Marketers

During his three years at Kellogg Company, Bob Arnold became a poster child for programmatic buying at the brand marketer level. Arnold, who recently quit cereal to join Google, presented his rules for programmatic at the Association of National Advertisers’ Media Leadership Conference in Boca Raton, Fla., on Tuesday. His key message: Don’t let complexity […]

Programmatic buying is on marketers’ radar, with new survey data from the Association of National Advertisers  finding strong adoption of platform-driven buying across a range of media types. But familiar barriers continue to hinder adoption, including a lack of understanding about what programmatic is. Thirty-nine percent of respondents to the ANA survey – which was conducted […]

Skullcandy knows that getting consumers to buy multiple designer headphones and earbuds can be a tough sell. After issuing an initial public stock offering at $20 a share in 2011, the Park City, Utah-based company’s stock fell as low as $4.80 last May and hovered at $9.54 on Friday. The company has vowed to turn […]

Digital think tank and research consultancy L2 is looking to corner the market on prestige brand and CPG strategy. A new investment round of $16.5 million from General Catalyst Partners (a HubSpot investor) received Wednesday also underscores the intersection of the management consultancy and digital agency. “The two primary buckets for this investment will be […]

“Marketer’s Note” is a weekly column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. It is written by Joanna O’Connell, Director of Research, AdExchanger.   As part of my ongoing look at companies’ migration toward a customer lifecycle management approach (or not, as I must always point out, as this is by no means […]

The world’s biggest advertiser wants more targeting. According to comments made Friday by Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller, Procter & Gamble (P&G) has seized the audience segmentation opportunities presented by mobile, social and other digital media. Meanwhile the relatively weak targeting of the TV channel has stripped away some of its appeal, he said. “[Digital […]

The proliferation of DVR services, set-top boxes and IPTV services has created a wealth of data marketers can mine. But the process by which one can purchase these targeted, data-driven ads is still in its infancy. For instance, extending programmatic buying concepts to “advanced television” (a custom system that algorithmically optimizes media against an advertiser’s […]

The advertiser imperative is simple: send the right message to the right user at the right time. The growth of the connected car has presented even more opportunities for brands to reach consumers in a context-specific environment and some service providers have risen to the challenge, like online radio company Pandora, which just began rolling […]

Yahoo is mothballing some of the most prominent and widely known parts of its ad tech system, including pioneering real-time bidding platform Right Media and its data management software Genome, executives announced at the company’s CES presentation. And in their place, Yahoo Advertising will serve as the umbrella for a variety of capabilities, with the […]

Pandora’s evolution bodes well for advertisers looking for enhanced targeting opportunities in a multiscreen world. At CES 2014, Pandora and WPP Group media agency Mindshare toured how the online radio service is acclimating to an omnichannel environment, in the process developing enhanced personalization capabilities that both Pandora’s users and advertisers can leverage. At the core […]

Skills in data-driven disciplines are in high demand, and many marketers are picking up the quantitative skills they need on the job. The problem, said John Deighton, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, is that while many marketers obtain quantitative skills as they work, business students, including marketers, are at a disadvantage […]

Enterprise software companies are racing to soak up marketers’ budgets by building out their marketing suites with acquisitions, partnerships and new products. Those players include Adobe, Salesforce.com, Oracle and IBM. As the year comes to a close, here’s a snapshot look at these companies’ marketing stacks and some of the gaps that each company has […]

LinkedIn delved deeper into marketing with its launch Tuesday of Showcase Pages, through which companies can feature specific products within their branded pages. Designed as an extension of LinkedIn’s Company Pages, users that follow Showcase Pages will receive updates on products, events or other content. “We tell marketers, ‘Yes, we’re a professional network, but people […]

As marketers and advertisers struggle to access the right data to deliver customer experiences that are timely, relevant, and engaging, a growing number are turning to data management platforms (DMPs) for help. While the specific features vary, a DMP essentially collects data from first- and third-party data sources, and organizes and distributes the information to […]

Delivering ads to consumers across multiple screens has become critical for advertisers as more people divide their attention between various devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, in addition to watching TV. Marketers are taking note and ramping up multiscreen budgets, according to a new report from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Nielsen. […]

