The Shipyard disclosed plans to acquire Fahlgren Mortine for an undisclosed price. Both agencies are based in Columbus, Ohio. Fahlgren Mortine was founded in 1962 as a PR agency and has expanded its offering to include design, customer experience and other services. Under The Shipyard, led by CEO Rick Milenthal, the agency will maintain the Fahlgren Mortine brand and will have access to additional services including media buying, creative, and data and analytics. Fahlgren Mortine leadership will remain in place with CEO Neil Mortine, and Marty McDonald, who was named president in 2022. Mortine will also be named vice chairman for The Shipyard and Christine Turner will continue as president of Turner, a subsidiary of Fahlgren Mortine since 2014. Turner focuses on integrated communications for travel, tourism and active lifestyle brands with offices in New York City, Denver and Chicago. The combined company will have a team of nearly 400 across 10 U.S. offices with both B2C and B2B industry expertise. The seller is Eastport Holdings, which acquired the firm in 2018. The transaction is expected to close at the end of April. The transaction follows a nearly $60 million investment in The Shipyard by Alaris Equity Partners USA that the latter announced last August.
New York-based agency group Meet The People announced today that True Independent Holdings, parent company of True Media and other agencies, is joining the group. TIH will assume responsibility for general media services for the group. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2005 TIH has offices in the US and Canada and capabilities including media planning and buying, a programmatic trading desk, and a data and analytics unit, Jack Miller is founder and CEO. Meet The People agencies include VSA Partners, Public Label, Match Retail, Saltwater Collective and Swell Media. Tim Ringel is the founder and CEO. With the addition of TIH’s 200 plus employees, the headcount of the combined operation is over 750 employees. MTP is backed by Innovatus Capital Partners LLC, the New York-based portfolio management firm.
The Beyond Collective named Dan Southern as managing director for Frontier, its strategic growth consultancy. Southern's remit is to widen the company's capabilities. Previously, he was a managing partner, at Contagious, working across a range of clients, including AB InBev, Bayer Consumer Health, KraftHeinz, Mondelez International, Arla and Unilever. Southern reports to Zaid Al-Zaidy, CEO of The Beyond Collective. “Its independent ethos, fluid culture and combination of specialisms make it a place where clients can find brilliant collaborators, delivering transformative thinking. There are new frontiers emerging all around marketers right now,” Southern said of Frontier. Beyond Collective, an independent group of specialized agencies located in London, offers design, advertising, social, physical and virtual experiences, as well as media planning and buying. In February, Itsu, the restaurant and grocery advertiser, appointed Above & Beyond and Yonder Media to handle creative and media for its grocery food business following a competitive pitch. Itsu launched as a restaurant chain in 1997. Agencies include Frontier, Yonder Media, Above & Beyond and Collective Studios. Clients include AkzoNobel, Alzheimer’s Research UK and Vimto.
Raw Sugar Living has appointed a creative AOR for the first time. Minneapolis-based Periscope won the business after a competitive review, but the news was kept under wraps, only announced once initial work for the personal-care product was underway. The agency’s remit is to augment the next phase of the brand’s growth, following a successful retail expansion. Since 2014, Raw Sugar Living has sold high-quality, vegan-friendly products, such as body wash, hair care, scrubs, lotions and lip care. Periscope will develop brand strategy and creative campaigns. The assignment also includes connections planning and media strategy, along with media execution and optimization from media agency Rise. Both Rise and Periscope are Quad companies. Media strategy work for the brand has begun. A creative campaign will officially launch in summer 2024. The three 15-second interim campaign spots — “Confidence,” “Joy” and “Glee” — are running on Meta, TikTok, programmatic CTV and OTT, and digital audio with Spotify. “Our category expertise is driving growth for purpose-driven brands whose strength comes from their authentic identity,” said Annette Fonte, head of business and brand leadership at Periscope. Michael Marquis, Raw Sugar Living CEO, added Periscope was a “trusted partner with a data-supported media strategy that showed us where we have the most potential to grow.” The partnership marks Periscope’s fifth creative AOR partnership in the CPG category within the last year. Its client work includes Hefty, Target, Summit Brewing Co. and Minnesota Lottery.
