• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, February 10, 2014

This week the Interactive Advertising Bureau is having its annual meeting. During his keynote, new IAB Chairman Vivek Shah came out with both guns blazing, telling media buyers to stop devaluing digital media by allowing themselves to be defrauded because it looks good on paper. He went on to say: "We have taken a perfect product and by our own actions we have made it imperfect. It's been a dirty secret we've been willing to keep. Bogus impressions won't infect the system if you don’t buy them, Mr. Agency Trading Desk ... You don’t go after drug dealers. You go after people taking the drugs." Hmm. Looks like there may some housecleaning going on over the course of the next year or two.

Watch out, Boston ad agencies. Devito/Verdi is about to eat your lunch. The New York agency has quietly made significant inroads into the very insular Boston ad community. It scooped up Legal Sea Foods and then the Herb Chambers car dealer account because Chambers loved the Legal Sea Foods account so much. And just last fall, the agency nabbed a branding project for area health insurer Fallon Health. While Ellis Verdi says he didn't target Boston specifically, he is considering plans to open a Boston office. Watch your back, Boston.

There's something going on over at Ford's ad agency Team Detroit. According to COO Mark LaNeve, the agency is "becoming digital centric" but apparently, it's more than just a focus on digital media. LaNeve adds: "It's not an initiative or program, but an evolution bordering on a transformation of the agency." While that must sound like the usual fluff you hear from agency big wigs, in this case, the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. According to Advertising Age's 100 Leading National Advertisers, in 2011 Ford became the first automaker to spend more on unmeasured (search, online, social, digital, etc.) than it does on traditional media. Currently, the brand spends upwards of $1.2 billion on unmeasured media, and Team Detroit played a large part in that shift.

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