Mel Edwards, the newly minted global CEO of Wunderman Thompson, has a huge job ahead of her. When the agency officially launches this year, it will have 20,000 employees in 90 markets across 200 global offices, and eventually, Edwards wants everyone in each market working together. “We need a little more time because of the […]
Every January, agency executives make their annual pilgrimage to CES to check out the latest trends in consumer technology and distill them into business ideas for clients. At WPP, newly merged agencies VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson are taking a wider purview at the show in keeping with their broadened services. Where Y&R and J. Walter […]
WPP said Monday it will merge digital agency network Wunderman with storied creative agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT), forming a new entity called Wunderman Thompson. Wunderman Thompson will employ 20,000 people in 200 locations across 90 markets, according to Adweek. Wunderman’s newly minted global CEO Mel Edwards will lead the agency, while JWT global CEO […]
Wunderman global CEO Mel Edwards has big shoes to fill. Last Thursday, the CRM and digital agency said it would replace CEO Mark Read, recently named CEO of WPP, with Edwards, who previously led the agency in EMEA. Read is credited with turning Wunderman around from a legacy direct marketing company into a digital powerhouse. […]
Google’s decision last Friday to limit portability of the DoubleClick ID outside of Google’s ecosystem was done in the name of consumer privacy. But the change will also stunt advertisers’ ability to do cross-platform reach and frequency measurement – unless they’re using Google’s Ads Data Hub. While agency execs support changes to protect consumer privacy, […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Criteo Swaps Out CEO With the GDPR compliance deadline bearing down, Criteo has restored its former CEO to the corner office. JB Rudelle will once again take the reins at the company, as Eric Eichmann steps into an advisory role prior to transferring […]
“The Complete Guide to CDPs” is presented by mParticle. “The Complete Guide To CDPs” is part 1 in a multipart series on the rise of the CDP and is an independent editorial report. The customer data platform (CDP) is the new “it” acronym, an emerging technology commanding a recent deluge of analyst and investor interest […]
Facebook’s announcement Wednesday that it would ban third-party data partners from directly targeting on its platform hit ad buyers hard. Previously, buyers could directly apply third-party data segments to their targeting on Facebook through suppliers like Acxiom, Oracle and Experian to enrich Facebook’s data with offline segments. Now, marketers using segments from third-party data brokers […]
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 […]
Media agencies know how to find the right person at the right time, thanks to the growth of programmatic. But they’re still trying to pin down how to send the right message. “You want the media to recognize where they were, but you also want to recognize where they were in the conversation,” said Zimm […]
Amazon on Monday quietly launched a self-serve platform called Advertiser Audiences, which lets advertisers upload their audience lists and CRM information, enabling tactics like audience matching and lookalike modeling. Advertiser Audiences is similar to solutions Facebook and Google released earlier, though Amazon’s tool has some key differences. The biggest strength, said Wunderman North America Chief […]
The past couple of years have been tough for CPGs, as consumers move toward fresher and healthier items and ecommerce disrupts the way goods are sold. The Q1 earnings season has only reinforced the trend. At Kellogg’s and Kraft-Heinz, net sales fell about 3% year over year in Q1 2017. Mondelez grew organically a meager […]
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. […]
Snap Inc. is expected to go public on Thursday, leaving many to wonder how the most anticipated tech IPO since Facebook will be treated by investors on Wall Street. While Snap described itself as a camera company during its roadshow, investors know that its success hinges on its ability to monetize successfully as an ad […]
Welcome to episode No. 13 of AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Seth Solomons, Wunderman’s CEO for North America, sees huge growth coming for machine learning. “If the agencies don’t see it and embrace it then it’s going to be a pretty disruptive force,”he says in the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. […]
As WPP’s direct marketing agency, Wunderman began collecting data about individual consumers before it was the currency of the digital world. “Data was the lifeline of this place to begin with,” said Wunderman’s New York president, Jamie Gallo. “It was very pedestrian and primal data, but it was what the agency was built on.” As […]
Despite Amazon’s legacy as a giant digital walled garden, marketers say it’s in the early stages of a major expansion into an ad platform model. Specifically, Amazon is testing ways to tie together its properties to form a more comprehensive, full-funnel offer, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the early products. Amazon didn’t return […]
When Mark Read became Wunderman’s global CEO in January 2015, he brought with him a great deal of digital know-how gleaned from his time leading WPP Digital. Wunderman had been in a state of continuous transformation, changing from a direct marketing agency to a digital one. Over the past 10 years, it has tripled in […]
Wunderman’s new global chief data officer, Gary Laben, saw his remit expand significantly last week, when he was appointed to the position. While Laben was and will remain CEO of KBM Group, Wunderman’s data-focused subsidiary, Laben will now oversee the deployment of Wunderman’s data capabilities globally. “Some of what we have is mature in markets […]
KBM Group might be the data services unit of WPP agency Wunderman, but don’t think of it as just a database manager. “Our job is to provide strategic leadership, not simply be a database vendor when clients need one,” said William Burkart, who became KBM Group’s president and COO in late September. So if you […]
KBM Group, a data services business and division of Wunderman, revealed its partnership Wednesday with Provenir, a move designed to improve the predictive targeting capabilities of the former’s IMPACT 360 Customer Engagement Platform. The partnership, the companies hope, will enable brands to consolidate interactions that occur across numerous channels like mobile, social, display and more traditional […]
A financial injustice plagues the marketing world. “Media outlets have proliferated over the past 10 years,” said Daniel Morel, chairman and CEO of WPP-owned digital agency Wunderman. “But somehow, the purse size of the CMO hasn’t changed that much. If you measure the size of the growth of media outlets and the money available for communication, […]
Is the union between Oracle and BlueKai, in the words of Ovum Research Senior Analyst Gerry Brown, a case of “the cat amongst the pigeons?” There might be some credence to the idea. As Brown points out, BlueKai is (or has been) a champion of open systems. Oracle is not. “Certainly few BlueKai partners will […]
WPP Group’s digital and direct marketing agency Wunderman and its media-buying agency MEC have launched a joint venture called CHOREOGRAPH to address converging client demands in paid, earned and owned media. The proliferation of cross-channel marketing campaigns and the subsequent need to marry transactional, customer and demographic data with audience-level information drove CHOREOGRAPH’s creation. “Over […]
Both agencies and ad partners draw comparisons between Twitter’s launch on Thursday of retargeting product Tailored Audiences and Facebook Exchange (FBX). Just how technically similar they are remains to be seen, but the industry is buzzing about the ad product’s cross-channel targeting potential. We asked some Tailored Audience partners, media agencies and a beta tester to […]
