WPP has struggled to grow in recent years, as key clients in fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) reduce spend and its traditional creative agencies underperform. While the tech vertical and its media business are relative bright spots, they aren’t big enough to buttress the entire holding company. WPP’s Q3 performance, which the company reported Friday, […]
Martin Sorrell went on the attack in a fireside chat with Accenture Interactive senior managing director Glen Hartman. The S4 executive chairman fixated on Accenture’s operating and incentive structure and how much autonomy creative agencies maintained within its network. “Accenture talks about one P&L,” he said during the session at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO New York. […]
Ad tech company Ad/Fin ceased business operations on Friday after a tumultuous few years of existence. Launched in 2012 as a tool to benchmark pricing data in programmatic media, Ad/Fin made enemies of the agency holding companies when it teamed up with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Ebiquity on a 2016 report uncovering […]
Reprise is a specialty agency born in the age of channel planning. What started as a search specialty shop combined in 2018 with IPG mobile agency Ansible and social agency Society as audience-based buying took off. While channel expertise still remained relevant, distinguishing agency services by channels didn’t resonate as much with clients. So when […]
Publicis reported Q3 earnings on a last-minute call with investors Thursday after results came in worse than expected, causing the holding company to lower its guidance through 2020. Organic growth was down 2.7% to $2.86 billion in Q3, and down 1.4% to $7.6 billion in the first nine months of the year. So Publicis lowered […]
Chief marketing officers are surrounded by disruption. And they’re realizing that the branding skills that got them the top marketing seat aren’t the same skills in data and operations that are going to drive their businesses forward, said Merkle CEO David Williams. “The average CMO is in a tough spot,” he said. “They didn’t grow […]
Small businesses in the United States are driving ad spend growth globally, thanks to self-serve and cost-efficient ad buying tools from Facebook and Google. While local businesses traditionally use local TV and radio, producing a commercial can cost thousands of dollars. And even though some DTC brands are targeting on OTT, production for those spots […]
Creatives still struggle to use data. Holding companies may have spent $12 billion collectively on data assets over the past decade, but creative agencies still don’t know how to use those tools, according to Forrester. But creative agency Heat has been able to bake AI into its creative process by tapping into its parent company […]
Brands are hesitant to go all-in on influencer marketing, which much like the early days of programmatic, is rife with black-box business models. Pricing and compensation vary significantly across influencers, and a lack of benchmarks and measurement make it difficult for brands to know if they’re getting a fair rate. Confusion around the value of […]
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 […]
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing budgets are starting to include larger-scale media, which is having a massive impact on national TV ad spend, according to Magna’s fall 2019 ad spend forecast, released Thursday. Marketing spend in the DTC category increased 30% YoY in Q2 2019. And DTCs spent 50% more on national TV in particular. “These new […]
S4 Capital had a solid second quarter earnings report on Wednesday, with revenue up 41.6% to $108.5 million in the first half of 2019. But that didn’t stop CEO Martin Sorrell from spending a significant portion of the earnings call throwing shade at his competitors, especially his former empire WPP. When asked whether S4 needs […]
IPG revealed a series of changes to its executive suite on Monday that brings media leadership to the top of the organization. Philippe Krakowsky, IPG’s chief strategy and talent officer and CEO of IPG Mediabrands, will assume the newly-created position of chief operating officer. He will retain his duties as chief strategy and talent officer […]
The Martin Agency is best known for its iconic creative ideas. Who hasn’t seen the Geico Gecko? But in addition to doing creative work for blue chip clients such as Geico, Oreo and Buffalo Wild Wings, The Martin Agency is transforming into a sophisticated media organization. The creative agency has had media as part of […]
Dentsu-owned performance agency iProspect said Wednesday it has acquired independent performance agency MuteSix. Terms of the deal, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, were not disclosed. MuteSix does creative production and performance marketing for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, including Theragun, Burst Oral Care and Grunt Style, and enterprise clients such as Petco and Shell. The […]
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 […]
Kantar didn’t have much flexibility under WPP to buy companies and solutions to modernize its traditional market research business. “We’ve been out of the market for three or four years,” said Kantar CEO Eric Salama on a press call held Thursday to provide an update on its strategy under its new owner Bain Capital. But […]
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 […]
Ad tech startup Ad/Fin saw an opportunity to build a business by partnering with the ANA and Ebiquity on a programmatic study. Here’s the story of how it made enemies of agency holding companies – and got caught up in the industry’s transparency reckoning. In early 2016, Ad/Fin met with leadership at Ebiquity and the […]
GroupM has a new global boss. Christian Juhl, the former global CEO of Essence, was named global CEO of media buying giant GroupM on Tuesday. Juhl takes over for Kelly Clark, who joined as global CEO in 2016 with a three-year commitment to the role. Essence has not yet named a successor for Juhl, but […]
Publicis Groupe grew 0.1% to $2.5 billion in Q2, returning to positive growth after a rocky first quarter. Organic growth was down 0.7% for the first half of the year. Despite the positive quarter, investors were skeptical of Publicis’ $4.4 billion acquisition of Epsilon, which closed in July. Many wondered why the company has such […]
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 […]
WPP said Friday it has sold a 60% majority stake in Kantar to Bain Capital in a deal that values the company at around $4 billion. Read the release. The news marks the end of a months-long bidding process that involved Apollo Global Management and Vista Partners. Bloomberg reported earlier in July that Bain had […]
Havas isn’t facing the same pressure to grow as other holding companies are. The privately-held agency network, owned by French media mogul Vincent Bolloré’s family empire, The Bolloré Group, isn’t subject to pressures of the stock market. “When you’re privately owned, you can focus on the long term,” said the elder Bolloré’s son, Havas CEO […]
At the Cannes Lions festival, media agencies made it clear that they’re embracing Ads Data Hub (ADH) – Google’s answer to privacy-safe attribution – despite the implications for independent measurement. ADH supplies a clean room environment in which agencies can continue to use their own modeling capabilities and data science within Google’s walled garden. Because […]
Global digital ad spend may be starting to slow, but it’s still growing like gangbusters compared with the rest of the market. IPG-owned Magna Global predicts in its latest spending forecast, released Monday, that digital ad sales will increase by 14% this year and represent more than half (51%) of total global ad sales ($304 […]
The Cannes Lions, the annual advertiser confab celebrating creativity on the French Riviera, is all about the glitz and glamour. But this year, beyond the branded yachts and magnum-sized bottles of rose, proving that creativity drove business performance will be a key ingredient in winning awards as marketers struggle for growth. Creatively, the focus will […]
Facebook, Amazon and Google might be the biggest ad platforms in the world, but as advertisers, they’ve become the heaviest spenders, according to a global ad forecast from GroupM released Wednesday. As an advertiser category, digital natives are fueling the fire on global ad spend growth. Granted, GroupM doesn’t expect the 2019 growth rate to […]
When nutritional supplement company Transparent Labs ran a video on social media as its first-ever marketing campaign, it didn’t expect to go viral. But the five-minute video raked in 21 million views and 18,000 shares across social media, translating to a 4:1 return on ad spend. Through the campaign, Transparent Labs was able to grow […]
As the industry evolves, media agencies are no longer set up to work with their clients in a financially viable way. In reviews, client procurement departments still evaluate their agencies against historical cost benchmarks, such as commissions or number of full-time employees (FTE) charged by its previous agency. But that often precludes the agency from […]
