Big news: Publicis is buying Epsilon for $4.4B to bolster its first-party data (audience targeting) capabilities. This is the largest acquisition ever for Publicis since being founded in 1926.
Why this matters: The future of advertising is audience targeted and holding companies such as Publicis are playing catch up through acquisitions.
Big news: Turner ad inventory is now being targeted with AT&T subscriber data (mobile and pay-TV) for more targeted advertising and improved post-campaign measurement. This was discussed as a major benefit of AT&T’s purchase of Warner Media last year.
Quote from Donna Speciale — President of Ad Sales @ Turner:
“I have been a little disappointed in the adoption in the audience area, and this, to me, is going to really help create and speed up the adoption because I think clients are now going to see a lot more results of what audience buying can do for their business, especially using the AT&T data, and really start driving business outcomes for them,”
Big news: IPG has acquired Acxiom’s Marketing Solutions (AMS) group for $2.3B.
What does AMS do? AMS is a data services and analytics company with data on 2B+ consumers.
Fox will make inventory from 28 stations in 17 markets available through WideOrbit.
These stations currently reach 37% of U.S. television homes.
Buying ads targeted directly to customer data (CRM) is coming to another major platform.
Neustar will be the onboarding partner.
Key findings on programmatic TV from a survey conducted by Adobe:
1) 28% of decision-makers plan to increase amount of $ going to programmatic TV
2) 62% of above group are increasing $ to reach more targeted audience
Nielsen will begin including set-top-box data from Comcast in its local TV ratings.
Why is this a big deal? Comcast has 23m cable subscribersand Nielsen is the only measurement provider with access to that data.
WideOrbit’s programmatic platform (WO Programmatic) for local TV has surpassed 1,000 stations.
