In an unusual partnership between agency and onboarder, DigitasLBi has teamed up with LiveRamp to sharpen and speed up the segmentation capabilities of its advanced analytics platform to drive more targeted campaigns. DigitasLBi said Thursday that it will leverage LiveRamp’s data connectivity services on IDIOM, its advanced analytics platform – still in the process of […]
Programmatic revenues from Omnicom’s trading desk, Accuen, grew $25 million YoY, the holding company noted Tuesday during its Q1 2016 earnings call. Notably, Accuen’s performance since 2014 has reliably shown YoY revenue growth of between $20 million and $40 million. Q1 2016 – $25M Q4 2015 – $45M Q3 2015 – $25M Q2 2015 – […]
More than a quarter of programmatic decisions are made by agencies for their advertisers – up from 20% since September. The revelation was presented by Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I.O conference in San Francisco on Thursday. The figures, which surprised Mahaney, show agencies make 27% of those decisions […]
Jonathan Hsia will discuss advertiser perceptions of ad tech on April 13 at PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. While ad tech capabilities have matured, marketers still need to catch up, said Jonathan Hsia, Mindshare North America’s head of digital investment. “It really is more a question of: What do marketers need to do to leverage ad tech in a […]
Deloitte Digital, which describes itself as a “digital creative consultancy,” has been hiring to offer better services around streaming media/entertainment businesses. Part of its growth over the last three years, from 1,000 people to about 7,000 today, was to staff up to accommodate new business opportunities like TV everywhere services as more TV companies go […]
Shaina Boone will discuss viewability, fraud and supply chain issues on April 14 at PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. Talking about fraud and viewability is one thing – but “actually managing it is an entire program,” said Shaina Boone, managing director of marketing sciences at OMD USA, where she helms the analytics practice. Managing advertiser expectations is […]
Accenture Interactive, the $2.9 billion digital and marketing services arm within the massive management consultancy, sees itself as a new breed of agency. Instead of taking a campaign-based approach, Accenture Interactive instead blends commerce, design and analytics to make marketing more experiential. “If you looked at the old KPIs for grocery and retail, they wanted […]
A handful of ad tech employees who started out at agencies are now returning to senior-level agency roles. And they’re bringing a particularly valuable blend of skills with them. According to Accuen CEO Megan Pagliuca, that initial agency experience is key. “There’s a big con of hiring people from ad tech [without an agency background] […]
Almighty, an independent digital agency in Boston, revealed on Wednesday the launch of a division called Almighty(X), designed to help clients evaluate their technology stacks from budget and optimization standpoints. The goal is to provide more transparency in the agency-client relationship. Almighty(X) will be headed up by Rob Griffin, a former senior executive at French media giant […]
Automated guaranteed has been the slowest part of programmatic to get off the ground. But one of its biggest proponents is the Dentsu Aegis-owned trading desk Amnet, which sees the technology as key to making programmatic a central part of everything an agency does. From January to December last year, budgets going to automated guaranteed […]
It’s been a year since Publicis Groupe forced a big transition of its programmatic operation that many saw as the future of data-driven agency services: It decentralized its seven-year-old trading desk, VivaKi AOD, and reassigned its employees to new jobs within the holding company’s media agencies. Today, its grand experiment is seriously strained by a […]
Merkle on Wednesday revealed its purchase of UK-based Comet Global Consulting, a provider of CRM and marketing solutions. It did not disclose terms. This acquisition marks the third and largest for Merkle within nine months, growing its European employee base to more than 500. The deal comes at the end of Merkle’s five-year global growth […]
The Association of National Advertisers and the 4As might be mending fences, but transparency – or the lack thereof – is still an issue. It’s why programmatic agency Anagram decided to start setting its clients up with their own direct platform contracts, rather than stepping in as the middleman. Anagram founder Adam Cahill calls it “radical […]
Devices and hardware will come and go. “Which is why the future is absolutely about mobility,” said Lisa Donohue, CEO of Publicis Groupe’s Starcom. “Mobility and understanding a consumer’s movements, the decisions they make and why they make them.” It’s a philosophy Starcom applies to “new establishment” clients like Airbnb and to more “classic” brands […]
There’s an old ad industry saw that goes, “a little Procter & Gamble budget in everyone’s paycheck.” Well, now there’s a half billion less. The CPG giant told investors on the company’s earnings call in January that the company had succeeded in cutting $370 million in marketing costs in 2015, and that it expected to […]
