Ad Tech and Martech
Business Wire | October 03, 2023
PMG today announced the acquisition of Camelot Strategic Marketing & Media, one of the largest independent agency buyers of video, OTT, and CTV, and leaders across business and marketing transformation for more than 40 years. Headquartered in Dallas, TX, Camelot, whose marquee customers include Intuit, Charter Communications, Experian, Michaels, and Whole Foods, will join PMG, an independent, global full-funnel marketing and technology company headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas.
According to PMG’s CEO and Founder George Popstefanov, Camelot is a perfect complement to PMG’s hyper-focus on the customer. “As the landscape evolves rapidly, customers require agency partners that deliver a data-informed, tech-enabled, integrated solution obsessed with outcomes, not outputs. The acquisition of Camelot brings advanced expertise in CTV, OTT, traditional media, and measurement to further PMG’s full-funnel, fully integrated model.” He adds: “Camelot has built an unrivaled video practice leading the industry. Their commitment to innovation and furthering the video industry is well aligned with PMG’s technological advancements, automation, and innovation.”
The acquisition of Camelot is further evidence of PMG’s philosophy of always changing for the better.
With the addition of nearly 160 Camelotians, PMG continues to invest in transformation that drives material impact for our customers across media, strategy, analytics, creative, all enabled by technology. Our customers push us daily to help them solve their biggest business challenges. Our commitment to heightened accountability and driving business impact has allowed PMG to work side-by-side with the C-Suite of top brands to transform for the future, says Popstefanov.
The synergies between PMG and Camelot continue when it comes to employees. PMG has been named to AdAge Best Places to Work for eight consecutive years and touts a 90 percent employee retention rate over the last five years. “PMG’s commitment to people and culture was one of the first things that caught our eye. Doing the right thing is never easy, but it’s clear that PMG has prioritized its values even when it was difficult. Camelot has always believed that a happy workplace environment leads to consistently satisfied clients, and we are excited about the bright future ahead and what it means for our people and our customers,” says Sam Bloom, CEO of Camelot. Camelot has also earned top recognition for its workplace culture and commitments, including AdAge Best Places to Work, Inc. Best Workplaces, and Top 100 Places to Work by The Dallas Morning News.
The company integration begins immediately, and clients' needs will drive the timing of specific synergies across teams and capabilities. George Popstefanov will be the CEO of the combined company, driving the vision and ambition of nearly 700 PMGers worldwide.
About PMG
PMG is a global independent digital company that seeks to inspire people and brands that anything is possible. Driven by shared success, PMG uses business strategy and transformation, creative, media, and insights, along with our proprietary marketing intelligence platform Alli, to deliver Digital Made for Humans™. With offices in New York, London, Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin, Atlanta, and Cleveland, our team is made up of over 500 employees globally, and our work for brands like Apple, Nike, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, Gap Inc., Kohler, Momentive, Sephora, and Shake Shack has received top industry recognitions including Cannes Lions and Adweek Media Plan of the Year.
Named to AdAge’s 2023 A-List, MediaPost’s 2023 Independent Agency of the Year, and Adweek’s 2021 Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year, PMG has grown through commitments to continuous improvement, business integrity, and cultivating dynamic relationships. We are proud to be named among Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators, Fortune’s 2023 #1 Best Places to Work, and Best Workplaces for Women, and to be the only company named to Ad Age’s Best Places to Work eight years in a row. For more information about PMG, visit www.pmg.com.
About Camelot
Trailblazing through 40 years in the media and marketing industry, Camelot Strategic Marketing & Media, is a Dallas-based independent agency with over 150 employees in cities across the U.S. – including New York, Los Angeles, and Baltimore. They partner with intellectually curious, want-to-get smarter leaders from the world's biggest brands – from TurboTax to Whole Foods to Michaels – to provide media-agnostic, transparent, insight-driven media and marketing strategy and execution that drives stellar results. For more information on Camelot, visit camelotsmm.com.
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Advertiser Platforms
Business Wire | October 10, 2023
Streaming TV advertising is taking a step toward the future. This week, TV advertising agency Marketing Architects launched a new platform for CTV advertisers called Annika Streaming. Based on technology initially developed for linear TV, Annika Streaming buys CTV and streaming inventory more efficiently than current marketplace offerings allow. This enables performance brands to capitalize on streaming’s potential.
Annika’s development began six years ago when Marketing Architects built an AI-powered DSP for linear TV. The platform was designed to evaluate custom audience and performance criteria, set it against market trends and historical data, then calculate which media buys will drive the best ROI for individual brands. The result was a linear TV marketplace that delivered premium inventory for TV advertisers without premium price tags.
