As Mindshare Chief Digital Officer Norm Johnston recalls, the impetus for Content+ occurred during the Cannes Lions advertising festival over several glasses of rosé. (What else?) Content+ is a partnership between media agency Mindshare and its WPP sister, digital agency POSSIBLE, that launched last week in London, Singapore, Shanghai and North America. “What came from […]
While marketers have long rallied around tent-pole events like the Super Bowl, the focus is no longer solely on the big-ticket TV buys or stadium sponsorships. But big games are still valuable to advertisers. While ads tied directly to major sporting events still command the most money because of their enormous draw, marketers are also […]
Tech and media agency Assembly, which originated last March when MDC Partners combined multiple agency assets into a single unit, has added digital video into its Dynamic Creative Versioning tool mix. “We’ve developed a technology that allows us, in real time, to test, learn and reapply content,” said Martin Cass, CEO of Assembly and former […]
Media and creative are merging, and agencies are rushing to become experts in areas where traditionally they were not. Full-service agencies like Hill Holliday and MARC USA, for instance, are fast-tracking their media planning and buying abilities. On the flip side, media agencies like GroupM’s Maxus are working to build stronger ties with creatives. Count […]
Independent full-service agency MARC USA is beefing up its digital planning and buying prowess following its acquisition of Boston-based media agency Results:Digital in September. The Pittsburgh agency has 270 employees and $370 million in annual billings, according to Jason Russo, who founded Results:Digital in 2011 and now serves as president of MARC’s Boston office. MARC’s […]
Healthcare and advertising is a complex pairing because of a variety of regulations around consumer targeting. While the sector has been slow to adopt programmatic, Publicis’ health arm, Publicis Health Media (PHM), is diving into automation with its programmatic platform AOD Health, released in October though a partnership with VivaKi, though the company declined to […]
Matt Mobley has spent more than 14 years tinkering with databases. He served as Acxiom’s VP of European consulting, followed by a stint as SVP of solutions consulting at Epsilon, and is now chief marketing technology officer (CMTO) for CRM and database marketing agency Merkle. Under CEO David Williams, Merkle has moved in on search, mobile and […]
KBM Group might be the data services unit of WPP agency Wunderman, but don’t think of it as just a database manager. “Our job is to provide strategic leadership, not simply be a database vendor when clients need one,” said William Burkart, who became KBM Group’s president and COO in late September. So if you […]
Publicis Groupe will snap up Sapient, a digital-centric agency and communications company known for experience design and digital-retail integrations, for $3.7 billion. The all-cash transaction comes directly on the heels of Publicis’s acquisition of programmatic platform RUN, and may bring some closure to the holding company’s disastrous courtship of Omnicom Group. Sapient CEO Alan Herrick (AdExchanger Q&A) will become CEO of Publicis.Sapient, a new […]
Interpublic Group’s (IPG) integrated agency Hill Holliday has launched its own programmatic unit, headed up by EVP and Chief Media Officer Cindy Stockwell. Faithful followers of the agency will recall this isn’t the first time Hill Holliday has offered programmatic-type services. But changing client demands spurred the agency’s decision two months ago to move away […]
After being summarily booted from the board of LG Ads in late 2022, Alphonso’s founding team has won its lawsuit against LG Electronics.
According to emails seen by AdExchanger that were sent to Amazon customers this week, Amazon is officially naming integration partners to offload clients of the Sizmek ad suite, now the Amazon Ad Server.
Given the deprecation of third-party cookies and the reemergence of contextual targeting, 2024 could be a big year for in-game ads – so long as game publishers position themselves as a source of premium inventory.
This was such a busy year in CTV land that we had to launch a dedicated newsletter just to keep up with all the trends, from measurement, currency, targeting and attribution to streaming data, identity, supply-path optimization and new ad formats – just to name a few.
Who got bought in 2023, and who did the buying? Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of the most notable ad tech M&A activity from this past year (with a few media and agency deals tossed in for good measure).
Snowflake has acquired Samooha, a startup that develops software to make clean room technology accessible to marketers who aren’t necessarily SQL wizards or data scientists.
