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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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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Ad Tech and Martech
Business Wire | October 05, 2023
OpenX Technologies, Inc., one of the world’s leading omnichannel supply-side platforms, today announced a milestone partnership with Cedara, the Carbon Intelligence Platform. With this integration, OpenX becomes the first digital advertising company to offer automated emissions measurement on campaigns, reduced campaign emissions, and a custom carbon offset portfolio solution for remaining campaign emissions via Cedara’s platform.
By pairing Cedara’s media emissions reduction and offset capabilities with OpenX’s status as the first Net-Zero adtech company, this partnership leads the industry’s sustainability initiative with best-in-class solutions for measuring and reducing emissions both at a corporate level and in media distribution.
This fully integrated solution will enable buyers to:
sync organizational emissions data with media buys
access highly curated and third-party certified projects
achieve transparency and customization into how and what offsets are leveraged through the creation of custom offset portfolios
seamlessly onboard and measure emissions from OpenX’s campaigns
Cedara provides automated omnichannel emissions measurement and deep business intelligence across both organizational and campaign-level emissions for advertisers and the media supply chain. Paired with OpenX’s comprehensive media activity data, this partnership enables transparent and accurate emissions measurement to deliver a truly sustainable supply path for buyers.
We are thrilled to partner with OpenX, as they have a long-term commitment to sustainability and are consistent innovators. Our partnership gives buyers an end-to-end, sustainable programmatic product that they simply can’t get anywhere else, said Eric Shih, COO at Cedara.
“With Cedara, we are able to offer an end-to-end solution that enables brands to measure the impact of their digital activity and provides control over and transparency into how and where quality offsets are used while delivering performance across our publisher portfolio,” said Joseph Worswick, VP EMEA and Head of Global Sustainability at OpenX. “In keeping with OpenX’s commitment to our own emissions reduction, we’re excited to see more businesses successfully build sustainability solutions as it shows the demand from digital advertising is growing.”
About Cedara
Cedara, founded in 2021, is on a mission to help businesses decarbonize and to build a more sustainable future for society. With its end-to-end climate management software platform, Cedara enables organizations of any size, along with their employees, to measure, reduce, offset and report on all carbon emissions. Cedara adopts a high-impact, data-driven approach to develop transformative solutions for enterprises and their partners to accelerate the shift to a climate-friendly economy. To learn more, please visit cedara.io.
About OpenX
OpenX is a supply-side platform that is a leader in advertising technology, and is helping to create a world where the open web thrives. The company powers advertising on web, mobile, and connected TV formats, enabling marketers to reach their target audience across OpenX’s global network of publishers. OpenX works with more than 130,000 premium publisher domains and receives more than 300 billion ad requests every day. OpenX is a certified CarbonNeutral® company and is verified for having fulfilled their SBTi Net-Zero targets. Visit the company’s website at www.openx.com.
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