Havas Media North America, the parent of MPG and Havas Digital, has established an in-house unit to handle "corporate trading" and barter media deals.
The news follows WPP's announcement
last week of the launch of GroupM's new "The Midas Exchange."
Havas said the new, unnamed unit was established due to demand from clients needing to liquidate surplus inventories that can be
converted into media. It will be headed by Mike O'Hara, a barter media veteran who joins as managing director-corporate trading, Havas Media.
O'Hara had been senior vice president-sales manager
at Omnicom's ICON International and executive vice president-sales at Argent Trading.
Both GroupM and Havas' moves come a little more than a year after Interpublic relaunched its barter media
initiatives under a new entity called Orion Trading for precisely that same reason. It appears that Madison Avenue is again focused on the art and science of turning damaged goods into good media
buys.
Typically, the way a barter media deal works is that a marketer liquidates some unsold goods or services either directly or indirectly in exchange for media credits. Usually, the barter
portion is only part of the media deal, with cash accounting for the rest.
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