Marketers

For large CPG brands like Conagra that typically generate the most awareness through mass reach, hyperpersonalized video creative hasn’t always been their top consideration. But that is changing. “We’re seeing more personalized creative and ad versioning from CPG brands [that] might not own any data from the consumer up until the actual purchase point, because […]

New York Life is in the insurance business – but the brand also has to protect itself. Marketers today have several metrics to juggle in their digital buys: Fraud, viewability and context top the list. But it’s not enough to monitor these metrics; brands need to take action. Natan Cohen, New York Life’s corporate VP of […]

Activist investor Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management won a recount vote for a board seat at Procter & Gamble. In the wake of the early October vote, the initial vote count had Peltz down by a narrow margin, but that now appears to be wrong. In a statement shared with AdExchanger late Wednesday, the […]

Do ads for STD self-testing kits count as sexual content? If medical and recreational marijuana use is legal in California, why can’t a cannabis advertiser geotarget Californians over the age of 21 on the large social platforms? These are the gray areas that certain categories of advertisers have to navigate on a daily basis, and […]

Nestle Canada is exercising more control over its programmatic and first-party data practices, said Melissa Savage, the food and drink company’s programmatic activation manager in the country. But unlike within an ad agency holding company, which tries to centralize programmatic knowledge, brand transformation must occur regionally. Take the company’s plan to ramp up native video […]

Nelson Peltz, founding partner of Trian Fund Management, narrowly lost a bid to win a board seat with Procter & Gamble on Tuesday, following a vote at the company’s shareholder meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. Peltz and his Trian fund are known for waging aggressive proxy battles to obtain public company board positions and then using […]

Criteo on Friday released a suite of products, including audience matching and customer prospecting, as well as a new policy beginning in the fourth quarter to give buyers and DSPs impression-level transparency into every unit of inventory. At the heart of Criteo’s string of product releases this year is a newfound willingness among retailers and […]

Despite a year marred by brand safety blunders, measurement errors and targeting missteps, marketers are mending ties with Facebook and Google as they place blame for the industry’s many issues on its ad tech underbelly. “Just 25% of CMOs’ digital media investment reaches target audiences,” said ANA CEO Bob Liodice during his opening remarks at […]

Amazon is winning a growing share of CPG media dollars, and its September announcement that it would open an office in New York City to house a major expansion of its advertising platform business means the competition will only heat up. It comes as CPG brands pulling back on digital media undercut global agencies, marketing […]

DoubleTree takes a cookie-first approach to marketing – the kind you can eat. But when it comes to data collection, the Hilton-owned hotel chain, known for handing out warm chocolate chip cookies to guests as they’re checking in, is interested in deeper data than just demographics and browsing history. “It doesn’t matter to me whether […]

Women’s fashion brand Johnny Was wanted to do influencer marketing, but paying an Instagram star or blogger to wear its clothes didn’t feel right for the brand. “What we’re looking for is authenticity,” said Rob Trauber, CEO of Johnny Was. “There are very few people we would pay to influence our products because it’s not […]

Demographic targeting and behavioral targeting have both been around since internet advertising’s early days, but big CPG brands now say behavioral targeting drives the biggest results online. Instead of trying to hit in-target demos, they’re looking for more creative ways to connect with consumers based on purchase history or interests. At Dmexco, Johnson & Johnson CMO […]

Six ad industry trade groups have called for Apple to rethink an upcoming change to Safari that will unilaterally block some first-party cookies. Apple’s Safari browser started blocking third-party cookies by default earlier this summer with the release of its Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a machine learning-based feature that discourages cross-site user tracking. But an extension […]

In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, acknowledged that some marketers are “feeling uneasy” about viewability, online ad metrics and brand safety. She outlined updates meant to address that discomfort. First, Facebook intends to give advertisers more control over where their ads are running by tightening guidelines on the […]

