Brand safety has become such a hot-button issue for advertisers that competing holding companies and agencies are ditching their territorial natures to fight it together. The 4As said Tuesday it has formed an industry consortium called the Advertiser Protection Bureau (APB), a cross-holding company and agency effort to better share knowledge around brand safety incidents […]
The past year was a tough one for agency holding companies. WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, IPG, Dentsu Aegis Network and Havas posted little to no growth in 2017. The agency business has been in flux for years, but 2017 offered the “perfect storm” of challenges that caused growth to stutter, said Greg Paull, principal analyst […]
“There are three big issues: technological disruption, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and activist investors,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told AdExchanger at the Cannes Lions festival. “The first involves continuous experimentation,” he said, and WPP has certainly walked the talk on that front. Under Sorrell’s leadership, the company has invested in tech far more aggressively than […]
Accenture, which has crept steadily onto holding company turf in recent years, has tapped Universal McCann, part of IPG, as its global media agency of record. WPP’s MEC was the incumbent. UM will handle cross-channel media buying across all lines of business at Accenture, including its agency brand, Accenture Interactive. Programmatic buys for Accenture will […]
Times Square was abuzz this week with talk of the elusive “agency of the future.” “Agencies will need to be far more empathic, far nimbler and more agile,” said Paul Gunning, CEO of DDB Chicago, on Tuesday at Advertising Week in New York City. “The holding company getting rid of silos is the foundation of […]
When Dentsu Aegis Network bought programmatic shop Accordant Media on Thursday, it was the Japanese holding company’s second major tech acquisition in less than a month, following the majority stake Dentsu took in CRM agency Merkle. “Programmatic is the way of working in the future and we’ll continue to invest in people who have the […]
Hours after the United Kingdom voted to quit the European Union, its most prominent ad industry employee is feeling… well, in his own words: “Very disappointed, but the electorate has spoken.” WPP Group CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told AdExchanger in a statement that “The resulting uncertainty, which will be considerable, will obviously slow decision-making and […]
Many agree there’s a great need for holding companies to integrate their media buying structure “horizontally”: to collaborate rather than compete across groups. Is it possible the obstacle lies not with the agency, but with the client? Executives from Dentsu Aegis, IPG, Havas, Omnicom and WPP took up the question at the Modern Marketing Summit […]
The Trade Desk has grown faster than probably any other DSP in recent years, as founder and CEO Jeff Green sought to capitalize on what he saw as strategic errors by rivals. “We saw that most of the DSPs had created channel conflicts for themselves,” said Green, a reference to some other DSPs’ media company […]
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 […]
