Holding companies WPP and Omnicom are laser-focused on competing for marketers’ growing digital media budgets "by promising the best technology tools and analytics and catering to clients’
desire for increased transparency in the fees they are paying," according to a
Wall Street Journal report. The competition is heating up with memos circulating. For example, Omnicom's data
and tech unit Annalect promotes its own proprietary tools and describes WPP's GroupM offering, mPlatform, as a “game of catch-up,” saying GroupM’s approach replicates what Annalect
has “been doing for years," the
Journal report says. "The Omnicom memo describes WPP’s investment in media companies and ownership of data as a 'known conflict of interest',
noting that 'mPlatform will prove to push these conflicts to the forefront for clients.' From the memo, it's not clear what the conflicts are, according to the report. "As part of a recent
reorganization, WPP media agency network GroupM bundled data analytics and digital services, including search, social and automated buying teams, calling the resulting offering 'completely open and
fully transparent.'" Battling back, "Omnicom’s data and technology group, Annalect, quickly moved to arm its people with talking points in case clients ask about its competitor’s revamped
offering, according to a document circulated among Omnicom staffers. Annalect also used the opportunity to express confidence in its own approach and point to recent accounts that switched over from
GroupM to Omnicom."
Read the whole story at Wall Street Journal »