Toyota Motor Corp. is gearing up for the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024 while planning separate campaigns to launch several new vehicles in the U.S. The automaker is launching global executions under the "Start Your Impossible" banner breaking today from Saatchi & Saatchi (Los Angeles and Dallas) and Dentsu (Tokyo). Toyota also will support the launch of the 2025 Toyota Camry with a campaign breaking in June with the theme “It’s a Vibe” that proves that "the journey is not just fun with Camry, it's fun because of Camry," according to Mike Tripp, group vice president, Toyota division marketing. The launch of another product, the 2025 Toyota Crown Signia, will be supported by a media campaign that starts in September. “Admiration Runs in the Family” will highlight both the sedan and SUV. It will “lean into the modern design, exciting performance and bold nature of the Crown family, showcasing how both vehicles amplify a feeling of accomplishment and confidence in drivers,” Tripp says. This year’s Olympic campaign theme, “No Journey is Taken Alone,” goes beyond athletic achievements to spotlight the unsung heroes in the athletes’ lives—their coaches, teammates, parents, and supporters. It’s a tribute to the community’s role in shaping these sports icons and fueling their dreams, according to the automaker. The six spots, which break April 17, will feature more than 20 Olympic and Paralympic athletes. The first spot, “Send Off,” highlights the powerful impact of communities joining together to support their athletes as they head to the Games. The effort includes broadcast commercials, digital video, digital content, paid social, out of home and programmatic advertising. The six broadcast commercials include 60-second, 30-second and 15-second versions as well as a mix of 6-second and 15-second social spots. The campaign message celebrates that where you come from -- your community – matters. It's this respect for local communities and long-standing commitment to sports that shines in Toyota's support of more than 200 Olympic and Paralympic athletes around the world. “Love Conquers All” shares U.S. Olympic BMX cyclist Alise Willoughby and her husband/coach Sam's inspiring story about the transformative impact of love and community support during challenging times, while “Think Fast” shows how French Olympic Handball player Nikola Karabati — with spontaneous coaching from his neighbors — can take whatever life throws at him. Viewers can follow Canadian Paralympic Track and Field athlete Marissa Papaconstantinou in “Keep Marissa Running” as she starts the journey from her Canadian hometown to the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, with her community cheering her on every step of the way. Through the 2024 campaign, Toyota aspires to ignite the spark of endless possibilities that reside within communities all over the globe, according to the automaker.
IPG Mediabrands this morning unveiled plans to step up its efforts to safeguard clients from the negative impact of misinformation in media -- especially on social media -- prioritizing political, climate, healthcare, AI-generated and brand-specific content.The initiative, which is being announced along with a new spate of research revealing how consumers feel about brand advertising in misinformation environments (see related story), includes an expansion of an ongoing research relationship between IPG Mediabrand's Magna and brand content safety platform Zefr, as well as new technology developed by IPG Mediabrands' Kinesso unit.Specifically, Kinesso has developed custom video algorithms capable of identifying the "suitability" of brand advertising placed in various media that also optimize video campaign-specific outcomes and KPIs.IPG Mediabrands did not disclose exactly how those algorithms work, but said it is introducing them now, because "the ad environment is primed for misinformation with major cyclical events and growing ad spend," an acknowledgement to what is projected to be a record political ad spending and social media and news coverage cycle leading up to the U.S. presidential election in November.IPG Mediabrands said the expansion of its relationship with Zefr includes two new features: "pre-campaign media responsibility profiles" leveraging AI technology to "proactively block unsuitable categories" flagged for misinformation and high brand safety risk across social media platforms; "custom misinformation avoidance" for user-generated content (UGC), including dashboards enabling agency and client teams to avoid sensitive categories such as the U.S. elections and climate denialism.IPG Mediabrands described the UGC tool as having "multi-modal video, image, text, and audio detection for full misinformation content avoidance powered by integrations with global fact-checks, beyond publisher or webpage-based analysis."
