Like its competitors, Omnicom expects steep declines in the second quarter as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. “In the preliminary forecasts we looked at, the second quarter was the most traumatic,” said CEO John Wren on the company’s Q1 2020 earnings call Tuesday. Omnicom also declined to give guidance for the rest of the year […]
Is COVID-19 the beginning of the end for upfronts? Buyers and sellers have long questioned the necessity of flashy presentations, especially as the broadcast TV business declines. Disney chairman Bob Iger recently predicted an end to the antiquated upfront process altogether as a result of the economic crisis. Ad buyers have been pushing to […]
Bowing to pressure from agency holding companies, Ascential has canceled the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for 2020. The ad industry’s largest annual event was postponed on March 18 from its regular timing in late June to late October 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The festival will now resume in June 2021, when […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. How To Finnish The Job In Finland, social media influencers join jobs like doctors, bus drivers and grocery store workers as “critical operators” who continue working during a crisis. It seems like a strange designation (especially in the United States, where some influencers have […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Subscription Overload? The amount of time consumers spend with media increased by one hour and 24 minutes between 2018 and 2019 to almost 12 hours per day – and that time continues to fragment across media channels as new content offerings hit the market, […]
Last decade saw a spate of data broker acquisitions by agency holding companies. But are these deals too focused on owning data, rather than using it to derive insights? “You have to look at broad groups of data to understand consumption,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. Rather than purchase a data broker, Omnicom […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Welcome To The Jungle Safari introduced a new private browsing mode that disables the now-common tactic among news companies of blocking incognito traffic, which they do because readers use private browsing to avoid paywalls. “This will lead to a hard paywall for all readers […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Rebate Redux Media agencies are paying settlements to clients as a result of contract audits sparked by the ANA’s 2016 transparency report, AdAge reports. Nearly 100 audits have taken place, but it’s not clear which clients or agencies are involved or if any money […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Plaintiff Engagement Remember Facebook’s video metrics mess? That situation led to a class action lawsuit, in which ad agencies alleged that Facebook inflated video engagement. And now, a proposed settlement would have Facebook pay $40 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The money would […]
Agency holding companies have spent $12 billion on data assets over the past five years but have yet to successfully deploy those assets at their creative agencies, according to a Forrester report released Monday. “It’s still very much a media proposition,” said Jay Pattisall, Forrester analyst and author of the report. “[Creative] seems to be […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. I Spy A study from Princeton University and the University of Chicago revealed the extent of ad tracking on OTT platforms like Roku and Amazon Fire TV, as well as the lack of controls to manage trackers. According to the study, 89% of channels […]
Two days after LinkedIn announced its Audience Engagement API, Omnicom has released a product built around it – an analytics tool called “Professional Audiences.” Omnicom released its B2B analytics tool Thursday, and it’s designed to help creative, business development and media teams generate insights for campaigns or pitches, said Slavi Samardzija, global CEO of Annalect, […]
The agency holding companies all face the same external struggles – new competition, slowing growth and the need for new skills. But they’re taking different paths to confront these challenges. Traditionally, holding companies followed the same playbook: growth by acquisition to amass the scale that gave them clout across major clients. But the shift to […]
Content is increasingly available across platforms and devices, but most media agencies still take a channel-based approach to planning. Linear and digital planners not only operate in silos, but the former use demographic data as their source of truth while the latter use behavioral data, creating a divide in both how agencies plan media and […]
Omnicom does not intend to buy a data company, even after Publicis Groupe bought Epsilon ($4.4 billion), IPG bought Acxiom ($3.2 billion) and Dentsu Aegis bought Merkle ($1.5 billion). Omnicom steadfastly believes that owning a data company would compromise its neutrality when serving advertisers. “Our systems have always been open and unbiased,” CEO John Wren […]
To centralize or not to centralize? That is the question holding companies have wrestled with since the advent of programmatic buying a decade ago. While Publicis Media and GroupM have broken up or reassembled their trading desks, others like IPG have kept that expertise at the center. Enter Omnicom, which said Friday it’s taking the […]
Another executive with a data and technology background is taking a big leadership role at Omnicom. Erin Matts, former North American CEO of Annalect, was named US CEO of Hearts & Science on Tuesday. Matts will succeed Scott Hagedorn, who was promoted to CEO of Omnicom Media Group on Thursday. Omnicom has not yet named […]
At agencies, data-driven talent is rising to the very top. Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn was named CEO of Omnicom Media Group (OMG) Thursday after 15 years with the company. Hagedorn succeeds Page Thompson, who will retire after 40 years at Omnicom. Omnicom has not yet named a replacement for Hagedorn at Hearts & […]
After 25 years at BBDO, John Osborn jumped to the media side as the US CEO of OMD last year. He joined the media agency at a time when it was trying to bring content closer to media, and parent Omnicom was encouraging more collaboration among its agencies. “The work we’re doing creatively has to be […]
After stagnant growth in 2017, holding companies are getting rid of assets that aren’t related to their core focus on digital transformation, programmatic, data and technology. Omnicom, Publicis Groupe and WPP have significantly pruned their portfolios this quarter. IPG and Havas, on the other hand, have disposed of smaller and less strategic agencies in the […]
Omnicom said Thursday it had acquired Credera, a small management and technology consulting firm with offices in Denver, Dallas and Houston. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Credera works with Fortune 500 companies including Southwest Airlines, Chili’s and The Container Store to build consumer tech platforms, integrate mar tech systems and consult on organizing […]
Omnicom is shedding nonstrategic assets to invest in data, technology and analytics. That strategy was made clear by management on the company’s Q2 and H1 earnings call Tuesday, when Omnicom reported organic growth in North America was down 0.9% for Q2 and 0.5% for the first half of the year. Worldwide revenues for the quarter […]
The only common currency for advertising is attention. And that’s where Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn is betting the farm. “The common currency of reach is not legit,” he said. “Attention is a finite resource. It’s the one element that binds TV and digital.” Hagedorn, a longtime Omnicom exec, is trying to help his […]
Launching a people-based data platform is the agency holding company trend du jour. Omnicom on Thursday announced its own version of such a platform, called Omni, that connects the media planning, buying and creative process across a single audience definition. “We’re moving some components that were in activation closer to planning,” said Slavi Samardzija, global […]
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 […]
Spend on Omnicom’s trading desk Accuen continues to decline as brands increasingly favor disclosed programmatic buying models. Accuen’s Q4 revenue declined by $12 million globally and $17 million in the US year over year. Before Q3, when Accuen’s revenues first began declining YoY, Accuen’s revenue had grown between $18 million and $45 million each quarter […]
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 […]
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 […]
We Are Unlimited, the integrated agency Omnicom launched to service the McDonald’s account earlier this year, has hired former iCrossing President Mark Mulhern as its new CEO. In an interview, Mulhern said he was attracted by the opportunity to test a new agency model. “The future of our industry is based on specialisms coming back […]
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 […]
