Month: October 2018

One of the key themes that resonated with marketers at Brandweek last week was the need for brands to be human, or more specifically, empathetic. Data and technology will only take the customer on their journey so far. To achieve emotional connections, “customer centricity,” explains Glen Hartman, head of Accenture Interactive, North America, should be…

Benefit Cosmetics pulled off a hair-raising stunt that’s scored the brand its third Guinness World Record, and this one came just in time for National Brow Day, which is today. The new record is for the most people filling in their eyebrows simultaneously–295 people participated in the stunt on Sept. 28 in San Francisco. Maggie…

U.S. suburbs are evenly divided politically, but some have a clear Democratic or Republican tilt. Poverty has increased more sharply in the suburbs than in urban or rural counties.

The post 5 facts about U.S. suburbs appeared first on Pew Research Center.

While there’s a lot of concern about an increasing digital divide between the haves and the have-nots, there’s hope for small business in automation. The tools to create, buy and test ads have gotten easier to use and can now be accessed directly by marketers regardless of company size, budget or level of social media…

Nielsen is reviewing “strategic alternatives” to selling its entire company, the company told investors this month. The TV ratings giant is reportedly under pressure from hedge fund Elliott Management Corp. “All options are being weighed,” a Nielsen spokesperson told AdExchanger. “The company has hired external advisers to conduct a full review and the board is… Continue reading »

The post Who Will Buy Nielsen? A Few Possibilities appeared first on AdExchanger.

“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 Neil Sweeney, founder at Killi. During the lead-up to the rollout of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there was a ton of coverage about the good it might… Continue reading »

The post The CCPA’s Potential Impacts That No One Is Talking About appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Sridhar Out One of Google’s key ad executives is riding his horse off into the VC sunset, Forbes reports. SVP Ads and Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy will depart the Googleplex for a role with Greylock Ventures. Sridhar helped Google’s ad platform business grow from $1.5… Continue reading »

The post German Pubs Unite To Save The Cookie; Pinterest To Hit $1B In Ad Revenue By 2020 appeared first on AdExchanger.

So you want to be in the subscriptions business? Before you start drafting a press release about this exciting new direction, make sure you’ve accounted for new costs that crop up when you’re chasing consumer revenue instead of advertiser budgets.

While many of these won’t be necessary at the very beginning, they start seeming essential pretty quickly, especially if you want to apply any kind of rigor to the work of acquiring and retaining customers. Here’s what you’ll need:

The post Inside the hidden costs of a subscription publisher appeared first on Digiday.

The ongoing demand for integration in the agency industry is experiencing collateral damage: the dissolution of individual agency brands.

At Publicis, the iconic Razorfish brand is slowly being phased out, part of a larger plan that will fold the agency into Publicis.Sapient. An agency spokesman said that the Razorfish brand does still exist in some markets, based on client needs. In Asia, for example, sources said that it did not exist on its own any more, while in New York, it now exists as Sapient.Razorfish.

While slightly different, the merger of digital agency VML and legacy creative company Y&R to create VMLY&R is also indicative of the trend. The idea is to combine the two agencies’ capabilities. In a statement, newly installed WPP CEO Mark Read called it a step to building a “new, simpler WPP that provides clients with a fully integrated offering.”

This merger came just a year after VML absorbed Rockfish, an e-commerce-focused digital shop.

VMLY&R’s new CEO, Jon Cook, said that for clients, it’s been a bit of a toss-up. “There is a healthy demand where clients appreciate the simplicity of constructs,” he said. “But there is still an appropriate and healthy demand also for an agency brand. If there hadn’t been, we could have named the new company something like ‘LaserFrog.’”

Still, client demands have affected name-brands, especially those inside holding companies. And that’s because a holding company’s own rationale has shifted. Created ostensibly for economies of scale, holding companies mostly served the purpose of being able to have different clients within the same company and avoid any perception of conflict.

But as the market shifted, the holding company’s inherently siloed structure, with multiple P&Ls, is being called into question. There’s also new competition from consulting firms, which are making their mark by offering increasingly integrated services that do everything from design to digital to business transformation.

But in this market, individual “brands” could matter less.

A top holding company agency exec, who declined to speak on the record so as not to worry her colleagues, said that in her experience, clients are just asking for more. She’s seen more global clients simply ask for customized groups of people — top talent from across the holding company — and to get a diversity of the agency brands. “They don’t care if a certain brand is involved. But they do like being told that this brief is being solved by groups from three different agencies, for example.”

Greg Paull, co-founder and principal of marketer consultancy R3, has found more demand for the “team” concept that sees multiple groups within holding companies come together to offer supposed bespoke offerings for clients. “And in some ways, advertisers care more about the people that work on the account, rather than the agency name,” said Paull. “The dirty secret in agencies is that senior management spends half their time pursuing new business and not working on client work. In some ways, this is an attempt to try rectify that.”

Ray Velez, the global chief technology officer at Razorfish, said that Razorfish’s continued evolution is par for the course. Founded in 1994 as a web development company, it went through multiple iterations before being taken private in 2003 and renamed as SBI.Razorfish, then renamed again as Avenue A/Razorfish following an acquisition by AQuantive in 2004. After being owned by Microsoft for two years, Publicis then acquired the company in 2009. In 2016, it merged with Publicis’ SapientNitro to form SapientRazorfish.

“There is a tension here,” said Velez, who has been with the company for 20 years. “You want to encourage and grow collaboration and expertise and best practices.” Velez said that traditionally, advertising has always operated within silos across agency brands. But as client demands change, there is more need for integration, especially inside holding company structures.

“We have to keep this as brand boundaries start to go away,” said Velez.

Paull said that more clients are demanding that holding groups are more synergistic across agencies — something that has to changed the role of individual agency brands. “Publicis in particular went to a lot of effort to buy a lot of digital assets,” said Paull. “Through a number of mergers and acquisitions and realignments, DigitasLBI, Razorfish and Sapient have become a bit of a melange. The challenge is for these individual brands to stand for something. It’s been a challenge for them to create this identity and positioning.

For digital agencies particularly, said Paull, this may be harder, partially because of an advertiser mindset that still tends to only hire digital shops on a project basis. That means “brands” can matter even less.

One exception to this, say industry observers, are independent companies like Wieden + Kennedy and Droga5, which continue to see immense growth. “We’ve seen that indie brands are more competitive and hungrier than holding company brands,” said Paull. “These agencies have a clear position and competitive approach that keeps resonating.”

The post Why agency ‘brand names’ matter less appeared first on Digiday.