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Inside The New Agency Holding Company Playbook AppNexus Has Quit The Industry’s Ad ID Consortium. Is This The End? Adobe Will Buy Marketo For $4.75 Billion The Big Story: The Strange Case Of The Vanishing Media Agencies Magna: OTT Will Reach $2 Billion In 2018 How New CEO Mel Edwards Will Build On Wunderman’s Momentum As Dmexco Shrinks, It Must Decide Whether To Be A Regional Or International Show Panoply Lays Off Editorial Staff In Transition To Focus On Tech Who Is Guru Gowrappan? New Oath CEO Described As Strong Operator, “Thinking Leader”

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Salesforce Gets Into The ID Graph Game With Launch Of Customer 360

by James Hercher // Posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2018 at 8:00 am.

Salesforce on Tuesday introduced Salesforce Customer 360, a unified customer ID that connects profile data across its Sales, Services, Commerce and Marketing cloud product suites.

“There are so many ways for a person to engage with a brand nowadays and a certain level of control has been lost behind these layers of technology and media,” said Patrick Stokes, the senior VP of product management for the new product.

Unveiled at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce Customer 360 is a free additional feature available to clients operating Salesforce’s cloud products. Salesforce Customer 360 becomes an onboarding and integration hub for data housed in Salesforce or pulled from other sources.

On top of Salesforce data – which may include CRM or transaction data from Commerce Cloud or campaign data from Marketing Cloud – any partner plugged into MuleSoft’s integration API can be incorporated into Customer 360.

Stokes called MuleSoft’s middleware technology, which Salesforce bought earlier this year for $6.5 billion, critical to the new offering.

“Sourcing data from multiple places instead of just Salesforce consoles enables [metrics] like risk of churn, lifetime value and more complete profile data,” he said.

Salesforce Customer 360 should also give customers a better sense of their true customer or audience base.

A brand with 25 million different data-driven profiles across Salesforce products and other vendors might only be looking at a few million individuals, Stokes said.

VR Is More Than A Flight Of Fancy For Cathay Pacific

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2018 at 12:35 am.

Virtual reality still has much runway to travel before it lands a permanent spot on the media plan. It’s niche.

But for brands like Cathay Pacific, VR content is just the ticket to engage consumers in a new and unexpected way, said Roberta Ma, VP of marketing for the Americas at the Hong Kong–based airline.

“It’s definitely still an experiment, but it’s also an interesting way for us to tell our story,” Ma said.

Last year, Cathay Pacific developed an interactive VR video for its sales team to share with potential clients, particularly those who had never flown on the airline, to give them a realistic sense of the Cathay experience, from check-in to cabin.

The video was a hit with clients, which got Ma thinking about how else Cathay Pacific could more widely distribute its VR assets – which were, Ma said, not cheap to produce.

The Dark Side Of Media M&A

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2018 at 12:05 am.

"Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Mark Gorman, CEO at Matrix Solutions.

While M&A strategies offer media companies a leg up on competition, little attention goes to the behind-the-scenes drama when aligning the legacy technology platforms across these corporations.

The technology platforms getting hit the hardest often facilitate the lifeblood of media: advertising. It’s almost unfathomable to think about the state of AT&T’s and Time Warner’s ad data now after the merger or what Comcast’s and Sky’s could potentially look like.

But as more media companies enter these conversations, it’s imperative they anticipate the challenges that lie ahead post-merger and formulate a plan to overcome them.

Vox Misses Sales Goals; Global Ad Spending Holds Steady

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2018 at 12:03 am.

The Plateau Problem

Digital publisher Vox is set to miss its goal of $200 million in revenue this year by more than 15%, though it should still see double-digit growth over last year’s take of about $160 million, The Wall Street Journal reports. The issue came up at a board meeting last week amid investor concerns about sustainable online ad growth. Other new media upstarts with big investments at nine-digit valuations, like BuzzFeed, Vice and Refinery29, have also fallen short of growth targets in the past year. Why? Among the reasons: This crop of publishers has failed to connect on ancillary products like sponsored content, ecommerce, podcasting and long-form video. More.

App Window-Shopping

Snap is testing a way to identify products on Amazon based on visual searches on Snapchat. Focus the camera on a product or barcode, and if Snapchat recognizes the item it will surface a deep link to the Amazon app product page (if it’s downloaded) or the Amazon site, according to a company blog post. Amazon is the only ecom destination listed for now, but greasing the in-app shopping journey could help Snapchat prove its worth as it adds performance marketers to its programmatic platform. AdExchanger has more.

SiriusXM Makes $3.5 Billion Offer For Pandora

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Monday, September 24th, 2018 at 11:31 am.

SiriusXM said Monday it has offered to acquire Pandora for $3.5 billion, a 13.8% premium on the current stock price. Read the release.

If the deal goes through, SiriusXM would be able to distribute its content beyond vehicles and gain both a subscription radio business and an ad-supported streaming business. It would have the opportunity to convert its ad-supported listeners to subscribers.

Pandora has 70 million monthly active users and 6 million subscribers. SiriusXM has 36 million paying subscribers, along with 23 million people on free trials automatically initiated with each car purchase.

“We believe there are significant opportunities to create value for both companies' stockholders by combining our complementary businesses,” SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer said in a statement.

