In the latest sign of massive change among ad agency hold cos, Mark Read is stepping down as leader of WPP. We unpack the impact of AI on agency hold cos and media, including WPP Media’s prediction that 2025 will be the first year in which the majority of ad spend flows through user-generated content.

This week’s PR Roundup looks at the reaction to ABC News not renewing veteran journalist Terry Moran’s contract, the latest Muck Rack State of Journalism report and a leaked memo regarding JPMorgan’s dipping employee morale.

Speaker brand Sonos is eager to have agentic AI surface operational efficiencies and handle B2B customer requests.  Speaker brand Sonos likes the sound of agentic AI so much that it is piloting an agent for its business-to-business customer portal.  The B2B ordering platform, which caters to Sonos’ custom integrators and distributors was in desperate need […]

The music festival market has seen explosive growth over the last 10 years, and all signs point to its continued upward trajectory for the next 10. But the landscape is shifting, and its evolution, in some sense, has created an identity crisis for the festival scene’s biggest players. Coachella and Burning Man tickets, which for […]

Former Netflix CMO Bozoma Saint John discusses how marketers need to understand culture and infuse their authentic selves into their work. Bozoma Saint John is unapologetically herself. No matter if that’s in the C-suite or the cast of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.   Saint John’s executive tenure includes chief marketing officer at Netflix, chief […]

On Thursday, French AI start-up Olyzon (pronounced “all eyes on” – more on that in a bit) announced $5 million in additional seed funding led by US-based venture capital firm Cassius Capital.

For three weeks, Marketecture Media CEO, veteran ad tech executive and podcaster Ari Paparo sat in a Virginia courtroom listening to testimony in the US Department of Justice’s landmark antitrust case against Google. 

The Trade Desk on Thursday announced its first native app built for use with a separate cloud or data warehouse. It’s called the Connector App on Snowflake. The idea is to more readily connect sales and conversion data from a brand or merchant with campaign optimization happening on TTD. “Until now, a lot of what […]

If there’s one thing the ad tech industry didn’t need, it was another three-letter acronym. But here we are. HWA. Last week, WPP Media launched Open Intelligence, touting it as the ad industry’s first LMM. LMMs, or Large Marketing Models, aren’t to be confused with LLMs, or Large Language Models. LLMs generate content, while LMMs […]

Google’s recent promise to bring more transparency to its Performance Max product—including better channel reporting and visibility into creative assets—is long overdue. It’s also not a coincidence. Years of litigation and a landmark antitrust ruling finally forced Google to acknowledge what the rest of the industry has long understood: You don’t have to control both […]