Marketers

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 […]

The in-housing trend continues to reshape agency and ad tech relationships. CPG giant Unilever announced on Wednesday that along with WPP it will invest $15 million in mobile creative management platform Celtra. The move aligns with Unilever CMO Keith Weed’s rather blunt approach to marketing strategy. “Get out of marketing if you’re not going to […]

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 […]

It’s never a surprise to hear a high-end digital publisher lampoon the chaotic digital ad environment, but a sharp invective delivered yesterday by Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times, went beyond the usual sniping. “The world of digital advertising is a nightmarish joke,” he said during a panel hosted by Omnicom Group agency […]

There’s no more US presidential election or splashy Summer Olympics to prop up ad spend, but there is still growth to be found – especially on the mobile front. Although the growth rate in total ad spend has slowed, global mobile advertising is on pace to reach $110 billion this year, surpassing the $100 billion mark […]

The duopoly isn’t a duo when it comes to brand safety. The nuances of how their respective platforms operate mean that Facebook and Google face their own particular challenges to ensure brand safety. While the primary risk on YouTube is adjacency – ads appearing within or beside unsavory or questionable content – the personal nature of […]

The convergence of retail and ecommerce accelerated with a blockbuster Friday when it was announced that Amazon would buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion and Wal-Mart is snapping up ecommerce men’s clothing company Bonobos for $310 million. The market response to the deals was clear, particularly to Amazon’s 11-digit investment in a brick-and-mortar footprint. The […]

The 2017 Cannes Lions festival will be a first for MediaLink – though not in the sense of its presence. After all, the consultancy has been nearly ubiquitous for a number of years, with its sponsorships, the events it hosts like Daily Dose and Tech Talks and its suppers with an invite list full of […]

The slang phrase “I’ve got the receipts” has become a way to declare oneself the indisputable winner of an argument. Mobile shopping and analytics companies are learning to love the term as well. As image scanning and recognition software improves and the value of shopper data shoots up, a growing industry is devoted to accessing […]

Facebook made several overtures to openness on Wednesday with tools designed to give advertisers more control over where and how their ads appear across in-stream video on Facebook, Instant Articles and the Audience Network. “Advertisers want separate controls for inside the news feed environment and outside the news feed environment where ads are more deeply […]

Microsoft is beta testing a feature on its Bing search engine called Custom Audiences. It is designed to improve targeting by letting advertisers upload first-party files like CRM, purchase history and subscription data. If advertisers want to participate in the beta test, which has been underway for several months, advertisers must upload their data via […]

As Chemistry Communications’ clients created more content and more ambitious distribution plans, manually distributing that content to dozens of native and social platforms became untenable. Chemistry turned to Story by PulsePoint to make content distribution more cost- and time-efficient. The agency serves clients not only in content marketing, but through media buys across digital, video […]

By Allison Schiff and Zach Rodgers Less than a month after Procter & Gamble pulled its business from the platform, AudienceScience has ceased operations and gone into receivership. CEO Bill Gossman confirmed to AdExchanger on Thursday that AudienceScience has suspended worldwide operations. The news was first reported by Business Insider. Gossman declined to comment further on […]

Wait, there’s good news in the fight against ad fraud? The global monetary impact of ad fraud is expected to go down this year, the amount of mobile fraud happening in the ecosystem is much lower than feared and programmatic can be just as safe as direct-sold if buyers implement the right security measures. The […]

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 […]