SiriusXM and Pandora both declined further comment.

Combined, the two audio companies can cross-sell and create new packages that include talk radio content from SiriusXM on Pandora.

AdColony Cuts More Jobs In The Name Of Profitability – But Can It Compete?

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Monday, September 24th, 2018 at 11:22 am.

AdColony laid off roughly 10% of its US workforce late last week amid struggles to gain a foothold in the app-install space. Headcount now stands somewhere around 350.

The cuts were across sales, IT, finance and product, including the chief product officer position. AdColony confirmed the layoffs, but not the exact number.

The beleaguered mobile video ad network denies it’s slimming down to get ready for a sale.

“We remain focused on profitability for AdColony,” the company told AdExchanger in a statement.

It said it needs to reduce headcount to get there, and several operational roles will move to global offices, including, sources tell AdExchanger, AdColony’s Istanbul location. Ostensibly, this will help the company save on salaries.

During the second quarter, AdColony restructured its performance sales team into a single group across North America and Europe to make it easier for its supply to compete across regions.

The hope is that these “ongoing changes” will help “keep AdColony competitive in the global mobile advertising marketplace,” the company stated.

But it’s been a bumpy road, and over the past couple of years layoffs have become par for the course at AdColony.

Inside The New Agency Holding Company Playbook

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Monday, September 24th, 2018 at 6:00 am.

As the traditional holding company model declines, new models are rising as competition.

While the “big six” – WPP, Publicis Groupe, IPG, Dentsu Aegis, Havas and Omnicom – still rule, legacy structures and poor financial performance are causing their dominance to wane.

In March, WPP lost $2.6 billion from its market cap. Omnicom has been shedding non-core assets to improve profitability after a year of flat growth. Publicis Groupe wrote down its digital agency group, Publicis.Sapient, by $1.5 billion because it was dragging down the business. And on Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported MDC Partners is exploring a sale for the second time in two years after its CEO Scott Kauffman stepped down earlier this month.

“It’s not a great time to be a conventional holding company,” said Andrew Bailey, US CEO of The&Partnership, an independent agency minority-owned by WPP.

Holding companies are losing leverage as clients favor consultative agencies that can work quickly over those with scale and big idea campaigns. Even ex-WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, who often downplayed the importance of consultancies, is singing a different tune with his new network, S4. In a prospectus, S4 said it is seeking agencies that are “agile, efficient, and of premium creative quality: in other words, faster, better and cheaper.”

New upstarts – like The&Partnership, Engine Group, Stagwell Group and Local Planet – are working off the same playbook. Rather than focusing on scale, these networks are built to facilitate collaboration, flexibility and agility across disciplines.

Data Drought? Prepare For A Deluge

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, September 24th, 2018 at 12:05 am.

"Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Julie Fleischer, vice president of marketing solutions at Neustar.

We’ve all heard the stats. There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. Ninety percent of the world’s data was created over the last two years.

We are drowning in data but starved for insights. If there is one thing everyone agrees on, it’s that the volume of data that’s being created, collected and cultivated is increasing exponentially.

And yet, now there is a new conversational thread emerging: We’re not drowning in data – we’re preparing to starve. The spigots are being closed, and we’re entering the era of the data drought.

This theory says, sure, data has been cheap and plentiful, but now the best data is getting stuck behind dams being established by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and walled gardens that are changing the rules so that they can hoard IDs and preclude leakage. Google Ads Data Hub and the blocking of ID sharing are two primary early warning signs offered of an impending data drought.

Taking Connected TV Data from Academic to Action

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, September 24th, 2018 at 12:04 am.

"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

Today’s column is written by Lindsey Harju, co-founder at Blinc Digital Group.

We love the constant barrage of headline-grabbing figures about cord cutters and connected TV, but most of the information we are devouring is really just academic.

Sure, academic data can be interesting and can lay a foundation for future decision making, but real-world application isn’t the highest priority. And that is where I become frustrated. The numbers fall apart when I attempt to take them from that academic environment and turn them into action.

EMarketer updated its projections for cord cutters this summer, increasing its 2018 estimates made last year by nearly 11%. But what exactly does that mean for marketers? That they should invest in alternative paths to get video in front of their most important audiences? Absolutely. That by waiting for the market to evolve further, they will be left in the dust by the competition? You bet.

What is missing is the “how.” Academic projections are great, but I need more data from the industry to make decisions.

FTC Looks To Change; MDC Explores A Sale

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, September 24th, 2018 at 12:03 am.

Cold Shower For Market Power

Big tech, are your ears burning? On Friday, the Federal Trade Commission held the second in an ongoing series of hearings digging into competition and consumer protection issues. The FTC is trying to update its enforcement and policy agenda in the face of fast-paced technological change. “Technology is no longer simply an industry, it is part of every industry,” said newly appointed FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, who kicked off the day’s discussions. (Read Slaughter’s full remarks here.) The current state of US antitrust law was the main topic of the day. “As consumers become data commodities themselves, the nature of competition has been evolving as well,” Slaughter said. And that means existing regulations probably need a serious refresh. “It’s evident that current antitrust and competition laws as they have been interpreted are not up to the task of ensuring a competitive marketplace,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor.