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 […]
Buyers have decidedly mixed feelings about outstream video. Outstream formats are generally billed as a highly viewable alternative to scarce pre-roll because they’re embedded natively within article text and only play with the sound on when a consumer scrolls over. But some say outstream formats are difficult to discover within the exchange environment and, unsurprisingly, […]
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 – […]
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 […]
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 […]
Accuen has a new chief exec in the form of Megan Pagliuca, who comes to Omnicom Group’s trading desk after five years as general manager of digital media at Merkle. Pagliuca replaces Josh Jacobs, who helmed Accuen for nearly four years before leaving in March. Jacobs later turned up as president of Kik Services, where […]
Advertiser agency reviews took center stage during Omnicom’s Q2 call. Chief John Wren claimed the holding company is well positioned to weather the storm of media reviews, which have spurred the reevaluation of nearly $30 billion in media billings, according to estimates from Pivotal Research, because of Omnicom’s investments in its data-management platform, Annalect, and its programmatic […]
The longtime chief of Omnicom Group’s trading desk operation is leaving the company after nearly four years. Josh Jacobs will move on to unspecified pastures after his lengthy stint as global CEO of Accuen, where he helped grow Omnicom’s revenue from programmatic buying activities to $140 million in 2014. Reached by phone, Jacobs cited personal motives, […]
Omnicom Group’s programmatic buying discipline is still in its early days, the agency holding company emphasized during its Q3 2014 earnings call Tuesday. Programmatic buying constitutes just south of 2% of the company’s overall revenue, which reached $3.75 billion during the quarter, up 7.4% YoY. Most of the growth came from the North America region, […]
When they write the history of programmatic advertising, June 2014 will go down as the month when you needed two hands to count the number of big advertisers running their machine-driven media buys in-house. Procter & Gamble, American Express and Mondelez all recently joined the small club of brands embracing exchange-traded media (existing members include Kellogg’s, […]
On Tuesday at the Cannes Lions festival, leaders of the world’s four largest agency trading desks participated in a panel hosted by Rubicon Project. The discussion touched on a wide range of topics, including deal automation, technology investment and transparency. One macro takeaway is that the so-called trading desks resemble each other less than they used to. […]
Yet another data-management platform (DMP) has hit the market, at least for clients of Xaxis, WPP’s trading desk. The DMP, called Turbine, is the fruits of a $25 million investment. “The strategy we designed with Xaxis was to develop the pieces of the ad tech stack that gave the most competitive advantage to our clients,” […]
In a rare instance, Yahoo’s advertising products shared the limelight with the company’s consumer-facing ones when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer unveiled the company’s new ad products among other new offerings at the Consumer Electronics Show. Ad agency execs responded to Yahoo’s new ad products optimistically, however, some areas remain unclear, such as the development of […]
Omnicom Media Group’s trading desk, Accuen, has expanded its reach in the BRIC countries over the past year, and Jun Yuan, head of Accuen China, is navigating the unique challenges of the market. “As an agency, we started our RTB business in China last year, in April,” Yuan told AdExchanger, noting that the team is […]
Facebook’s barricade against Google held up a long time, but the wall had to fall: Google wanted the audience, marketers wanted the interoperability and Facebook wanted the demand. As we reported Friday, after giving Google the cold shoulder for more than a year, Facebook has decided to let DoubleClick Bid Manager bring its buying clout […]
Automation Is Coming. In panel after panel at New York’s Advertising Week, publishers and agencies heaped hate on ad selling inefficiencies and delivered eulogies for their mutual adversary, the insertion order. The big questions: Which players will be first to seize the automation grail? And how long will it take? The holding company trading desks […]
Here’s a far out option for Publicis and Omnicom as they attempt to fit their trading desk units together: Allow the smaller of the two, Omnicom’s Accuen, to continue as a standalone unit to manage clients that are competitive with Publicis’s Vivaki AOD. It would be the programmatic equivalent of a “conflict shop.” Last week, […]
As more advertising dollars pour into digital — and into agency trading desks — the exchange model’s momentum is likely to continue, no matter what level of integration comes from the merger of Publicis Groupe and Omnicom. Several executives who have served with the trading-desk side of the agency business and moved on said that […]
A merger of Omnicom Group and Publicis Groupe, the announcement of which is expected tomorrow, would result in a sprawling array of media agencies — and digital agencies that buy media — under one corporate roof. Omnicom’s big media agency brands are PHD, OMD, and Resolution Media. The Publicis side is sprawl-ier, consisting of Starcom […]
When Innovid CEO Zvika Netter co-founded the interactive video ad-serving company in 2006, he and his partners thought they would be the advance guard that would witness the demise of the pre-roll format. Innovid would replace that model with its customizable, targeted iRoll product, which allows viewers to hit a button within a digital video […]
On agency holding company Omnicom’s Q2 2013 earnings call today with Wall Street analysts, CEO John Wren and CFO Randall Weisenburger talked “programmatic strategy” as Omnicom’s net income for the most recent quarter increased 2.4% to $289.5 million from $282.7 million in Q2 of 2012. Read the earnings release (PDF). The holding company is looking to […]
Accuen, Omnicom Media Group’s trading desk, is officially opening trading desk operations across 20 markets in Latin America, giving the programmatic unit coverage in 60 countries. Much of the focus on the nations that comprise Central and South America has tended to revolve around the rise in consumer spending by Hispanics in the US and […]
Centro is bringing mobile and tablet ad inventory to its programmatic display ad serving system, called Brand Exchange. Publishers and agency trading desks AdExchanger spoke with view the offering as a way to further unlock the largely untapped local ad market. While mobile and tablet usage is growing, it’s still a mere fraction of the […]
Last week in Cannes, global leaders from the five biggest holding company trading desks convened for a panel discussion hosted by the Rubicon Project. The event took place on a rooftop against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea, while on the sidewalk below creatives scurried between beach parties and celeb-packed sessions at the Palais des […]
On yesterday’s Omnicom Q3 earnings call with CEO John Wren and CFO Randall J. Weisenburger, the ad agency’s digital media and analytics efforts through Annalect were highlighted…. -and that’s news in itself as trading desk-related business has rarely, if ever, made an appearance on a holding company earnings call. A trend to watch for the […]
Top dogs from the four dominant agency trading desks took the stage at the BB King Blues Club this morning. They hit on a bunch of topics new and old, including “education” fatigue, incursions made by DSPs, and making audience trading part of the “fabric” of all agencies. We’ll present this one lick-by-lick in honor […]
Agency trading desks are understandably eager to ramp up with the Facebook Exchange, which promises to broaden the reach and frequency of their programmatic buying efforts. But right after the FBX launch they weren’t equally able to use it — which has led to some hand wringing. WPP’s Xaxis had a direct seat, while Publicis’s Vivaki […]
With Facebook Exchange now three months old and officially out of beta, agencies have started to get a sense of the possibilities. In many cases they’re working through holding company trading desks to source audience and measure results on the fledgling marketplace. For Omnicom Group agencies, that means collaborating with Accuen. AdExchanger spoke with Josh […]
Omnicom Media Group (OMG) has announced that Josh Jacobs is the new President of Accuen, OMG’s answer to the agency trading desk trend that has swept through ad holding companies. Jacobs previous experience includes executive roles at Glam Media, where he was SVP of Ad Products and Marketing,, and Yahoo!, where he was VP & […]