At the Advertising Research Foundation’s Industry Leader Forum yesterday in New York, one point of contention was around marketing mix modeling. Marketing mix modeling is “a core part of our decision-making,” remarked Patrick McGraw, director of consumer and market at P&G, during a panel about measuring marketing effectiveness. “It helps us develop a better understanding […]

Oracle has acquired cloud content marketing platform Compendium for an undisclosed sum. Oracle, which bought marketing automation company Eloqua for $871 million last December, has since formalized that deal into the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud and has plans to improve “top-of-the-funnel” customer engagement with its acquisition of Compendium, according to the company. These moves are […]

HP Autonomy, the British software maker that Hewlett Packard acquired two years ago for $10.3 billion and wrote down in a multibillion-dollar loss, is hoping to erase some of that bad press with its new HP Digital Marketing Hub. The Marketing Hub is a cloud-based interface that lets marketers identify customer segments, build prescriptive models […]

The convergence of creativity and technology is shifting the dialog between consumers, agencies and brands. An on-stage discussion at the DMA 2013 conference in Chicago attempted to chart that shift by answering the question, “Does data drive the big idea or vice versa?” On the panel were Doug Bryan, a principal engineer at RichRelevance; Ben […]

As an industry, data-driven marketing drives $156 billion in revenues and contributes 675,000 jobs to the US economy alone. These figures, published and heralded onstage to thousands of marketers this morning by Direct Marketing Association president and CEO Linda Woolley, were part of a 100-page Data-Driven Marketing Economy report distributed today at the DMA 2013 […]

In the past week, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify – two companies whose aim is to ensure that brand advertisers get the kind of exposure and inventory they expect – unveiled their respective tools designed to limit, if not eliminate, the waste caused by fraudulent traffic – namely “bots.” The new tools, as outlined by […]

“Marketer’s Note” is a weekly column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. It is written by Joanna O’Connell, Director of Research, AdExchanger Research.   Having just returned from the three-day ANA Masters of Marketing conference, held this past weekend in Phoenix, I thought it worth sharing my thoughts with marketers on what […]

Breaking: The sizzle reel still has legs. Two thousand attendees at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual Masters of Marketing conference were treated to numerous examples of the genre Friday, as senior marketers from Chrysler, Walmart, MARS and Coca-Cola showed off their favorite TV spots. Repeatedly. But while the raw storytelling power of television remains […]

Clearly Criteo is feeling no pressure to “go quiet” following its-F-1 filing last week. President Greg Coleman appeared at Advertising Week yesterday for a rapid-fire session with marketers. At the outset of the panel discussion, it was made clear “there won’t be any questions [taken] about Criteo going public.” Coleman was accompanied onstage at the […]

Last week, Cologne, Germany became a hub of advertising news, discussions and deals when roughly 26,000 marketers and vendors descended on Germany’s fourth largest city for the 5th annual Dmexco conference. In many respects, Dmexco is like any other large ad tech conference with breakout sessions and an exhibit hall, but done on a much […]

More advertisers are running in-house “agency” units in 2013 than did five years ago, according to a new survey from the Association of National Advertisers. The change is driven in part by the weak global economy, but also could be chalked up to digital acceleration – including data/analytics and social imperatives. The survey of 203 […]

With agencies continuing to voice concern about their battles with clients’ procurement officers, some high-profile agency executives have called to pay for performance. Perhaps they should look no further than today’s direct-response business — traditionally driven by search advertising — where agencies like WPP GroupM’s Quisma have been operating for more than a decade. Quisma continues […]

Much has been made of the need for marketing and IT to forge closer ties. But a new study from Accenture finds only 10% of executives feel the collaboration is going well. And according to the report “The CMO-CIO Disconnect,” marketers may be to blame. Accenture surveyed more than 400 senior marketing professionals and 250 IT […]

Fees remain the most common way for marketers to compensate advertising agencies, according to the 2013 Trends in Agency Compensation survey released by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). Out of 98 client-side marketers, 81% indicated that they continue to use some type of fee compensation for various agency types and services. Labor-based fees, which […]

Little Rock, AR-based Acxiom is gearing up to launch an “Audience Operating System,” for cross-channel and cross-device ad targeting, in September. “The world is coming to us as big data and insight-based decisioning is exactly what we do,” CEO Scott Howe said during the company’s earnings call. “It is also exactly our vision for the […]