Marketers

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 […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Census Incenses The ANA published a survey of advertisers who oppose a potential change to the US census that would undercut marketing spend and measurement. The Trump administration wants to include a question about citizenship in the 2020 census, which advertisers worry will […]

Hector Munoz knows quick-service restaurants (QSRs), having worked in the space for more than 25 years. Munoz rose through the ranks at Burger King, then spent six years as CMO of Popeye’s Chicken. In February 2017, he became CMO at Church’s Chicken, which launched a brand campaign called “Here’s the Deal” on Friday. “If we […]

Influencer marketing often gets lumped in with vapid Kardashian nonsense, PewDiePie antics and top-of-the-funnel fluff. But there’s no reason sponsored videos can’t be a data-driven user acquisition (UA) channel for performance-minded marketers. User acquisition is about knowing where your audience is, wherever that may be, and being willing to experiment, said Danika Wilkinson, community manager […]

More brands are bringing the strategic functions of programmatic buying in-house, relegating their agencies to specialized roles. Sixty-five percent of brands are either completely or partially buying programmatic media in-house, according to a white paper released Tuesday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Data Center of Excellence. The white paper surveyed marketers at 119 US […]

This isn’t a test: Data-driven TV planning is finally having its moment. About 15-17% of advertisers in the US already regularly include addressable or advanced TV buys in their media plans, according to a joint Forrester/Association of National Advertisers survey of 126 ANA members released Wednesday. An additional 20-30% of advertisers plan to start dipping […]

Brands like Uber, Ubisoft and Bayer have evolved their programmatic in-housing tactics in recent years – and all three outlined those changes at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco Wednesday. In the early days of in-housing, brands often bit off more than they could chew – or lacked the proper resources to implement and maintain […]

Because it can take a month or more to tie digital media to offline purchases, CPGs like Del Monte are used to relying on proxy metrics like viewability or engagement. But Del Monte is piloting an Amobee product released Wednesday called Sales Accelerator, which aims to collapse that timeline to about a week and help […]

Brand safety has become such a hot-button issue for advertisers that competing holding companies and agencies are ditching their territorial natures to fight it together. The 4As said Tuesday it has formed an industry consortium called the Advertiser Protection Bureau (APB), a cross-holding company and agency effort to better share knowledge around brand safety incidents […]

AdColony further trimmed its executive ranks this week in an effort to streamline the business and get to profitability. The mobile video ad network did away with at least five senior and mid-level roles in North America. AdColony’s former VP of performance, Tim O’Neil, who joined AdColony less than a year ago, was let go […]

Monster.com’s new CMO, Jonathan Beamer, has a monster job ahead of him. Since its heyday in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the career site, once the most trafficked job platform in the US, lost ground to upstart competitors such as Indeed.com and ZipRecruiter. Monster rested on its laurels, and what started as a scrappy […]

When AMC created a dedicated data sales team, which it revealed last week, it set the stage for AMC to compete more effectively with networks like NBC and Fox. AMC owns the television channels AMC, WE tv, BBC America, IFC and SundanceTV, and its data sales team, called AMCN Agility, will span that national footprint. Spearheaded […]

During the 2016 US presidential election, news publishers experienced an uptick in engagement. The Trump era has kept that engine going. Politico is no exception, where traffic is up more than 30% year over year. That’s one of the reasons why Politico overhauled its website on Tuesday, showing more stories above the fold and optimizing […]

Oscar Garza, EVP of media activation at Essence, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO conference on April 10-11 at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. Brands concerned about brand safety, transparency and media budget control are sweetening to the idea of taking programmatic in-house. But marketers often don’t realize there’s a lot more to programmatic than […]

Ever since AT&T hired GroupM honcho Brian Lesser last August to lead its new advertising and analytics business, he’s been on a hiring spree. And many of the recruits share one thing in common: They’ve earned their programmatic stripes in some capacity. Time will tell how the AT&T Advertising & Analytics division will develop should […]