But as viewership shifted to streaming and connected TV, it was essential brands follow consumers to the channel. Unfortunately for performance marketers, streaming’s promise of advanced targeting and measurement capabilities has been overshadowed by its high prices, typically 5-10X higher than linear TV.
To close this gap, Marketing Architects spent the last two years building a proprietary streaming capability, bringing the efficient prices Annika achieved in linear into streaming and CTV. Now, Annika Streaming solves some of the biggest challenges for performance marketers on the channel.
Pricing: Annika Streaming obtains rates significantly more efficient than industry-leading third-party DSPs. These are achieved through a data-driven approach that benefits streaming publishers and advertisers alike.
Targeting:The platform offers several layers of contextual, geographic, and dayparting targeting capabilities, plus retargeting.
Distribution: Annika is fully integrated with dozens of streaming publishers and buys inventory available on Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Firestick, and smart TVs.
Measurement: With Annika, advertisers get access to multiple measurement models running in parallel, including IP address tracking and holdout groups for incrementality testing.
Marketing Architects clients had first access to Annika Streaming, which they are currently using to complement linear TV campaigns. The platform is available to select new brands starting this week. Learn more by visiting marketingarchitects.com/streaming.
About Marketing Architects
Marketing Architects is an All-Inclusive TV agency that rebuilt the traditional agency model to help brands drive profitable growth. Founded in Minneapolis, Marketing Architects has spent 25 years building homegrown technology to solve TV's pricing, measurement and scale challenges. For more information, please visit www.marketingarchitects.com.
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Ad Tech and Martech
Integral Ad Science | October 19, 2023
Integral Ad Science (Nasdaq: IAS), a leading global media measurement and optimization platform, today announced a new Made for Advertising (MFA) AI-driven site detection and avoidance product. The company's MFA site technology aims to improve transparency into advertiser campaign quality, identify where spend is being allocated, and inform optimizations to minimize waste on MFA sites.
MFA sites are web pages featuring low quality content (e.g. spam sites, or ad farms) created solely to serve ads, and are optimized to perform well against traditional verification metrics, such as viewability. However, advertising spend on these sites does not drive meaningful outcomes, such as conversions or brand lift.
IAS's new product leverages AI to uncover MFA sites at scale, allowing advertisers to take back control of their media quality and cut down on wasted spend. During Alpha testing, IAS delivered comprehensive campaign analysis demonstrating superior MFA site identification for some of the world's largest advertisers and agencies.
IAS's product supports the Association of National Advertisers' (ANA) recent definition of MFA sites and incorporates characteristics such as ad-to-content ratio, ad refresh rate, and the source of the traffic coming to the site to classify a site as MFA. According to the ANA's Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study, 21% of all advertisement impressions measured were served on MFA sites.
Our MFA product was built to deliver unprecedented transparency to advertisers and provide them with the ability to both detect and avoid MFA sites in order to redirect their ad spend to publishers that drive a return, said Yannis Dosios, Chief Commercial Officer, Integral Ad Science. The industry faces a significant challenge in combating MFA sites. By leveraging AI, we have developed a scalable way to identify these low quality sources of inventory and improve overall campaign performance.
Advertisers and their agencies need confidence that the industry is converging on agreement about the specific websites that compose the MFA category. By training its model against Jounce Media's widely adopted list of MFA domains and incorporating signals from Sincera, IAS has developed the industry's first pressure tested solution for detecting and blocking MFA at scale.
"Advertisers should recognize that MFA websites can account for a significant portion of their overall campaign and should determine, independently, if MFA sites fit with their brand suitability standards for content and user experience. We applaud IAS for taking action after we released the findings from our programmatic transparency report and for supporting our definition of MFA," said Bill Duggan, ANA group executive vice president. "We have found that awareness of MFA sites among the ANA community of media professionals to be limited – which is surprising. We look forward to further developments from IAS around MFA site identification and ad spend optimization to help better educate and inform buyers."
The IAS MFA product completed alpha testing in early October 2023, and is available now as a beta measurement offering for select customers. General availability is expected to expand to all customers in early 2024.
About Integral Ad Science
Integral Ad Science (IAS) is a leading global media measurement and optimization platform that delivers the industry's most actionable data to drive superior results for the world's largest advertisers, publishers, and media platforms. IAS's software provides comprehensive and enriched data that ensures ads are seen by real people in safe and suitable environments, while improving return on ad spend for advertisers and yield for publishers. Our mission is to be the global benchmark for trust and transparency in digital media quality. For more information, visit integralads.com.
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