The cookie-based identity regime that fueled the first 25 years of the digital advertising is dying. What will replace it? David Moore, ad tech veteran and CEO of fledgling startup BritePool, says he has an answer. Moore is one of a handful of early ad tech entrepreneurs who are still actively building companies today. As […]
Martin Sorrell has harsh words for his successor at WPP Group. During a wide-ranging interview on this week’s AdExchanger Talks podcast, Sorrell sharply questions decisions made by WPP’s current leadership in the year since he abdicated to start his own holding company, S4 Capital. He suggests WPP brass have executed poorly on a well-intentioned strategy […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Playing Nice As he throws his energy into a new marketing investment vehicle, Martin Sorrell has no plans to undermine WPP Group, where he remains the eighth largest investor, Reuters reports. Reuters spoke with another big WPP stakeholder, Jupiter Asset Management fund manager Alastair […]
“There are three big issues: technological disruption, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and activist investors,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told AdExchanger at the Cannes Lions festival. “The first involves continuous experimentation,” he said, and WPP has certainly walked the talk on that front. Under Sorrell’s leadership, the company has invested in tech far more aggressively than […]
There’s an old ad industry saw that goes, “a little Procter & Gamble budget in everyone’s paycheck.” Well, now there’s a half billion less. The CPG giant told investors on the company’s earnings call in January that the company had succeeded in cutting $370 million in marketing costs in 2015, and that it expected to […]
In the latest chapter to a rather convoluted M&A tale, AppNexus will snap up ad tech firm Real Media Latin America (RMLA) from Peter Gervai, the Brazilian entrepreneur who paid $1 some 13 years ago to take it off 24/7 Real Media’s hands. The companies didn’t disclose the deal price or Sao Paulo-based RMLA’s revenues, but its […]
WPP Group planted a stake Thursday in Rentrak by acquiring $98 million of the media measurement company’s common stock (12.4% of total shares). In return, Rentrak gets Kantar Media’s TV measurement business in the US. WPP also made a $56 million cash investment in the company, which, barring regulatory approval, would give the holding company […]
With the Omnicom-Publicis merger now in some doubt, WPP Group retains a glimmer of hope that it could remain the world’s largest agency holding company past the third quarter. In its Q1 earnings report Friday, WPP listed media investment – represented by its GroupM network and the Xaxis ad tech unit – as among its […]
Kantar Media SRDS has added programmatic digital ad inventory to its media planning platform, which aggregates advertising rate card information for a wide range of supply sources. It’s another indicator of how demand for “programmatic direct” continues to transform the traditional planning and buying process. WPP Group-owned Kantar is partnering with supply-side platforms (SSP) PubMatic, […]
WPP Group’s 24/7 Media – which will soon be absorbed into Xaxis – has acquired 12-year-old semantic ad-tech company Crystal Semantics and its 15 employees from previous owner Ad Pepper Media. London-based Crystal’s technology can be applied a few ways, said Rob Schneider, 24/7 Media’s SVP of corporate strategy and platform development. First, it offers straightforward […]
WPP Group CEO Sir Martin Sorrell takes an increasingly broad view of his competitors. In addition to the company’s two largest agency holding company rivals, Interpublic and Publicis/Omnicom (the future Publicis Omnicom Group), and smaller players Havas Media and Dentsu/Aegis, he says the company now competes broadly with Internet giants, researchers and data firms. “We […]
Publicis Groupe is hemorrhaging senior digital talent. With his exit for a plum job as CEO of AOL Networks (AdExchanger story), Razorfish CEO Bob Lord became the latest in a string of digital agency CEOs to leave the French holding company. Among the others are Colin Kinsella, former CEO of Digitas North America, who recently […]
For the past few years, the analytics spotlight has been captured by Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) and comScore’s Validated Campaign Essentials (VCE). WPP’s Kantar analytics group has tended to play a minor role in the wars over whether TV-centric metrics like gross ratings points can be relevant for digital media buys. But with today’s […]
WPP Group’s trading desk Xaxis is known for its proprietary approach to technology. The GroupM unit has incubated numerous ad platforms, a legacy of WPP’s 2007 acquisition of 24/7 Media. It offers these products to clients as an alternative to licensing from vendors. By contrast, trading desk rivals VivaKi AOD (Publicis), Cadreon (IPG), and Accuen (Omnicom) are […]
Last week, Ford Motors kicked off its latest long-term ad campaign, dubbed “And Not Or,” with a theme that could also apply to its digital strategy. The spots, which began running on TV and have heavy online video components, touch on concepts that people expect to naturally go together; consumers are asked to choose between […]
WPP Group has taken a 20% stake in Globant, a fast growing Latin American marketing and software development firm. Buenos Aires-based Globant blends engineering and design-driven driven approaches. It employs 2,700 in six countries — including Brazil, Argentina, and Columbia — and offers its clients software development, data architecture, e-commerce applications, design, and mobile development […]
As a WPP Group agency, MediaCom works closely with the holding company’s Xaxis trading desk to execute data-driven media strategies. In such relationships between agencies and trading desks, it can be hard for a client to know where the desk stops and the operating agency begins. That creates a tricky problem, since first party data […]
E-commerce has become much more mainstream in the last two years. And yet, no one company, except for Amazon or perhaps Apple, appears to be notably dominant. Earlier this week, WPP’s GroupM Next released a survey of 1,000 users that showed 45 percent of customers shopping in-store at brick and mortar locations will walk out […]
Yesterday, Microsoft Advertising and WPP Group‘s 24/7 Media announced a new deal, which “consists of four main components that will help strengthen advertising technology stacks and expand opportunities for the marketer and publisher clients of both WPP and Microsoft Advertising,” according to a release. Read more about the components. AdExchanger discussed the deal with Dave […]
Brian Lesser is CEO of Xaxis, a digital partner of GroupM agencies, and WPP Group company. To learn more, visit the new company website here. Lesser, previously GM of WPP’s Media Innovation Group, discussed Xaxis and its implications. AdExchanger.com: What is Xaxis? And how will it differentiate itself within the marketplace? BL: Xaxis is a […]
Bill Lederer, CEO, of WPP Group’s newly-created Kantar Video discussed the company’s new Videolytics platform “an online and mobile video advertising and program platform offering content identity, syndication, tracking, measurement, analytics, and optimization for marketers and their agencies, media companies, and content creators and distributors.” What target market is VideolyticsTM for and why?
David Moore is the Chairman & Founder of 24/7 Real Media, a WPP company. AdExchanger.com: Doesn’t it follow that there is channel conflict between ad networks and large publisher sites with sales teams? What must ad networks do, if anything, to make sure that publishers do not feel like they’re inventory is being cannibalized? DM: […]
Yesterday, Yahoo!’s Right Media announced a new partnership with mega-agency and holding company, WPP Group, that will bring the Right Media Exchange to many of WPP’s top clients. Whether the clients end up using the exchange will be another question. In the NY Times article about the partnership, WPP Group sees a main benefit of […]