At its annual meeting on May 29 Publicis Groupe will ask shareholders to pass a resolution to do away with its two-tiered board set-up in favor of a single board of directors. Under the current two-tiered structure—more common in Europe than the U.S.--the Paris-based holding company has a Supervisory Board and a Management Board, with the latter reporting to the former. In theory the management board focuses on day-to-day operations while the supervisory board charts long-term strategy and other non-day-to-day matters. Former company CEO Maurice Levy now Chairs the Supervisory Board, while current CEO Arthur Sadoun chairs the management board. Sadoun is not on the Supervisory Board but as CEO of the company I don’t think there is any doubt he focuses on long-term strategy. Levy is credited with proposing the restructuring, which was approved unanimously by the Supervisory board. It would take effect after his term expires in 2025, if shareholders go along. Once approved, Sadoun would add Chairman of the Board duties to his current CEO role. Levy would take on the new role of Chairman Emeritus. Under the new set-up the company would add an outside Lead Director as well. Sadoun and Levy both issued statements saying the change would be the most effective way to sustain the company’s recent growth and success, as well as keeping in place their partnership running the company since 2017.
Way back on Nov. 7, 2023, there was an article on Forbes about the “Biggest Threat to the Advertising Industry” being ad fraud. Fast-forward to last week, when there were a bunch of stories calling out Forbes for “mistakenly” running a made-for-advertising (MFA) site for many years where advertisers thought they were getting impressions on Forbes.com and instead were getting manufactured impressions on a site at www3.forbes.com. That site is no longer live, of course, and a number of big advertisers are pretty upset. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem as if many people are talking about this. Ad fraud is certainly an issue, and it has been for many, many years. Since the beginning, in fact. In my first ad buy way back in 1995, I remember buying on an ad network (which shall remain nameless even though it is long gone) and discovering it was running our BMW ads on adult websites without permission to get the impressions we had contracted. At that point, there were literally hundreds of thousands of people online, so getting impressions could be difficult to scale. Today, there should be no such problem -- and yet here we are, battling fraud because of the programmatic nature of media buying and the almost impossible task of ensuring your ads run where you have contracted them to be. Couple that with the volume of performance-based advertisers who are only interested in clicks and actions, and you end up with more opportunities for fraud. Where there is demand, the Internet will find people to create supply. In this case, however, a trusted brand is allegedly playing the same game and creating “made for advertiser” sites to fill its own insertion orders. The responsibility to uncover fraud rests on the shoulders of the advertiser. Your brand, or your agency, must be the ones demanding to see reporting, and should be checking that reporting. The easiest thing to do is to view your own website logs and look at bounce rates and time on page for the clicks that are immediately coming to your site. That may not capture impressions, but it will uncover bot traffic. I believe there is a correlation between false or MFA impressions and bot traffic that generates clicks. I don’t think a publisher creating MFA pages is employing bots to drive traffic, but once those pages are there, they are victim to bots as much as any other page. Specifically in this case, that domain existed outside of the paywall and was more easily crawled, indexed and botted, so to speak. Conversely, your brand or your agency needs to find channels and platforms that embrace transparency. A premium partner should be able to provide log data that shows exactly where your ads ran, at least within a specific and predetermined rate of accuracy. If you can’t get that from a premium partner, then you should know you are not dealing with someone who should be considered premium. Transparency is the way to combat fraud. The industry has to embrace tactics to reward transparency in partners while avoiding fraud that can be detrimental to the brands who support this advertising-driven economy. Without that trust, what happens to the ad spend that supports all this digital media? It’s a question worth asking whenever we can.