The more things change, the more they stay the same. The old adage applies to the new media landscape, where sweeping technology changes have scattered US audiences across new devices but has also greatly increased the amount of content consumed per year. The average American adult watches 5 hours and 24 minutes per day of […]
GroupM said Wednesday that Wavemaker global CEO Tim Castree has been named CEO of GroupM North America. Castree does not yet have a successor and will stay on in an advisory role at Wavemaker until a replacement is named. Castree’s big task will be to get GroupM back to growth in North America, its slowest […]
Even before WPP’s restructuring announcement Tuesday, the holding company had already merged digital agency VML with creative agency Young & Rubicam, and digital agency Wunderman with creative agency J. Walter Thompson. It’s still unclear what that means for GroupM’s four large media agencies. WPP CEO Mark Read didn’t comment directly about the media buying arm, […]
The new WPP, as CEO Mark Read called it during a Tuesday morning investor call in London, will return to organic growth by reducing headcount by about 2.5%, consolidating agencies and investing strategically in technology. WPP expects to deliver annual savings of $346 million by the end of 2021 thanks to this strategy. Restructuring costs […]
Keith Weed announced Thursday that he will step down from his role as Unilever’s chief marketing and communications officer in April. Weed has worked for Unilever for more than 35 years, the last eight as Unilever’s top marketer. His departure, which he announced in a tweet, has been planned for more than a year. It […]
What do advertisers outside of China need to know about Tencent? For one, it’s got much more going on than just WeChat – the Tencent app with the most name recognition outside of China. Second, WeChat is more than just a social platform: It’s embedded into the fabric of Chinese life. “Global brands have heard about […]
From 7 pm to 7:45 pm on Tuesday, publishers saw mysterious yellow 300×250 ads blanket their sites. Paying CPMs north of $20, the yellow square ad elbowed out other buyers with its big spending. Hourly revenue spiked many times over publishers’ normal averages. Then it disappeared. Turns out, the yellow ad appeared across the United […]
Will privacy legislation be the death of the third-party data ecosystem? Not according to the IAB Data Center of Excellence. Marketers are on tap to spend $19.2 billion on third-party audience data as well as technology and solutions to manage, process and analyze all that data, according to a joint IAB/Winterberry Group report released Wednesday. […]
Forrester tried to acquire SiriusDecisions, a B2B market research and analytics firm, five years ago, so closing a $245 million deal for the company last week felt like a natural step. But SiriusDecisions was the third acquisition in the past half-year for Forrester, which historically buys a company every three years or so, said founder […]
After weeks of speculation, S4 Capital said Tuesday it will merge with programmatic agency MightyHive. S4, launched by former WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, will pay $150 million for MightyHive. The agency’s revenues grew 129% at a compound annual growth rate between 2015 and 2017. Revenues for the first nine months of 2018 were $40.7 million, […]
“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view. Today’s column is written by Belinda J. Smith, global head of media at Electronic Arts. Over the past year or so we’ve seen every indication that in-housing will have as much staying power as “The Year of Mobile” – which enjoyed its […]
Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital said Monday it is in advanced talks to acquire programmatic marketing agency MightyHive, five months after it paid $350 million for digital production agency MediaMonks. MightyHive is valued at up to $200 million and brings in $25 million in annual revenue, according to Financial Times. Sorrell launched S4 in April after […]
GroupM and Magna both released global advertising spend forecasts Monday with very different findings. GroupM lowered its ad spend growth forecast for this year from 4.5% to 4.3%, reaching $543 billion. Magna, which measured 2018 in retrospect, said global ad spend grew by a record 7.2% this year to $552 billion. GroupM revised its 2019 […]
AT&T’s ad tech unit Xandr has big hopes for TV advertising, but the company said Thursday during an analyst call that it’s also going to be heavily involved in powering online ads. “You will continue to see Xandr media business outpace the television market in 2019,” Xandr CEO Brian Lesser told investors. “And now what […]
LiveRamp, dataxu and Index Exchange launched the first commercial proof of concept for the Advertising ID Consortium on Thursday. The product places LiveRamp’s IdentityLink directly in the bidstream, skipping the cookie syncs typically required for a DSP and SSP to match against LiveRamp in a campaign. Additionally, Bill Simmons, dataxu’s co-founder and CTO, is joining […]
