Mindshare

Sports sponsorships can play well for small brands; Perplexity was first to AI search ads, but advertisers waited for Google; and GroupM officially rebrands to WPP Media.

NBC, Fubo, Disney-owned ESPN and ad agency Mindshare weigh in on the creative flexibility offered on CTV and whether sports streamers really reach incremental audiences.

2024’s most popular guest columns offer a snapshot of an industry in flux – and one that’s grown cynical due to repeated promises of unrealized change.

By implementing the anti-MFA playbook detailed in the ANA’s November report, brands were able to reduce the portion of their programmatic budgets going to made-for-advertising sites to about 1%.

If you’re using retail media or commerce marketing for the bottom of the funnel only, then you’re missing out on major opportunities.

GroupM’s integration with Google allows its Choreograph campaign planning and insights platform to compile data derived from Google – including signals from Search, YouTube and Google Analytics – in one interface.

We asked the experts: Which channels are you leaning into — and where are you pulling back – during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday season?

Old El Paso launched an awareness campaign to reach new customers in the UK with personalized ad creative promoting “Fajita Friday” (because why stop at Taco Tuesday?). Specifically, the General Mills-owned brand saw an opportunity to reach incremental new households with more individualized messaging, said Aditi Hilgers, head of meals for General Mills in the UK, which is partnering with WPP-owned agency Mindshare and search intelligence company Captify on the campaign.

Marketers who are curious about the bias in their campaign targeting can put their media plans to the test by running them through a free open-source toolkit built by IBM. The idea behind using the tool, dubbed the Advertising Toolkit for AI Fairness 360, is to stay a step ahead of regulation by making sure the ad industry roots out bias in campaign planning, especially the invisible kind that can be amplified by a reliance on data segments (even a marketer’s first-party data) and black box algorithms.

Advertisers understandably seek to protect themselves from fraud, awkward placements and inadvertently funding misinformation, but in doing so rely on overzealous or blunt brand-safety filters that steer them away from news and diverse content.

  American adults streamed almost 142 billion hours of content during the week of May 11, up roughly 43% from a year ago, according to Nielsen. And The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green predicted during the company’s Q1 earnings call that reach on CTV will “rival and even surpass” linear TV in the near future. But […]

For better or for worse, the country is starting to reopen. But that doesn’t mean advertisers are simply flipping their media plans back on. As advertisers return to the market, they’re thinking critically about how consumer media and shopping habits have changed, and how strategies that worked in the past won’t necessarily work in the […]

As audiences erode on linear TV, supply is shrinking and pricing is going up on scarcity value. Advertisers have already shifted a significant amount of money out of linear TV as audiences flock to digital. According to Zenith, digital will make up more than half of ad spend globally for the first time in 2021, […]

The Cannes Lions, the annual advertiser confab celebrating creativity on the French Riviera, is all about the glitz and glamour. But this year, beyond the branded yachts and magnum-sized bottles of rose, proving that creativity drove business performance will be a key ingredient in winning awards as marketers struggle for growth. Creatively, the focus will […]

Ad buyers are turning to a tool called curated marketplaces to get more reach for their private marketplaces. Curated marketplaces let buyers set up a group deal ID across several publishers based on likeminded attributes. Supply side platform SpotX first developed them in 2015, and they’re gaining more traction with buyers. Of the 65% of its […]

Pixability, a platform that originated as a tool for identifying high-performing YouTube channels, is putting its money where its mouth is. The company will refund advertisers for views that run on YouTube inventory that is not brand-safe or fails to meet an advertiser’s agreed-upon brand safety terms, either through cash or TV-like “make-goods.” Although Pixability […]

As the first homegrown WPP agency, GroupM’s Mindshare has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. “We were born in Asia when Madison Avenue and the high street of London told us you can’t have a media independent,” said Mindshare’s US CEO, Adam Gerhart. “That provocateur and internal upstart mentality is pervasive in everything we do.” The […]

While tapping into purchases helps advertisers close the loop around the actual conversion, the use cases for purchase data have evolved far beyond measurement. The use of transactional data is maturing in media activation, as is the ability to commingle it with other data sources like behavioral, location and even panels in channels like addressable […]

Mindshare Chief Data Officer Rolf Olsen and Oleg Korenfeld, EVP of ad tech and platforms at Spark Foundry, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC I/O New York conference on Oct. 25-26 in a presentation titled “Data Accuracy and the DMP.” Partnering with a data management platform doesn’t count as a data strategy, said Rolf Olsen, […]

Mindshare launched a service on Thursday designed to let programmatic planners automate targeting, which lets them create lots of segments quickly. The system, called ANNA, is still in beta and uses AppNexus’ demand-side platform (DSP) and a new API from dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform Jivox. “Physically, you wouldn’t have time to sit in a […]

Agencies are adding new wrinkles to their media-planning processes to make sure campaigns are relevant and informed by expertise across many marketing disciplines. “More timely, adaptive media plans for clients make it easier to respond to things that drive business results,” said Joe Maceda, head of Mindshare’s Invention Studio in North America. And as holding […]

As agencies struggle to transform under continued fee pressure from clients, executives are reassessing whether descending on the French Riviera for a week of endless rosé and parties on yachts sends the right message about the state of the industry. “If clients are using zero-based budgeting, let’s use it for Cannes,” WPP CEO Sir Martin […]

As consumer attention continues to fragment, creative agencies are relying more on real-time insights to craft personalized messages and optimize them on the fly. That requires bringing media and creative services closer together. While smaller indie shops are bringing media execution in-house to make messaging more relevant, holding companies experiment with cross-discipline and cross-agency teams. […]

Agencies are straining to recruit and retain data-driven talent. Prospects with a strong background in statistical analysis and data mining – the second most popular skill on LinkedIn as of January – aren’t necessarily looking to work at a media agency. And it’s hard for agencies to retain employees due to a business culture that […]

This is the first installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world. Nazanin Jazayeri is a translator. As director of advanced analytics at Mindshare, she’s part of a team that bridges product developers, media planners and buyers by interpreting the massive streams of data that […]

When General Mills launched Tiny Toast in June, its first new cereal brand in more than 15 years, the company also launched its first completely digital marketing campaign. Because General Mills was targeting millennials, it stayed away from traditional TV and instead placed short video clips across YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram. In the two months […]

About one year ago, GroupM quietly introduced a new structure designed to consolidate its real-time ad buying capabilities across programmatic, social, search and mobile. Called Connect, the new group appeared to be the WPP-owned media agency network’s answer to the growing need for programmatic decentralization of programmatic buying. We have seen that decentralization play out across […]

More than a quarter of programmatic decisions are made by agencies for their advertisers – up from 20% since September. The revelation was presented by Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I.O conference in San Francisco on Thursday. The figures, which surprised Mahaney, show agencies make 27% of those decisions […]

Jonathan Hsia will discuss advertiser perceptions of ad tech on April 13 at PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. While ad tech capabilities have matured, marketers still need to catch up, said Jonathan Hsia, Mindshare North America’s head of digital investment. “It really is more a question of: What do marketers need to do to leverage ad tech in a […]

Campaign briefs are increasingly filled with demands for advanced creative versioning, forcing agencies into closer collaboration with ad tech providers. It’s one of the reasons why Mindshare partnered with dynamic creative optimization platform Spongecell last fall to support a Mazda Rebels campaign, featuring a series of short films profiling engineers and innovators on the cusp of […]