If you’re still confused about what’s motivating global consulting firms to move in on agency turf, who better to explain than a longtime holding company executive who defected to the other side? Nikki Mendonça, global president of Accenture Interactive Operations, spent 28 years in marketing services, including 16 years at Omnicom. She left in 2018 […]
When Andre Swanston, CEO of Tru Optik, gave up his career as a nightclub owner and financial adviser to found an ad tech company, his mother cried. Raised in the Bronx by parents who migrated to the United States from Saint Kitts in the Caribbean, Swanston advised investing clients at Ameriprise and JP Morgan Chase, […]
Michael Kassan was Mr. Cannes even before he sold MediaLink to the festival’s parent company, Ascential. This week, with Cannes Lions 2019 kicking off, Kassan spins tales of Cannes past, present and yet to come. He also talks about the evolution of MediaLink two years after the acquisition. (Spoiler: It’s going well. Kassan just extended […]
The first slur against programmatic, dating to about 2008, was that RTB stood for “race to the bottom.” In the same year Jeff Zucker, then CEO of NBCU, decried the trade of “analog dollars for digital dimes.” Since then programmatic’s reputation – and its associated revenue value to media companies – has improved dramatically. But […]
Martin Sorrell has harsh words for his successor at WPP Group. During a wide-ranging interview on this week’s AdExchanger Talks podcast, Sorrell sharply questions decisions made by WPP’s current leadership in the year since he abdicated to start his own holding company, S4 Capital. He suggests WPP brass have executed poorly on a well-intentioned strategy […]
Today in the podcast studio, Criteo COO Mollie Spilman talks about what makes companies survive and thrive in the ever-changing digital advertising business. Criteo was the emblem of the wild growth in programmatic marketing, and remains the second-largest publicly-traded ad tech companies with a valuation of $1.3B. In the five years since Spilman joined to […]
Interpublic Group’s $2.3 billion purchase of Acxiom Marketing Services in 2018 shook the industry. And it reverberated into 2019 with Publicis Groupe’s follow-up acquisition of Epsilon. This week on the podcast, IPG Chief Data and Technology Officer Arun Kumar comes into the studio for a frank discussion of the deal and the larger trend of […]
What if Microsoft, and not Google, had acquired DoubleClick in 2007? What if Facebook hadn’t given up on its Atlas and LiveRail acquisitions? What if YouTube had stayed independent? In this episode, Beeswax CEO Ari Paparo comes to the studio for a game of “what if,” applying his encyclopedic knowledge of ad tech to a […]
It’s been almost a year since Vista Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in ad verification company Integral Ad Science. In the wake of the acquisition, the company appointed a new CEO, Lisa Utzschneider, to lead the company. In this episode, Utzschneider discusses her 20 years in senior revenue roles at Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo, […]
Facebook, Google and Amazon all possess near monopolies in their respective markets. Is there anything wrong with that? The presiding view has been that monopolies don’t matter as long as the consumer is better off, according to Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer at Publicis Groupe. “All of us get these platforms for free,” he says […]