“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 Simon Harris, head of programmatic activation at Dentsu Aegis Network. Header bidding has made it common for a buyer to see the same impression several times, as most publishers now offer […]
The Big Story is a breezy podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The Wild West days of ad tech are over. Any new startup that wants to stick around must show it can be a business first, […]
When people learned in 2014 that ad fraud was a $6.3 billion problem, many asked why no one had been arrested for stealing all that money from brands. Four years later, that day has arrived. “Finally, somebody gets arrested for this,” said Neal Richter, chief architect of Rakuten Marketing Platform. The FBI charged eight people […]
Until now, if an ad fraud scam was uncovered, the criminals behind it would usually fade back into the shadows with impunity, and shortly thereafter, they’d be back at it again – the seemingly eternal game of Whac-A-Mole. This time, there’s accountability. Two global botnets, Methbot and 3ve, are no more, and there are real people […]
When Gap Inc. launched the men’s activewear label Hill City in September, it marked its first new brand in a decade, and its first-ever foray into digital-first territory. Hill City has some notable differences compared to other DTC companies – like corporate ownership and a running start with distribution in 50 Athleta stores (Gap’s activewear […]
AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. In the podcast studio this week, GCA Advisors managing director Josh Wepman talks about the changes afoot in television. Wepman has sold companies to Google, Snap, Yahoo, Pitney Bowes and Telstra, among others, and TV is his key strategic focus right now. “When you think about […]
Thanksgiving holiday shopping trends have shifted from surprising to predictable. At this point, the big news will be in some hypothetical, future November when ecommerce sales stop growing hand over fist. Ecommerce sales reached $18 billion combined for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, according to Adobe. Cyber Monday alone cleared about $8 billion, the […]
One year ago, Rubicon Project removed buyer fees from its platform, halving its take rate to 12.8%. The gutsy move occurred during a battle over take rates: Competitor AppNexus said its take rate stood at 8.5%, and its CEO called for a price war. Drastically cutting take rates forced Rubicon to use cash reserves to […]
WPP said Monday it will merge digital agency network Wunderman with storied creative agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT), forming a new entity called Wunderman Thompson. Wunderman Thompson will employ 20,000 people in 200 locations across 90 markets, according to Adweek. Wunderman’s newly minted global CEO Mel Edwards will lead the agency, while JWT global CEO […]
How Questionable Data-Sharing Practices And A Healthy Dose Of Hubris Helped Bring Down One Of The Most Well-Known Players In Ad Tech The Rocket Fuel brand is dead and buried, the founders long gone, its tech sold off to Sizmek for a song and the code completely rewritten. An ad tech unicorn that courted top […]
Thanksgiving and watching football on Thanksgiving are American traditions. But this year will be the first celebration of what you might call Ticketmaster’s football Thanks-for-giving-us-your-business day. The ticket-sales company has secured the exclusive ticketing rights for the NFL and transitioned the league to digital-only tickets this year. Now Ticketmaster is spiking the football – which, […]
Radio giant iHeartMedia said Monday it will acquire programmatic radio platform Jelli. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. iHeartMedia has been working with Jelli since 2015 to power its private marketplace, SoundPoint, which represents programmatic inventory on its 850 broadcast radio stations. Jelli also powers Katz Expressway, the independent programmatic marketplace run by radio […]
The IAB Europe’s GDPR Transparency and Consent Framework – which many ad tech companies now depend on to pass user consent strings – could be on shaky legal ground. On Nov. 9, France’s data protection authority, the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (the CNIL), issued a warning against a small French ad tech company called […]
Everyone wants to talk about over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) right now, but they’re often confused for one another. They’re also used interchangeably by many marketers, brands, and sometimes, by the most erudite reporters. With all the TLAs (three letter acronyms) we love to employ in this industry, we thought it’d be a good […]
The publisher tech startup Blockthrough, which specializes in retrieving revenue lost to ad blocking, acquired its rival and category pioneer PageFair on Thursday. Terms were not disclosed. PageFair was one of the first startups offering technology for publishers to counteract ad blocking, either by circumventing the ad blocker or by creating new direct audience agreements, […]
