Agencies

As AKQA’s media team stares into the maw of WPP and its Xaxis audience buying unit, what does it see there? Scott Symonds, Managing Director of AKQA Media, is certainly aware of Xaxis’s reputation as the most controlling of the holding company trading desks – an entity that has been known to force its solution […]

For agencies and marketers, there’s a pervasive lack of synthesis among available consumer data. It would seem particularly frustrating for Steve Plimsoll, chief technology officer, Mindshare Worldwide, but he sounds much too excited about the next eight years, when he believes that problem will be solved. Plimsoll is taking steps to position his media shop […]

The U.K. is rapidly catching up to the U.S. in programmatic media, with DSPs servicing about 30 percent of GroupM’s display ad spend this year compared with 20 percent in 2011. WPP’s global media arm issued its measured ad spending report for the country this week (press release), and while the overall picture is stagnant, […]

Social Customer Relationship Management – or Social CRM – has been increasingly on the minds of many marketers, their agents and ad tech companies as the use of social media proliferates and acquisitions of Vitrue by Oracle and Buddy Media by Salesforce signal a changing media landscape. Consumers are spending a large part of their […]

Nick Pahade is a veteran of digital agencies and ad startups, having founded or led Beyond Interactive, Denuo (Publicis), GSI Commerce, and Traffiq. Two months ago, he was named North America CEO for global media planner Initiative, which is owned by Interpublic Group. This week at the Cannes Lions ad festival, he spoke with AdExchanger […]

WPP Group just scored a win at the intersection of social and programmatic display. Facebook has confirmed to AdExchanger that it added the holding company’s Xaxis audience buying unit to its list of approved real-time bidding partners for the new Facebook Exchange. Xaxis is the only one of Facebook’s RTB partners to hail from within […]

The acquisition of AKQA, the largest remaining independent interactive agency, by WPP sent waves through the ad sector today. Read: the French Riviera was buzzin’. Numerous senior agency people attending the Cannes Lions global ad festival have either worked for AKQA or competed with it dating back to its founding in 2001. The deal was […]

WPP Group has added digital agency AKQA to its holding company corral as the digital, pure play agency remains a highly-sought-after prize. Read the release. It was rumored that AKQA would be acquired by Dentsu for $600 million in 2010. Though today’s acquisition did not include terms of the deal, and considering time has passed […]

Last week, media communications agency Starcom USA announced that former Hill-Holliday executive Phil Geyskens has been hired as EVP/analytics & development director. He will join Starcom’s Managing Board and report to CEO Lisa Donohue. According to the press release, Geyskens’ new role is “to find and tell data stories, which includes inventing new interfaces, visualizations, […]

In 2006, Planning Group International partners Patrick MacDougall and Gaston Legorburu sold their agency to Sapient for $36 million. Today PGI’s core technology offering, the 12-year-old online marketing platform BridgeTrack, is still at the heart of the parent company’s ad optimization regime. Both MacDougall and Legorburu are still with the company – Legorburu as global […]