Two years ago, CRM and digital agency MRM//McCann was in a tough place. CEO Michael McLaren stepped down in May 2016, just two months after the agency lost Verizon’s digital account. But things turned around for MRM under global president and COO Kate MacNevin, who led the agency after McLaren’s departure and was promoted in […]
IPG’s $2.3 billion acquisition of Acxiom Marketing Solutions will transform the holding company’s services around its clients first-party data, said CEO Michael Roth said on the company’s Q3 earnings call Friday. “Acxiom is a world-class data asset,” he said. “As all companies look to make their first-party data work harder for them, and do so […]
IPG beat the holding company sector in Q2 with a strong organic net revenue YoY increase of 4.6% to $1.95 billion. Meanwhile, Omnicom and Publicis, which reported Q2 earnings last week, were down 0.9% and 2.1%, respectively. WPP has not reported Q2 earnings yet, but saw just 0.8% growth in Q1. IPG is raising its […]
Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer at IPG Mediabrands, will play a central role in integrating Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) into the holding company. The $2.3 billion acquisition, announced last week, gives IPG 1,600 data scientists, 200 product and technology specialists and first-party data on 2.2 billion global consumers. With AMS, IPG also […]
Times are changing at IPG. The holding company used to tout its neutrality around data and technology, with CEO Michael Roth using the phrase, “Why buy it when you can rent it?” But IPG’s $2.3 billion acquisition Monday of Acxiom Marketing Solutions changes all that. “What’s interesting is the world has changed,” Roth said on […]
Looks like Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) is an agency business after all. Interpublic Group said Monday it acquired Acxiom’s legacy data management business for $2.3 billion. AMS represents about three-quarters of Acxiom’s total revenue. Dennis Self and Rick Erwin will serve as co-presidents of AMS, which will remain a standalone unit aligned with IPG Mediabrands. […]
Consultants, in-housing and other negative talk about the agency business doesn’t bother IPG CEO Michael Roth. Rather, he sees it as a validation of his sector. “Clients are faced with disparate questions about how to navigate their dollars,” he said. “Our job is to help them do that.” IPG, which outperformed its peer set in […]
Last year, when Publicis Groupe said it would pull out of the Cannes Lions festival and awards show and reinvest the funds in an artificial intelligence platform, it sparked other holding companies to rethink their presences. Many had become concerned that the festival, which takes place every June along the beach in the south of […]
IPG Mediabrands is the latest agency network to bust silos to offer clients integrated solutions. The company said Wednesday it folded mobile agency Ansible and social agency Society into search agency Reprise. The combined agencies unified under the Reprise brand because it had the broadest footprint, with 60 offices in 40-plus markets, said Tim Ringel […]
After applying zero-based budgeting, CPGs are coming back, said IPG CEO Michael Roth during his company’s Q1 2018 earnings call Friday. Roth said CPGs are among the leading spenders for the quarter, with spend up by 10% across IPG. The growth was in part reflective of new business wins. “I’ll put it out there that […]
The blockchain-based advertising marketplace NYIAX on Friday announced new leadership appointments and a partnership with Rebel AI, another blockchain ad tech startup, as it looks to scale. Bill Wise, the CEO of Mediaocean, has gone from a NYIAX adviser to executive chairman of the board and Richard Bush, formerly the company product chief, is being […]
Facebook’s decision to shut off partner categories and turn down the spigot of data flowing into and out of its platform may be a necessary step to comply with GDPR and improve consumer privacy. But Facebook could’ve given partners more notice, rather than wait until two months before GDPR goes into effect, said Arun Kumar, […]
Erica Schmidt, Cadreon’s former EVP and managing director in North America, has been promoted to global CEO of the programmatic unit, the company said Wednesday. Schmidt takes over the role from Arun Kumar, chief marketing and data technology officer of IPG Mediabrands, who oversees the group’s central media, data and technology practice as well as […]
Advertisers want to market using the type of rich data provided by walled gardens – but that’s not possible on the open web. So the major holding companies have each developed data platforms to meet their clients’ needs. The question is: What’s the difference between their offerings? Publicis Groupe’s Spine, IPG’s AMP, WPP’s mPlatform, Dentsu […]
