Agencies

Agencies are dying? Don’t tell that to Rob Norman, chief digital officer and veteran of WPP’s GroupM, who said Monday he will step down from his full-time role to become a part-time adviser for the company. But even if agencies aren’t having a near-death experience, they should behave like they are, Norman said: “If you […]

As holding companies distribute programmatic knowledge to their operating agencies, trading desks are repositioning to stay relevant to clients. Xaxis, GroupM’s trading desk that pioneered the model of selling media to clients at a mark-up on a guaranteed CPM, will now buy for clients on guaranteed metrics that impact business performance, such as viewability and […]

If an agency spends $100 programmatically for its client, how much money actually ends up with the publisher? Agencies and marketers want to know – especially GroupM. As awareness of hidden fees continues to rise, GroupM is doing more than just tracking where media spend ends up. It’s pulling and rerouting spend to take advantage […]

When Snap reported disappointing earnings on Tuesday, it said revenue was constrained by its shift from a direct sales model to a programmatic, auction-based model. Snap’s excuse mimics one that publishers used in the early days of programmatic to explain their revenue shortfalls, and it doesn’t fully take into account immaturities and nuances in Snap’s […]

“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 Jay Friedman, chief operating officer at Goodway Group. In the early 2010s, a few assumptions seemed undeniable for media buyers. They believed programmatic was growing rapidly with user-level targeting, for example, providing […]

 WPP, which reduced its full-year forecast Tuesday following a disappointing Q3, said it had invested mre than $7 billion on Google and Facebook this year as the No. 1 and No. 3 destinations for its clients’ media spend. NewsCorp., Twenty-First Century Fox, Sky and Foxtel all tied as the second-largest destinations for client spend. By […]

As media buying becomes more fragmented across media channels and buying platforms, agencies and clients need to stop treating it like a cost play, said Jeff Nicholson, chief media officer at VaynerMedia. “Most people are looking for operational profitability,” he said. “People are taking a simple approach to [media buying] because there’s no one calling […]

Advertisers, agencies and publishers agree that the bar for better data quality has never been higher. Yet the quality of many third-party data sets is questionable, and advertisers don’t always know what they’re getting when they purchase it. Here’s how Anheuser-Busch InBev, Publicis agency Spark Foundry and the publisher Condé Nast are all vetting data […]

Brands, agencies, publishers and vendors agree that while the industry is rife with ad quality issues, programmatic isn’t the culprit. “Programmatic is not the problem,” said Shaune Kolber, programmatic creative and ad fraud manager at Dell, at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in New York City on Thursday. “It’s a way of buying. It’s not supposed […]

One of the many pressures facing holding companies is increased competition from management and IT consultancies like Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and PricewaterhouseCoopers. While consulting firms may not be their biggest threat today, tomorrow could be another story. Holding companies tend to work from the bottom up, focusing on marketing initiatives like creative or media strategy […]