Like its competitors, Omnicom expects steep declines in the second quarter as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. “In the preliminary forecasts we looked at, the second quarter was the most traumatic,” said CEO John Wren on the company’s Q1 2020 earnings call Tuesday. Omnicom also declined to give guidance for the rest of the year […]
Is COVID-19 the beginning of the end for upfronts? Buyers and sellers have long questioned the necessity of flashy presentations, especially as the broadcast TV business declines. Disney chairman Bob Iger recently predicted an end to the antiquated upfront process altogether as a result of the economic crisis. Ad buyers have been pushing to […]
The podcast industry has been on a crazy ride for the past month and a half. As people spend more time at home, listeners are still gravitating toward their favorite programs, but they’re engaging at different times of day and through home devices such as smart speakers. In the initial days of the pandemic, podcast […]
So much chips and salsa is slowly growing stale, beer and soda going flat. If you think the average American TV viewer misses live sports, consider the desperation for brands that target sports advertising. The NFL Draft is seeing clearly enough, with a surge of demand from advertisers that are itching for the return of […]
Google will require advertisers to submit personal identification or business documents that prove who they are and what country they operate in, the company announced on Thursday. The process will start in the United States and then expand globally, but it will take a few years before the new business verification program is complete, according […]
Holding companies are being hit hard by the pandemic, and IPG is no exception. The company reported Wednesday that Q1 2020 net organic growth was 0.3% YoY to $1.97 billion, compared to 6.4% growth during the same period a year ago. Revenue was negatively impacted by account losses and the coronavirus pandemic in certain regions, […]
Welcome to ad tech. Everything’s a disaster. But Troels Jensen, former CEO of the Danish fin tech company Itiviti AB, who was brought on as Adform’s chief in April, is sticking to the plan. “The long game hasn’t changed,” Jensen said. “But we do have time now to think about how we’re hitting the ground […]
This article is sponsored by Verizon Media. Up until recently, brands looking to break through the heavily saturated digital advertising ecosystem adopted third-party cookies as the anchor for behavioral and interest-based targeting. Even two years ago, spend on third-party data was still rapidly increasing – by 17.5% to $19.2 billion, according to a 2018 study […]
The coronavirus pandemic brought everyone online, leading to a surge in traffic. But it’s expensive to process all the programmatic ad requests that come with that traffic. Plus, CPMs are falling industrywide. So two weeks ago, The Trade Desk asked exchanges to stop sending duplicate bid requests for the same ad impression. The request initially […]
The mobile gaming category – a more than $60 billion-a-year market – is thriving amid the brewing economic crisis. But unlike other publishers and platforms experiencing engagement spikes without the corresponding uptick in ad revenue, mobile game publishers are seeing massive boosts across the board. Nearly every metric (other than CPMs and cost per install or […]
Brands launching campaigns in response to the COVID-19 crisis must tread carefully. Consumers largely don’t want to hear about irrelevant products or buy nonessential items during a recession. They can also see right through brands with COVID-19 responses that don’t offer something relevant. That leaves brands balancing the need to distribute important information without coming […]
While the increased digital media supply caused by the pandemic has prompted CPMs to plummet – dropping 20% in March, according to ad analytics company Adomik – programmatic auctions are still healthy. Certainly bidding in March declined overall, said Francois de Laigue, Adomik’s VP of sales and strategic partnerships. The average dropped from 2.5 to […]
The Ad Council said Thursday it has launched a programmatic private marketplace (PMP) for public service announcements related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This initiative is its first major foray into donated programmatic media, though it has experimented with targeting audiences on social and specific publishers. The Ad Council coordinates public service advertising campaigns for a […]
Travel is the backbone for many business categories, including entertainment, events, hospitality and food and dining. But that backbone is broken right now, and may never fully recover. Rafat Ali, founder and CEO of the travel industry publishing company Skift, has his finger on the pulse of the travel industry. It was three years after the 9/11 attacks […]
This article is sponsored by Xandr. Given the events of the past month, few questions should remain about the importance of Connected TV (CTV) as an integral part of advertisers’ media plans. According to Nielsen, the AT&T TV Now streaming service saw an approximately 20% increase in total viewing time in the third week of […]
