IRIS.TV, a content data platform, has partnered with GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, to leverage the IRIS_ID “as the primary method for accessing video-level data enriched by contextual and brand-suitability data […]
GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, today announced the expansion of its Media Inclusion Initiative (MII) to include a 5% pledge to allocate spend across Black, Hispanic, AAPI and LGBTQ+ owned […]
As part of an ongoing commitment to “reinvest” ad budgets supporting “credible” news publishers who practice “responsible” journalism around the world, GroupM on Tuesday announced a deal using a nonprofit organization to vet the quality of local, national and international news sites for programmatic media buys. The initiative, which GroupM describes as an “industry first,” is part of its ongoing “Back to News” push, and gives GroupM clients access to vetted and high-quality ad inventory on news sites vetted by global nonprofit Internews.
Brian Wieser is exiting as global president-business intelligence of WPP’s GroupM unit. Wieser, who announced late last year that he was turning over day-to-day operations of GroupM’s forecasting and business intelligence to successor Kate Scott-Dawkins, has not disclosed what he plans to do next, but at least part of it will continue being co-host with Scott-Dawkins on their weekly This Week Next Week podcast.
A post-pandemic ad-spend boom has already begun to recede. Two of the world’s biggest media-buying firms — WPP’s GroupM and Interpublic Group’s Magna — projected a slowdown in the rate of ad-sales growth for both 2022 and 2023, citing factors that include a reduced pace of business in China as well as a pullback by several key advertising categories in the face of inflation and the possibility of a recession.
With a little more than a month before the Big 3 agency forecasting units release their year-end outlooks amid weakening economic signals, GroupM at least appears to be standing pat. “We still end up in the mid-single-digit growth rate for this quarter and nothing that is inconsistent with what we published at the beginning of this year,” GroupM Global President of Business Intelligence Brian Wieser said in this week’s edition of the This Week Next Week podcast he co-hosts with Kate Scott-Dawkins.
Exclusives
GroupM within the next month will publish findings of a one-year analysis of various methods currently used by the ad industry for calculating the impact media has on carbon emission and plans for it to become an industry standard by the end of the year.
A week after Publicis’ Zenith unit reduced its forecast for worldwide ad spending growth this year, GroupM followed suit. While both agencies characterized their downgrades as minor, their back-to-back adjustments — -1.1 and 1.3 percentage points, respectively — signal volatility in the global economy has taken some steam off an expansionary advertising marketplace. Interestingly, GroupM actually boosted its U.S. forecast for 2022 up 0.3 points to a growth rate of 12.8% in 2022.
Media buyer GroupM and measurement company iSpot.TV have completed a study that found that 8% to 10% of connected TV ad impressions are being counted as delivered when the TV is turned off.
In the middle of an upfront in which measurement is a key issue, one of the biggest media buyers in the world is making its position clear on what it will use for currency in 2022-23 and how it is preparing for the future. GroupM said it will continue to transact using Nielsen data for the upfronts. But it also said it will be using alternative currencies, including outcome-based approaches, with a dozen of its largest clients to shadow its Nielsen-based deals.
While advertisers and agencies can not by themselves eliminate dangerous and destructive content online, they do have a role to play as they also work to avoid misspending money and inviting regulations that could hurt business, GroupM said in a new report on brand safety.
One of the most telling analyses to come out of the Big 3 year-end 2021 advertising forecasts was this chart (see above) pushed by GroupM to illustrate its analysis of the share of ad budgets going into digital media vs. TV for big advertisers vs. the overall advertising market. The analysis, which varies somewhat by country, shows an overall consistent pattern that the world’s largest brands still budget significantly higher percentages of their ad spending in TV than the overall advertising marketplace.
The global advertising industry will notch higher growth this year than previously expected as brands are relying more heavily on search engine and social media companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms to reach customers during the pandemic, according to two ad industry forecasts released today.
Despite unprecedented disruptions over the past couple of years — including a global pandemic, economic recessions, social unrest and issues with various supply-chain issues — the global ad economy is poised for sustainable growth, but its composition will be very different going forward, according to a new report from GroupM.
The outlook for U.S. ad spending has improved considerably for this year, as have estimates for 2020, which included a recession attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a mid-year update released this morning by GroupM’s Business Intelligence unit. GroupM now projects U.S. ad spending will expand 16.5% — 22.3% if the incremental impact of 2020 political ad spending is removed — a marked improvement from estimates it released in its last update in March (+9.1% and + 14.9%, respectively for total U.S. ad growth and excluding political ad spending).
On Tuesday, GroupM announced that an inaugural group of 20 clients has pledged to spend at least 2% of their total annual media budgets in Black-owned media companies through the firm’s recently launched Media Inclusion Initiative. The program is designed to help clients invest in diverse media companies and content creators with an initial focus on Black-owned media.
More encouraging news that ad demand is rebounding from its recent recession is coming out of GroupM’s Business Intelligence team. “Global advertising is improving,” GroupM Business Intelligence Global President Brian Wieser writes in an update, adding that ad spending is “even going positive in some markets.”
TVN Focus On Advertising | TVB Driving Impressions-Based Ad Buying
“In our current multiplatform world, everything is now being sold on an impression basis except linear TV,” says TVB President Steve Lanzano. “We want local TV stations and the ad agencies to be able to sell and buy that way, too. We have been working with the buying agencies for some time behind the scenes and now we are going public.”
