Agencies

Creative agencies, media agencies, PR agencies, “general” agencies. All have faced significant technology disruption in the form of shifting consumer behaviors, disintermediation by vendors, and relentless waves of “marketing tech” requiring evaluation and training. To understand the changes afoot in marketing services business models, we asked a number of senior execs who should know to […]

The six global ad holding companies (WPP, Publicis, Interpublic, Omnicom, Dentsu, and Havas) are basically legal roosting boxes for advertising agencies, but a few years hence we may see them very differently. Or, a few of them anyway. Speaking with AdExchanger today, CEO Martin Sorrell said, “I think our business has changed dramatically in the […]

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 […]

When David Williams bought Merkle in 1988, the first online display banner was still a few years away. But that doesn’t mean marketing tech wasn’t a part of his CRM agency from the get-go as Merkle ‘grew up’ building platforms for direct mail, and then the phone, and then email as the Internet made its […]

Internet marketing agency VirKet based in Mexico City, Mexico announced last month that it had signed on with Kenshoo and its search engine marketing (SEM) platform products – Kenshoo Enterprise (for large, corporate clients) and Kenshoo Local (for managing many smaller advertisers). See the release. Daniel Molano, Chief Strategy & Product Officer at VirKet, discussed the deal and […]

Any media agency will tell you it’s innovating hard around data in campaign planning and reporting. But what does that mean exactly? For Universal McCann, the global media arm of McCann Worldgroup, today’s challenge in analytics isn’t methodological. It’s all in the follow through – creating standardized measurement approaches and then getting insights into the […]

Traffiq is among the few companies to cleanly jump the fence from a product-centric to a services-centric model. One year ago, it was focused on developing and marketing a self-service marketing workflow tool. Over time however it became clear prospective customers weren’t ready. “We were building a model that could be self-serve, and what we […]

In the summer of 2008, Paris-based ad holding Publicis Groupe had started working on CEO Maurice Lévy’s pledge to derive at least 25 percent of the agency’s revenues from digital. The problem was that digital was still a sideline to the main business of creating and buying ads for TV, print and out-of-home. With those […]

  R/GA’s decision to launch a media division one year ago was an unusual step for an agency deeply associated with its creative product. The firm has always talked a good game about data, for instance using personal health data to support the award winning Nike+ and Fuel Band products. But that’s a far cry […]