Both Publicis Groupe’s Zenith and WPP’s GroupM have lowered their 2017 ad spend forecasts, due to cost-cutting clients and slow economic growth in global markets. Zenith projects 4% growth for the global ad market by the end of the year, down from its original forecast of 4.2%. GroupM revised its 4.4% forecast down to 3%, […]

The rollups continue. Fluent, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cogint (formerly IDI), is combining with BlueFocus International, itself the wholly owned subsidiary of a publicly traded Chinese public relations services company, to create a new entity, name TBD. The deal, announced Thursday, is being shepherded by investment bank Petsky Prunier and will blend performance marketing […]

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands are threatening steep investment pullbacks if higher standards aren’t met on marketing measurement and transparency. And those Fortune 500 CPGs, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Mondelez, Nestlé and Kraft, seem to be holding to their lines in the sand. In the past few weeks, holding companies like IPG, WPP and […]

While Google claimed advertisers are returning to YouTube, new data from Standard Media Index reveals advertisers really did tighten their purse strings after the video platform’s brand safety scare. YouTube ad spend declined about 26% YoY in Q2, while ad spend spread across digital video platforms such as Hulu or network-owned video services, in comparison, […]

Every vendor in the supply chain takes its cut before a CPM goes to work, and that includes a fee for brand safety protection. It’s a small price to pay, said John Montgomery, global EVP of brand safety at GroupM, running somewhere between two and 10 cents per thousand impressions for brand safety protection when […]

Media agencies know how to find the right person at the right time, thanks to the growth of programmatic. But they’re still trying to pin down how to send the right message. “You want the media to recognize where they were, but you also want to recognize where they were in the conversation,” said Zimm […]

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) said Wednesday it will partner with publisher trade body Digital Content Next (DCN) to encourage marketers to join DCN’s TrustX cooperative exchange, which promises access to viewable, brand-safe and premium inventory from DCN-member publishers. “The marketplace TrustX and DCN built aligns with the digital supply chain priorities that the […]

As NBCUniversal’s portfolio has evolved, so has its sales pitch to brand marketers. When NBCU merged its linear and digital sales teams in 2015 and combined all its content groups, its client partnerships team assumed a greater role within its sales organization. That team, led by client partnerships EVP Ali Tarrant, became the broadcaster’s conduit […]

The largest advertisers in the world are still dead set on cutting advertising costs and reducing agency fees. On earnings call after earnings call in the past week, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies sent a clear message to the ad industry: The belt is tightening. On Thursday, Procter & Gamble CEO Jon Moeller told investors […]

Nielsen’s specialty is media measurement, not mar tech. But a slew of new Nielsen Marketing Cloud wins may help change that perception. Despite the presence of data management platforms from Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle, Nielsen Marketing Cloud just had its largest-ever quarter for new DMP client wins since it acquired eXelate in 2015. CPG marketers […]

The result of NBCUniversal’s 2017-2018 upfront: Bookings volume increased by 8% to nearly $6.5 billion, according to the company. Although total volume growth was slightly softer than last year’s 10% increase, NBCU clocked positive momentum across its portfolio. NBCU commanded high single-digit CPM increases across all inventory, including late night and sports. (Those figures don’t […]

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 […]

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 […]

As the marketing chief at a sprawling enterprise software company, SAP CMO Maggie Chan Jones has unique insight into marketer pain points. At the top of the list: fragmentation. “There are thousands of marketing technology providers across different marketing functions,” Jones said. “One of the biggest headaches a marketer has is trying to sell one […]

Despite the tech company takeover of Cannes, the ad industry’s current infatuation – artificial intelligence – confined its appearances to panels and presentations. But a few AI aspirations (“deployments” is too strong a word in many cases) are worth calling out. Tencent The Chinese maker of the popular WeChat application has a machine learning agenda […]

Twitter’s ad tech fortunes haven’t been great. Most recently, it took its 479-million-dollar acquisition TellApart for a long walk behind the barn. However, Twitter isn’t giving up on ad tech, at least not as an investor, said co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey at a Wednesday panel hosted by Omnicom’s OMD in Cannes. “We’re definitely not […]