Marketers

Speaking Thursday at the ANA Media Conference, Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard was pleased that Facebook and Google had agreed to independent MRC audits, but he emphasized that the audits are only the first steps toward improving the media supply chain. “It’s not enough to accept [audit pledges] until the audits are […]

Marla Kaplowitz, named president and CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) on Friday, has made mending fences with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) a top priority. Addressing the rift between the two organizations – and, more broadly, between marketers and agencies themselves – over agency transparency has “got to happen this […]

Nielsen Catalina Solutions’ (NCS) original value prop focused on connecting media consumption with in-store sales for CPG brands. But in the past two years, NCS has moved beyond attribution and into building programmatic audience segments. Programmatic targeting is already almost 25% of NCS’ business, with a revenue goal this year between $20 million and $25 […]

Product placements aren’t new, but with the rise of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services – and a reduction in cable networks’ commercial loads – branded TV content is primed to take off. That said, it’s hard to credit a sale of a bucket of KFC chicken to Jimmy Kimmel peddling it on his late-night show, so one company […]

Since iCrossing entered the market as a search agency in 1998, digital spend has expanded to social, display and mobile, all of which are table stakes. As a result, iCrossing expanded into a full-service agency, eventually getting acquired by Hearst in 2010. Since then, it’s snagged AOR accounts for clients like Bayer, Church and Dwight and […]

Pinterest introduced its first search ad offering Wednesday, almost seven years after the company launched. “Now we believe we’re at a place where we understand how people are leveraging the platform and using it to plan their lives,” said Michael Akkerman, head of Pinterest’s marketing partners program. The new search functionality comes via Kenshoo, an […]

P&G isn’t going to give digital a free pass anymore. Its agencies, ad tech partners and publishers must enable viewability and third-party measurement and root out fraud. Contracts must be transparent. And if they don’t? P&G will pull media spend. According to its 2016 financial report, P&G spent $7.2 billion on advertising last year. “We […]

Advertisers will focus less on quantity and more on quality over the next five years. That shift in how they spend their marketing budgets will change the role programmatic – and media agencies – play in the marketing ecosystem. “The days of buying volume are going to reach a point of obsolescence,” said Forrester principal […]

Make no mistake about it: Accenture Interactive is here to eat the agency’s lunch. “Our clients asked us to get in this business,” said Glen Hartman, Accenture Interactive managing director for North America, at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview on Wednesday. Clients are starting to look for “nontraditional service providers” that can tie multiple threads together. That […]

CES has always been about TV, and 2017 was no exception. Displays got a whole lot sharper and devices got a whole lot thinner. But the TV advancements most relevant to marketers and advertisers revolve not around the hardware but the software, which enables addressable ads and better measurement. To be fair, CES isn’t exactly […]

GroupM exec John Montgomery has been to CES for nearly a decade, but this is his first year attending as EVP of global brand safety. So what’s a brand safety guy doing at a consumer electronics show? “To understand brand safety, I need to understand where media is going, particularly new data innovations,” he said. […]

Jim Butler, president of the Dentsu Aegis digital agency Isobar US, is ready to hit the CES showroom floor even though, at the time of this interview, it hadn’t opened yet. It’s his first pilgrimage to CES, and much of what will be displayed at the Las Vegas Convention Center falls into both personal and […]

Advertising trade groups are seizing the political moment in a bid to dismantle the Federal Communications Commission’s recently passed broadband consumer privacy laws. With the commission on the cusp of a Republican majority – Chairman Tom Wheeler has said he’ll step down on inauguration day – the writing could be on the wall for the FCC’s […]

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which officially kicks off Thursday, is fundamentally a hardware show. It’s a sprawl of new toys that consumers will either really want (drones!) or want not at all (3-D TVs!). “One needs to be careful about CES, as there are a lot of things on display and aren’t relevant for […]

Has performance-based pay finally arrived for agencies? Traditionally, marketing services firms were paid on a set scope of billable hours worked by each employee on an account. But a growing number of advertisers are pushing for more tangible, ROI-based remuneration. The biggest recent example is McDonald’s. The quick-serve advertiser’s RFP process specified that agency compensation […]

