A year ago, all the major ad agency holding companies were digging themselves out of a deep hole, as investors hedged their bets on the return of ad budgets and even the survival of traditional agencies. Fast forward one year – and what a difference that year has made. Omnicom lost more than a third […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Tim’s Turn Apple CEO Tim Cook will soon testify in the company’s lawsuit with Epic Games. Epic sued after its hugely popular game Fortnite was kicked out of the App Store last year for flouting Apple’s 30% cut of in-game revenues. Epic claimed that […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brand Value TikTok has inked a partnership with media holding company WPP that will give its media clients early access to the social platform’s emerging services. With 1 billion monthly active users – the app has been downloaded more than 2.6 billion times worldwide […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. New Crew With Biden in the White House, the Federal Trade Commissions and the Federal Communications Commission are playing the usual game of musical chairs triggered by a new administration. The Republican heads of both agencies – Ajit Pai at the FCC and Joe […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Is It Safe To Come Out? With the Trump circus leaving town, what does this mean for brand safety? Seb Joseph of Digiday wrote about how the political divide amongst American consumers has extended to the media channels people consume. “And it’s made the […]
OpenAP, a consortium of TV networks that allows advertisers to buy standardized audiences across their inventory, launched its first tech product on Monday, a supply-side platform (SSP). SSPs are a mainstay of digital publisher technology, and now they’re coming into the TV world to help improve the antiquated linear TV ad buying process by adding […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. State Of The TransUnion Credit bureau and consumer data provider TransUnion acquired cross-channel marketing company Signal on Monday (not to be confused with TruSignal, the predictive analytics and data firm TransUnion acquired in May of last year). TransUnion didn’t share a deal price. The […]
This week is earnings week, and there are many, many investor calls on the calendar. Couldn’t listen to them all? In this episode of The Big Story, the AdExchanger team gives you the quick lowdown on how some of the biggest advertisers and agencies did after a full quarter of COVID-19. We start out with […]
Omnicom mitigated the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on its business in part by cutting 6,100 jobs across its network in the second quarter, the company said Tuesday during its earnings call. Omnicom also froze hiring, eliminated salary increases, implemented voluntary pay cuts across its agencies and participated in government subsidy programs in 35 markets. […]
Consolidation has opened up better measurement solutions in podcasting – and big brands are jumping in. On Wednesday, Omnicom said it will invest $20 million upfront into podcasts on Spotify in the second half of 2020, The Wall Street Journal first reported. The deal also gives Omnicom access to exclusive and original content globally and […]
The remote work experiment caused by COVID-19 will transform agencies. Automation will become even more integral to agency workflows as consumer media habits shift, changing the nature of talent and services. Highly office-driven cultures will shift to a more remote, distributed workforce, as companies reduce their real estate holdings to drive efficiencies during the economic […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. On Again, Office Again Agencies are starting to plan for office returns. Omnicom is developing a three-phase return strategy based on local government guidelines, Campaign reports. Phase one involves returning offices to 25% occupancy with social distancing rules in place, such as wearing masks, […]
The departure of long-time television investment executives at two of the world’s largest media agency groups, Omnicom Media Group and GroupM, underscores the changing television marketplace, accelerated by the pandemic. At GroupM, changes to the investment team began in 2016, when longtime chief investment officer Rino Scanzoni left. He was replaced by another investment vet, […]
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 […]
