Initiative

AI marketing company Cognitiv updated its contextual targeting tool, ContextGPT, to provide brands with more relevant and nuanced content.

As the industry evolves, media agencies are no longer set up to work with their clients in a financially viable way. In reviews, client procurement departments still evaluate their agencies against historical cost benchmarks, such as commissions or number of full-time employees (FTE) charged by its previous agency. But that often precludes the agency from […]

Big agencies’ inability to quickly change their legacy structures has eroded their value to clients. “We are too passive,” said Nick Brien, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network in North America, on stage at the 4A’s Decisions 2020 conference in Washington, DC on Monday. “We are slow to change. We’re too incremental. We have legacy structures […]

  TV buying is becoming more data-driven, even on the linear side. But buyers and sellers are questioning whether audience targeting works on the medium. “’Should TV be bought on an audience basis?’ is still an outstanding question,” Donna Speciale, president of ad sales at Turner, said Wednesday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference in New […]

The ongoing media reviews have created inroads for agencies to use creative, informed by data, as a strategy to win new business. In a bid to take advantage of this growing opportunity, Initiative, the IPG Mediabrands-owned agency, hired Nick Childs as its first-ever global chief creative officer on Sept. 1. “As a lot of media […]

The ad sector’s creative apparatus has a good deal of work cut out before it wraps its head around data to the extent media and digital agencies have. But to hear some tell it, analytics – or “insights” as many prefer – has begun to permeate campaign ideation. In Cannes last week, AdExchanger talked with […]

Nick Pahade is a veteran of digital agencies and ad startups, having founded or led Beyond Interactive, Denuo (Publicis), GSI Commerce, and Traffiq. Two months ago, he was named North America CEO for global media planner Initiative, which is owned by Interpublic Group. This week at the Cannes Lions ad festival, he spoke with AdExchanger […]

Bret Leece knows analytics. He got his start in 1995 creating econometric time series models to track and predict Sprint’s call center activity, before moving on to CRM and database marketing roles including at MarketShare. Currently Initiative’s EVP of performance analytics, he has a long view of where advertising performance has been and where it’s […]