When the outdoor recreation retailer REI closed its shops for Black Friday, the biggest sales day of the year for many stores, it was testing brand appeal against strong short-term revenue, as well as its out-of-home (OOH) media and data services. REI has grown its OOH media from nothing two to three years ago to […]

The world’s largest consumer product brands are struggling to grow their US businesses. While some of the challenges are macro-economic, like increased transportation costs, the biggest factor is the growth of retail private-label brands, which can’t be acquired or stamped out like startup competitors. Large CPGs are also adjusting to new direct-to-consumer and ad-heavy startup […]

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 […]

Albertsons has unleashed shopper data from its network of 2,300 stores to help CPG advertisers determine whether their digital ad spend drove sales. When the grocery chain, whose numerous brands include Safeway, launched Albertsons Performance Media last week, it joined retailers like Target, Kroger and Walmart, which have each invested in building an audience activation […]

Twitter is a company that always seems on the verge of flight. The potential is there, but the question remains: Will the platform ever be able to fulfill it? Instability in Twitter’s C-suite doesn’t help. On Tuesday, COO Anthony Noto – second in command to Jack Dorsey – became the most recent top Twitter exec to fly […]

Just six weeks into her new role as CMO of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Andrea Zahumensky is hitting the market Sunday with her first big campaign launch for the quick-serve restaurant’s new Smoky Mountain BBQ flavor. Zahumensky, who joined KFC from Procter & Gamble, where she was brand director for baby care products in North America, […]

Procter & Gamble isn’t done trimming its agency and advertising investments, even after a year of deep cuts to media and production budgets, according to senior managers during the company’s Q2 earnings report on Tuesday. Digital media and tech vendors have become more transparent since P&G began crusading against online supply chain failures a year […]

Many large brands have in-housed advertising technology as part of a data-driven marketing overhaul. But for Marriott, the data-driven plan has meant taking more ownership of media production, including travel news sites and documentary features, as data ties creative content to bottom-line results. Last year, Marriott consolidated data from its Marriott and Ritz-Carlton rewards programs […]

Netflix will inevitably need ads, predicted Jo Ann Ross, CBS’ president and chief advertising revenue officer, during a fireside chat at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview on Thursday. “Maybe they’ll offer a lower-cost version of their service [or a different model],” she said, “but if they’re spending that much money [on content], they will look for ways […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Our guest this week is Belinda Smith, a senior brand marketer at Electronic Arts who is also the author of many smart AdExchanger columns. Belinda is a font of insights for any marketer thinking about bringing their media buying activities in-house. When she joined EA, […]

  GroupM Chairman Irwin Gotlieb has always had an intuitive eye for technology. He’s been applying it to the CES show floor since the 1970s, when it was called the Comdex computer expo show and disc drives sold for $400,000. Gotlieb began offering his knowledge to clients, vendors and other partners on his legendary floor […]

When a company as large as SAP doubles down on digital, the executive org chart must change. For the last six months, the enterprise software company has had two primary CMOs: one who is responsible for brand and media and another who focuses on demand generation, life cycle marketing and bottom-line revenue. But they work […]

The center of media activity at CES is the C Space in the Aria hotel. Here you will find the private meeting spaces booked by Turner, Spotify, Twitter, Oath, CBS, NBCU and Samsung Ads. As in the past, the C Space showroom floor – ostensibly an ad tech vendor showcase – was pretty barren this […]

WPP is embracing the forces of change – both internally and externally. Internally, CEO Sir Martin Sorrell knows WPP’s clients want simplification, which will lead to more consolidation. “We’ve seen it amongst clients and media,” he told AdExchanger. “We’re quite likely to see a similar set of circumstances in the agency business.” And externally, he’s […]

L’Oreal will expand a media ownership strategy it piloted in Mexico to other Spanish-speaking countries to generate first-party cookies from its customer base. The idea is similar to sponsored content, but instead of working with a brand-name media company on a story package, for the past year L’Oreal has developed fiufiu, a kind of pop-up […]