Acxiom’s new global CEO Chad Engelgau, appointed in early March, has a big job ahead of him, navigating clients through privacy laws and browser restrictions while integrating the business with parent company IPG. Engelgau, a 12-year Acxiom vet, reports directly to Arun Kumar, IPG’s chief technology and data officer. Acxiom sits alongside IPG’s programmatic unit […]
As clients tighten their belts and put accounts up for review, IPG media agency UM is focused on working strategically with data and analytics to grow clients’ businesses. That often means sitting out a major pitch if it’s clear the focus will be on cost cutting. “It goes against how agencies have been trained, which […]
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 […]
When they write the history of programmatic advertising, June 2014 will go down as the month when you needed two hands to count the number of big advertisers running their machine-driven media buys in-house. Procter & Gamble, American Express and Mondelez all recently joined the small club of brands embracing exchange-traded media (existing members include Kellogg’s, […]
Matt Seiler is remarkably on-message. For the past five years, the CEO of Interpublic Group’s media investment arm, Mediabrands, has banged the drum about the need for performance-based compensation for agencies. More recently he also took up the banner of automation, proposing to automate 50% of all media investment by the end of 2015. Interestingly, the automation rallying […]
On Tuesday at the Cannes Lions festival, leaders of the world’s four largest agency trading desks participated in a panel hosted by Rubicon Project. The discussion touched on a wide range of topics, including deal automation, technology investment and transparency. One macro takeaway is that the so-called trading desks resemble each other less than they used to. […]
GroupM made waves last week when Ari Bluman, chief digital investment officer for North America, said WPP Group’s media agencies will stop buying impressions in open auctions by the end of 2014. It turns out that’s not quite the case, as Brian Lesser, CEO of WPP’s Xaxis programmatic platform, made clear in public comments Tuesday […]
Automation Is Coming. In panel after panel at New York’s Advertising Week, publishers and agencies heaped hate on ad selling inefficiencies and delivered eulogies for their mutual adversary, the insertion order. The big questions: Which players will be first to seize the automation grail? And how long will it take? The holding company trading desks […]
The growth of online media has upended the way media is bought and sold, and the traditional ad agency model is under greater pressure than ever before. On one side of the office are established account planners and media buyers; on the other side sits the trading desk. A group of media agency heads kicked […]
The incursion of procurement on the marketing organization has caused no shortage of pain at agencies — and some startups as well. Among the concerns are that creative process will be devalued, client services squeezed, and strategic account planning shrunk to a line item by procurement agents who may lack marketing experience. But procurement exists […]