Performance marketing agency Merkle’s acquisition Tuesday of London-based data marketing agency DBG for undisclosed terms marks another step toward international growth, specifically in the UK. While DBG offers similar capabilities as Merkle around marketing databases, campaign management, data platforms and CDI, it gives Merkle key insight into UK data knowledge, platforms and technology. “A big […]
IBM’s purchase of three agencies in six days on behalf of its in-house agency Interactive Experience (iX) is uncharacteristic since iX hasn’t been acquisitive in its almost two-decade history. The first purchase, last Thursday, was Resource/Ammirati, known for brand building. IBM then acquired digital agency Aperto on Tuesday and design agency Ecx.io on Wednesday; both […]
To date, IBM’s internal digital agency Interactive Experience (iX) has flown under the radar, through quiet, organic growth – reaching a global headcount of 10,000 employees. That changed Thursday when IBM iX – not to be confused with IBM’s consulting unit Global Services – revealed its first-ever acquisition: the digital/creative agency Resource/Ammirati, which has 300 […]
As programmatic commands a greater share of marketing budgets, trading desk knowledge will expand throughout organizations. Accuen expects its trading desk to decentralize when programmatic reaches 70% to 80% of media budgets industrywide, according to Megan Pagliuca, who became the CEO of Accuen after leaving Merkle late last year. That will happen in the next […]
Influencer marketing found its stride in 2015, and some expect this year will bring it a big step closer to becoming a mature marketing channel. Influencer marketing has established itself as a media category, but “it will become even more important if done in an ordered and manageable way,” said Rob Norman, chief digital officer […]
Merkle has China on the mind. The CRM and performance marketing agency revealed Thursday it had entered into a reseller agreement with dominant Chinese search engine Baidu. Although the deal is not necessarily exclusive, it is the first of its kind for Baidu with a US partner agency. As a result of the deal, Merkle […]
GroupM hopes its purchase of digital/media agency Essence on Wednesday (for undisclosed terms) will add a whole lot of Google expertise into WPP’s cluster of media agencies. After all, the formerly independent Essence is Google’s digital agency of record. “Google, as you might imagine, is keen on its global digital agency using the full set […]
It might surprise those who think of Merkle as only a CRM agency to hear it has a media practice that employs 400. Although the division has taken four years to construct, Merkle has over the past several months recruited a handful of media agency heavyweights (including ex-Razorfish COO Michael Komasinski) to help support its […]
Programmatic continues to help more than hurt the agency conglomerates, or at least it has for the largest US holding company Omnicom Group. Omnicom continues to see notable growth from its trading desk, although the growth rate has slowed. The company’s Accuen exchange-buying unit delivered an incremental $25 million in spending growth during the third […]
Television may be a little late to the programmatic party, but addressable TV promises to blend performance efficiencies with proven sales lift – and that’s changing the face of the TV buy. Media agencies were historically agents of the upper funnel, but data and technology are redefining the awareness and consideration phase. “A client used […]
Mobile agency Fetch is in serious growth mode. It’s been just shy of a year since Fetch became part of the Dentsu Aegis Network, which reportedly shelled out around $48 million in November 2014 to buy the London-based agency. Although Fetch still maintains its global headquarters in London, CEO and co-founder James Connelly said that […]
When most people think about experiential advertising – like sponsoring a music festival or finding a way to showcase Coca-Cola into the Olympics without actually buying an ad – few consider it data-driven. Lucien Boyer, global president and CEO of Havas Sports & Entertainment for the past seven years, has focused exclusively on these unblockable […]
Pirated content and ad fraud are like a nefarious version of peanut butter and jelly – but there’s not lot of awareness in the industry about their connection. “The people who create pirate sites are the same ones who perpetrate clickbot fraud – they’re the ones who spread malware and create the armies of bots that generate […]
Global media powerhouse Carat has lowered its 2015 global ad spending forecast from 4.6% to 4.0%, reaching $529 billion, in the wake of a similar ad sector demotion from rival agency group Zenith Optimedia. “That’s the new normal [for growth],” said Jonathan Barnard, Zenith’s UK-based head of forecasting. Barnard cited volatility in the eurozone, slowdowns […]
As agencies face increasing pressure to produce more content with shrinking budgets, some are streamlining production with in-house capabilities. At least, that’s what WPP had in mind when in 2009 it partnered with Hogarth Worldwide, a global marketing implementation firm. As a sister organization to WPP, Hogarth acts as a production and global distribution resource […]