TVN Focus | Ad Buyers See An Opening For McMahon’s XFL
“The XFL has a good chance to become a small, viable opportunity for clients based on its WWE ownership backing,” says Adam Schwartz of Horizon Media. “I don’t think the XFL will ever become the NFL, but if the product is strong, it will get viewers to watch and, perhaps, to gamble on the games [and] that will draw more viewer interest.”
WPP said Christian Juhl, who currently leads GroupM’s ad buying agency Essence, will assume the new role on Oct. 1. GroupM buys tens of billions of dollars of commercial space on behalf of advertisers. One of Juhl’s biggest remits will be to evolve the company’s partnerships with ad and tech vendors.
Fox is the latest TV network to join Project OAR, the TV consortium designed to standardize addressable TV buying. The group also announced the formation of an agency advisory committee that includes Publicis Media, Omnicom Media Group, GroupM, IPG’s Magna Global, Dentsu Aegis, Havas and Horizon Media.
GroupM issued a revised ad-spending forecast today for the U.S. predicting underlying growth (which excludes political advertising) of 5.8% for 2019. That’s just slightly lower than the 6% underlying growth GroupM says the U.S. market achieved in 2018. The WPP media unit also forecast underlying growth of 4.8% for 2020.
As global president of business intelligence, the research analyst will lead the company’s marketplace analytics, forecasting and publishing.
The new offering is designed to help TV advertisers target viewers more precisely across the spectrum of video platforms including broadcast, satellite and cable TV and the array of video-on-demand offerings tied to those channels; over-the-top providers and game consoles, all combined for scale.
WPP’s GroupM today announced it is imposing its viewability standards globally and strengthening them for social and mobile newsfeed environments. It’s also undertaking a research to study the performance of social and newsfeed video.
Mindshare, the GroupM agency, has absorbed sibling Ogilvy unit Neo, which becomes part of Mindshare’s newly formed Performance Group, the agencies have confirmed. The new unit also houses an operation called FAST (Future Adaptive Specialist Team) which focuses on marketing via addressable channels. For GroupM it’s the second big agency restructuring move in recent weeks, following its decision to fold Maxus into sibling media agency MEC. Neo was formed in 2006 as a digital media unit of Ogilvy.
After celebrating the benefits of robust ad spending in 2016, the U.S. media world may have to prepare for a hangover next year. Madison Avenue is seen paring back on the amount it spends in 2017 as advertisers ponder heavier investment in digital media and gauge the pulse of consumers under a mercurial new U.S. president, according to two of the ad sector’s biggest purchasers of commercials. While advertisers will spend more money overall, the amount of increase in their outlay from year to year is expected to narrow.
After serving since 2005 as chief investment officer for the North American operations of GroupM, the large media-buying operation that is part of ad-holding giant WPP, Scanzoni is moving to a new role – and the shift is indicative of a transformation of how Madison Avenue is buying commercial inventory across all media. He becomes president of investment, meaning he will oversee how advertiser dollars are allocated across TV, print, radio, digital and local media, as well as the burgeoning swell of analytic tools advertisers are tapping to help them determine their allocations.
The Future Of Agencies: Mining For Data
A new deal with BuzzFeed gives GroupM loads of data, which can be used for better targeting. The aim: Breakthrough campaigns. Rob Norman, chief digital officer at GroupM, talks about why the BuzzFeed deal was made, why big data is important, and how agencies are preparing for the future.
The company’s top forecaster — Adam Smith — provided some headline numbers for 2015 ad spending from a forthcoming new report during a conference call with analysts on Wednesday. GroupM now believes that total global spending growth for the year will be 4%, down from the 4.9% (to $538 billion) the firm had forecast earlier.
WPP’s GroupM has appointed David Michael chief information officer in North America. The position is new and the firm said Michael is responsible for IT delivery in North America. From authorizations to dashboards to human resources to finance, he will work with GroupM and its agencies to identify, enable and execute data-driven solutions which provide tech advantages and deliver efficiency.
Promising Predictions For 2015 Ad Spending
After two years of recession and five years of recovery, the worldwide media economy is finally getting back on track. Global ad spending finally will rise above its 2007-2008 pre-recession levels next year for the first time, according to a new forecast from GroupM. Worldwide spending will hit $534 billion this year, up 4.5 percent over 2013. In 2015, that will increase to $560 billion, up another 5 percent.
Broadcast Nets Making C7 Ad Deals
GroupM is striking agreements with broadcasters to do business on a C7 basis for its clients during upfronts, according to multiple people familiar with the talks. Actual commitments for ad time aren’t the focus; instead the parties are laying groundwork to do deals that consider commercial ratings over the course of a week instead of the current industry standard of three days.
Three new ad spending forecasts released Sunday night are pegging ad growth next year partly on the Winter Olympics, the World Cup and the mid-term elections in the U.S. It’s the first time in 20 years that a new platform is expanding overall ad spending without cannibalizing other media, one forecast said.
Less Optimistic Outlook For U.S. Ad Spending
Though there have been some economic bright spots for the United States this year, including the decline in unemployment and rebound of the housing market, true recovery is still a ways off, and that’s apparently making companies reluctant to invest in advertising. A new forecast from GroupM slashes its outlook for U.S. ad growth in 2013 from 2.7% to 1.8%.
WPP’s GroupM has won global buying duties for household products maker S.C. Johnson after a review. The account, with total spending approaching $1 billion, will be parked at Maxus, which also was awarded half of the client’s media planning account.