Brands that haven’t gone dark still need a steady flow of creative, but production shoots are on hold. So with everyone practicing social distancing, brands are repurposing stock assets and using influencers as content creators. “People are looking for any cost-effective solution that gets them high quality ads,” said Alex Collmer, CEO of creative automation […]
NBCUniversal opened more of its inventory to programmatic platforms on Monday, with a new product integration through FreeWheel and The Trade Desk. FreeWheel, a sister-company of Comcast’s NBCU, is coming out of beta with its “unified decisioning” platform, which operates an auction where programmatic demand is considered alongside direct-sold campaigns for OTT inventory and video […]
“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 Allison Schiff, senior editor at AdExchanger. It’s part of a series of perspectives from AdExchanger’s editorial team. The COVID-19 outbreak highlights a singular dilemma of a pandemic in the digital […]
This story has been updated to reflect Tuesday’s earnings call. Publicis Groupe said Monday it will cut the salaries of chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun and executive chairman of the supervisory board Maurice Lévy by 30% in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The company will also reduce compensation by 20% for management board members. For […]
Dentsu Aegis Network, the international arm of Japanese agency conglomerate Dentsu, will cut all employee salaries by 10% in response to the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Senior executives took a higher salary deduction, a Dentsu Aegis spokesperson said, but declined to specify how much. Dentsu Aegis Network employs about 45,000 people across 145 […]
Sir Martin Sorrell thinks the term “social distancing” could use a rebrand, since we’re actually communicating more than ever, albeit virtually. “I think social distancing is not the right way of putting it,” he says. “It’s physical distancing.” As founder and CEO of S4 Capital, Sir Martin is keeping an eye on his 2,500 employees […]
The sell-side ad tech company OpenX said in a note sent to clients Thursday it has added an insurance line to cover potential DSP payment defaults and warned publishers against working with supply chain intermediaries that won’t insure campaign spend. “Our strong advice to you is to only work with exchanges that can indemnify you […]
Forget client dinners, Thirsty Thursdays and team drinks. The advertising world is going all in on the Zoom happy hour. “I wasn’t too sure about Zoom Happy Hours at first. Did I really want another meeting on my calendar? But I soon learned how fun and relaxing they can be,” said Sara Badler, SVP of […]
Julie Binder left New York City last month for an Airbnb upstate, where she and her husband can get outside and wring excess energy from their two kids. But she doesn’t just have her own family to think about. Binder is VP of marketing for Maven Clinic, a telemedicine startup focused on pregnancy and women’s […]
This article is sponsored by Tatari. OTT viewing is on the rise. Once considered a supplementary source of TV content, streaming now accounts for nearly 30% of viewing – and growing. As publishers continue to move more of their content libraries to the advertising video on demand (AVOD) ecosystem, streaming ad impressions will become a […]
On Tuesday, PlaceIQ announced its acquisition of Toronto-based location data and measurement company Freckle IoT. Terms were not disclosed. Foot traffic may be way down during the pandemic, but consolidation in the location data space is heating up. The day before, Foursquare revealed merger plans with location data provider Factual less than a year after […]
Marketing and agency veteran Wendy Clark will become the global CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN), the company said on Monday. She is the first female CEO of a global agency network. She will start in September and report into Tim Andree, DAN’s global chairman, who took on the global CEO role after Jerry Buhlmann […]
Amazon has removed third-party vendors from its affiliate program. Starting at the beginning of this month, affiliate networks such as Skimlinks and Sovrn (which acquired VigLink) can no longer send traffic to Amazon and get a cut of transactions, according to sources at many affiliate networks and publishers. Removing third-party affiliate networks frees up significant […]
Todd Garland spent the past 12 years building BuySellAds into a programmatic mainstay, and a standout of the Boston ad tech scene. “The idea that you can wake up one day and wonder if it’s gone is terrifying,” he says. The questions of existential dread have mostly subsided, as people settle into their work-from-home routine. There are even […]
Really though, does a pharma company like Bayer even need to advertise during a global pandemic? Actually, yes, says Bayer’s head of media in North America Josh Palau. “Right now, consumers are so in need of the products we make that anything we can do to make sure we’re front and center to get what […]