Boxed, a bulk shopping startup that competes with Costco and Sam’s Club, wants to woo a younger demographic of shoppers to its version of the wholesale club. The three-year-old company is on a hiring spree and expects revenues to exceed $100 million this year. Now Boxed is dabbling in brand marketing for the first time […]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed a stringent set of online privacy regulations on Thursday. The law, expected to go into effect next year, expands the FCC’s mandate over internet service providers (ISPs), which will soon have to obtain individual consent to use data drawn from a subscriber’s activity, such as web browsing, app usage […]

Just weeks after acquiring HookLogic for $250 million in an all-cash deal, Criteo is pushing into paid search. Criteo played primarily in performance display until now, but its Predictive Search product marks its first major move into a different part of the marketing funnel. It’s a $33.2 billion market that’s dominated by Google, whose Shopping […]

For a CMO, convincing the CEO or CRO to put more money toward marketing is a tall order. Because it’s difficult for marketing to prove ROI, large organizations often squeeze the budget. That’s changing. When Denise Karkos became CMO of TD Ameritrade, she told her board upfront that she planned to invest in data, analytics […]

Johnson & Johnson saw the writing on the wall when it began marketing in a digital world. The 130-year-old CPG giant was born and raised in what Alison Lewis, CMO of J&J Consumer Brands, called a “right-handed world.” “We were dominated by brick-and-mortar, Mom was the CEO of the household, big players used size and […]

“We need CMOs to turn up the leadership dial,” Association of National Advertisers CEO Bob Liodice told attendees during his opening keynote at the Masters of Marketing conference Thursday. Liodice rattled off a litany of problems familiar to the contemporary marketer, including fraud, viewability, privacy, talent shortages and poor creative, that have withered the effectiveness […]

Adidas-owned Reebok is in a unique position, both as a challenger to Nike and as a target of other challenger sports and apparel brands like Under Armour. As such, it invests heavily and consistently in content – despite its fluctuating ad spend over the years. Because content must generate larger, measurable performance results, Reebok bets the […]

In a bid to capitalize on digital ad growth in China, AdRoll has recruited a new adviser with lots of experience in the country and is developing a go-to-market strategy. Peter Cheng is Tencent’s former GM for ad platforms and products, as well as the former COO of AdChina (which sold to Alibaba in January […]

Sometimes good marketing means less marketing, according to Belkin CMO Kieran Hannon. “Wherever we’re able to provide a superior experience backed by data, we do,” said Kieran Hannon, CMO for Belkin. “Otherwise, we’re more about minimizing our interaction with people so they can get on with what they need to do.” Each of Belkin’s three […]

After many years in leadership roles at media agencies, Jordan Bitterman will move to the brand and media side as chief marketing officer of The Weather Co., the IBM-owned company said Wednesday. Bitterman brings extensive knowledge of how media companies can drive efficiencies in the data-driven milieu. He said The Weather Co. is in a […]

Agencies that don’t comply with the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ (4As) Transparency Guiding Principles of Conduct (TGPC) will risk losing their memberships. Under the new rule, which the agency trade body blogged about on Monday, anyone (from marketers to executives from other agencies) who finds an agency is not compliant with the 4As’ guidelines […]

Eight trade associations, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab, the 4As and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), have teamed up to develop cross-platform standards for video ad delivery. Their goal, according to Alanna Gombert, SVP of technology and ad operations for the IAB and GM of the IAB Tech Lab, is to […]

HotelTonight, the five-year-old booking app, spends all its marketing budget on mobile. For CMO Ray Elias, who joined nine weeks ago after a decade at StubHub, being mobile-only gives HotelTonight an edge over its desktop-first competitors in the online travel agency space. “We exist in an elite group of customer experiences that really only work […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Damian Garbaccio, executive vice president at Nielsen Marketing Cloud. We all know that consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies spend a lot on advertising. In the US alone, CPG and consumer […]

Consumer packaged goods companies are going direct-to-consumer, spurred by a desire for greater data governance and less reliance on third-party retailers. As a result, the principles behind shopper marketing, which traditionally centers on in-store promotions, are blurring with brand marketing, which focuses on building brand affinity. “We’ve seen shopper marketing move from this singular approach […]