programmatic media, though it has experimented with targeting audiences on social and specific publishers. The Ad Council coordinates public service advertising campaigns for a […]
Most marketers rely on household-level data to target audiences on connected TV. But homes are made up of multiple viewers with different preferences of what they like to watch and buy. So ad-supported streaming platform Tubi has teamed up with TransUnion to understand more about the people watching Tubi within a given home, the companies […]
Brands that haven’t gone dark still need a steady flow of creative, but production shoots are on hold. So with everyone practicing social distancing, brands are repurposing stock assets and using influencers as content creators. “People are looking for any cost-effective solution that gets them high quality ads,” said Alex Collmer, CEO of creative automation […]
This story has been updated to reflect Tuesday’s earnings call. Publicis Groupe said Monday it will cut the salaries of chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun and executive chairman of the supervisory board Maurice Lévy by 30% in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The company will also reduce compensation by 20% for management board members. For […]
Dentsu Aegis Network, the international arm of Japanese agency conglomerate Dentsu, will cut all employee salaries by 10% in response to the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Senior executives took a higher salary deduction, a Dentsu Aegis spokesperson said, but declined to specify how much. Dentsu Aegis Network employs about 45,000 people across 145 […]
Sir Martin Sorrell thinks the term “social distancing” could use a rebrand, since we’re actually communicating more than ever, albeit virtually. “I think social distancing is not the right way of putting it,” he says. “It’s physical distancing.” As founder and CEO of S4 Capital, Sir Martin is keeping an eye on his 2,500 employees […]
Coronavirus shelter-in-place orders have been in place for less than a month nationally, but consumer media habits are already massively changing. Streaming is the clear winner of social distancing. From March 9 to March 16, total streaming time grew to 156.1 billion minutes per day in the United States, compared to 127.6 billion minutes during […]
Social distancing has been so isolating, Alison Levin is already wishing she was back in a crowded Las Vegas hotel lobby. “I will never, ever complain again about CES being too crowded, too crazy, too overwhelming,” she said. “I actually miss CES, if you can believe that.” As VP of ad sales at Roku, Alison […]