IPG purges its media plans of any ad tech companies that fail to provide value. “We’ve been talking to all of the ad tech companies we work with to make sure we’re optimizing for the effectiveness of media – and, frankly, if they can’t do that, we look for providers that can,” Michael Roth, chairman and […]
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 […]
For agencies, managing and optimizing campaigns across walled gardens is no easy task. Because Facebook, Google, Snap, Twitter and Amazon each have their own ways of defining audiences and processes for optimizing spend, buyers have to launch campaigns multiple times across each of them for every client, without getting consistent insight into what’s working and […]
One of the many pressures facing holding companies is increased competition from management and IT consultancies like Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and PricewaterhouseCoopers. While consulting firms may not be their biggest threat today, tomorrow could be another story. Holding companies tend to work from the bottom up, focusing on marketing initiatives like creative or media strategy […]
IPG took a hit in revenue last quarter as cost-cutting clients opted to forego agency-of-record (AOR) relationships in favor of working project by project. Unfortunately for IPG, that business model doesn’t provide a consistent revenue stream, as it gives clients the ability to stop their projects. “During the third quarter, several of our largest clients […]
Advertisers want measurement that assesses video brand safety. And the latest beneficiary of that need is OpenSlate, a video analytics company that can determine if ads were placed alongside appropriate video content on YouTube. The YouTube measurement partner said Thursday it’s bringing a new brand safety auditing tool for YouTube to market, partnering with independent […]
Spending cuts in the CPG sector had a negative impact on revenue growth at IPG this past half year. The holding company saw revenue decrease in both Q2 and H1 at -1.7% to $1.9 billion and -0.6% to $3.6 billion, respectively, the company announced on its earnings call Tuesday. Growth at Mediabrands and McCann Worldgroup […]
Last week, IPG Mediabrands global CEO Henry Tajer announced he will leave the company and head back to Australia for personal reasons. But executive politics and challenges facing media agencies also factored into his departure. Tajer, a 10-year veteran of IPG Mediabrands, became global head in 2015 after a successful stint as CEO of Mediabrands […]
On IPG’s Q1 2017 earnings call Friday, CEO Michael Roth echoed past statements that he doesn’t see management consultancies as a threat, despite their encroachment onto agency turf. “There is a great deal being written about the convergence that is bringing adjacent industries into each other’s orbit,” he said. “The increased competition that we all read […]
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 […]
Both Publicis Groupe’s Zenith and IPG’s Magna attribute growth in online advertising to programmatic targeting and data in their global ad spend forecasts released this week. That momentum will help digital ad spend overtake TV this year for the first time. Magna pegged overall ad spend at $187 billion this year, a 3.7% increase over […]
Cadreon’s global president Arun Kumar has become IPG Mediabrands’ first-ever chief data and marketing technology officer. In addition to overseeing all data, technology and analytics assets within Mediabrands, he will still head up Cadreon. Among Kumar’s top priorities is scaling IPG Mediabrands’ data stack across the unit and IPG at large. “We’ve gotten pretty good […]
Erica Schmidt, managing director of North America for Cadreon, will speak about the state of programmatic and advanced TV at Programmatic IO on April 5 in San Francisco. The times, they are a-changing for traditional TV planners. Advertisers and agencies increasingly expect to buy TV, over-the-top (OTT) and mobile on a converged basis. And many want to […]
On its Q4 and full-year 2016 earnings call on Friday, IPG said it will invest in data and analytics for its global media management unit, Mediabrands, rather than bolting on an acquired solution. “We believe [Mediabrands] will become the data stack and platform that will service all of our clients,” said CEO Michael Roth. Roth […]
IPG Mediabrands has rolled content-creation arm Mediabrands Publishing into social media agency Society. Thursday’s merger will tie content creation closer to distribution and targeting across platforms. “You can’t just push content organically anymore,” said Rob Bernstein, managing director at Society. “You need two bookends: smart targeting and really good messaging. It’s not about taking a […]
Holding company trading desks this year are putting the focus on data and the ability to identify a customer across screens and platforms. That focus made owning data mission critical, and it’s shifted the focus away from programmatic as a silo and toward data management and activation across the board. As a result, “trading desk” […]
