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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Cycle Media, which launched Monday, hopes to break the mold of the traditional media holding company. The company is the result of a merger between Cycle, a social content and influencer network formed in 2016, and Laundry Service, a marketing agency with deep roots in social, founded by Stein in 2011 and acquired by sports marketing […]
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 […]
Before he tried on agency life, Babs Rangaiah was a bit of a star on the CPG circuit. After more than a decade driving media innovation for global CPG Unilever, a shakeup in Unilever’s marketing org last spring led Rangaiah agency-side. Now, as a partner leading global marketing solutions for IBM’s in-house agency, Interactive Experience […]
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 […]
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 […]
WPP cut its growth target for this year from 3% to 2%, citing a tepid economy and lack of new business wins, the company said on its Q1 earnings call on Thursday. Q1 organic growth came in below expectations at 0.8%. WPP is feeling the pricing pressure from CPGs as they struggle to compete with […]
On IPG’s Q1 2017 earnings call Friday, CEO Michael Roth echoed past statements that he doesn’t see management consultancies as a threat, despite their encroachment onto agency turf. “There is a great deal being written about the convergence that is bringing adjacent industries into each other’s orbit,” he said. “The increased competition that we all read […]
Accenture, which has crept steadily onto holding company turf in recent years, has tapped Universal McCann, part of IPG, as its global media agency of record. WPP’s MEC was the incumbent. UM will handle cross-channel media buying across all lines of business at Accenture, including its agency brand, Accenture Interactive. Programmatic buys for Accenture will […]
Growth at Accuen was flat last quarter as more clients moved away from nondisclosed programmatic buying methods, where agencies procure inventory and resell it to clients with an unrevealed markup, said Omnicom CEO John Wren on the company’s first-quarter earnings call on Tuesday. “A lot of clients have shifted to wanting these services on a […]
MDC Partners’ media agency, Assembly, has forged a strategic deal with Fox’s true[X], whose products give consumers options in their video ad breaks. The deal also gives true[X] more access to Assembly’s brand roster, like Hotels.com. Assembly and true[X] extended their partnership after collaborating on engagement-based ads for clients like the anti-tobacco nonprofit Truth. While […]
The agency-client relationship is ailing, and fixing what’s broken will involve deep organizational changes on both sides of the table – starting with the marketer. “The brand has to start with itself,” said Brigitte Majewski, Forrester analyst and author of a report released Thursday calling for a new agency operating model. “If you aren’t asking […]
Trading desk CEOs want to change the narrative around programmatic to one of quality rather than cost efficiency. For Amnet co-CEO Art Muldoon, who joined Dentsu Aegis Network when it acquired his programmatic shop, Accordant Media, in August, the ability to tap into a network of creative and data assets helps push that narrative to […]
Amanda Richman, president of activation and investment at Publicis Groupe’s Starcom, used to mostly negotiate rates with TV networks. Today, she helps clients navigate spend on walled gardens, vet ad tech partners and use data to make smarter media buys. “There’s a deep relationship with investment in media inventory and investment from a tech and […]
Both Publicis Groupe’s Zenith and IPG’s Magna attribute growth in online advertising to programmatic targeting and data in their global ad spend forecasts released this week. That momentum will help digital ad spend overtake TV this year for the first time. Magna pegged overall ad spend at $187 billion this year, a 3.7% increase over […]
Media agency employees sitting for Facebook’s Blueprint certification exam may have flashbacks of their experiences taking the SATs. The exam, which certifies agency employees on every Facebook native ad product within its Ads Manager, Business Manager and Power Editor tools, is a multiple-hour affair that requires weeks of prep. Test-takers must roll up their sleeves […]
Targeting a running watch to a broad group like “runners” on Facebook doesn’t cut it anymore. Bold Worldwide, a social media agency with a roster of sports-focused clients, advocates that its brands – including running and cycling watch Polar – massively increase the amount of content they create. With more versions of ads, they can […]
Cadreon’s global president Arun Kumar has become IPG Mediabrands’ first-ever chief data and marketing technology officer. In addition to overseeing all data, technology and analytics assets within Mediabrands, he will still head up Cadreon. Among Kumar’s top priorities is scaling IPG Mediabrands’ data stack across the unit and IPG at large. “We’ve gotten pretty good […]
