Media Agency Of The Year: IPG Mediabrands

Since it was founded in 2008, Interpublic’s IPG Mediabrands unit arguably has undergone more change in leadership, organization, product, services and philosophical approach than any of the other major agency holding company media-services divisions.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that its transformation has continued under its most recent chief, Eileen Kiernan. What is surprising is how much it has accelerated.

In less than three years, Kiernan has completely retooled the organization -- consolidating most, if not all of its data and technology innovation and development under a rebooted Kinesso unit, enabling its client-facing agency brands (Initiative, Mediahub, and UM) to focus 100% on service, ideation, execution and stewardship.

Like its Magna unit that consolidated much of the division’s research and market intelligence as well as corporate-level partner and vendor negotiations, the move has brought a keener, consolidated focus on innovating for the future in a way that benefits all of the division’s stakeholders -- not just its agency brands, but their clients, and Interpublic corporately, including its shareholders.

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And while MediaPost has recognized IPG Mediabrands in previous Agency of the Year Awards -- and its Kinesso unit, just last year -- the timing of this year’s recognition is noteworthy because it is likely to face even more change this year as Interpublic is poised to merge with Omnicom, pending shareholder and regulatory approval.

That should be an interesting cultural mix, especially for their respective media-services divisions, because whereas IPG Mediabrands has historically been among the most open, entrepreneurial and vocal about its vision, innovation and industry leadership, Omnicom’s media group historically has taken a more insular, proprietary approach, mainly letting its clients and vendors speak for themselves.

The latter has always been an anathema for MediaPost “Agency of the Year” recognition, which depends on people telling their stories -- if not to us directly, at least in a public enough way that the editors of MediaPost could see and evaluate the impact they are having in the media marketplace.

Unlike creative agencies -- where their work is inherently public and on display for everyone to see, hear and watch -- media-services innovations often are opaque and require some storytelling in order to understand them.

IPG Mediabrands has always been among the best media innovation storytellers, but in the end, it’s about what they’ve been able to show -- not tell -- that has made the difference. Especially in the past year -- the one where we are recognizing them as our “Media Agency of the Year."

As in 2023, much of the big innovation took place inside Kinesso, which continued to evolve its scientific approach to the data-driven and programmatic media marketplace, expanding on the “algorithmic trading” model it previously developed and expanding it into a new “Experimentation Lab.”

No, it’s not a physical lab with beakers and test tubes, but one that is conducting continuous, high-speed and high-volume (tens of thousands) of experiments across the data-driven, digital media marketplace to understand which audiences, media and creative executions have the best yield for each client’s outcome goals.

During 2024, Kinesso also engineered a partnership with commerce platform Vudoo developing and executing a variety of new “shoppable” media formats and campaigns as part of IPG Mediabrands overall deeper push into retail and commerce media.

The unit also launched a new “Emerging Tech Assessment” solution, enabling its client brands to test, measure and anticipate alternatives in an increasingly opaque digital media marketplace including the deprecation of cookies and user IDs.

Kinesso also accelerated the deployment of its AI-powered generative AI chatbot, “My Bot,” integrating it into Interpublic’s Interact operating system, and onboarding the app to more than 55,000 employees across 77 countries.

Kinesso aside, IPG Mediabrands also launched a dedicated health marketing and media unit, Mediabrands Health, partnered with Adverity to augment its Acxiom data spine to broaden its utility in audience development and planning, and struck a new partnership with Zefr to expand efforts around misinformation avoidance, which aligns with its longstanding Media for Good efforts.

If 2024 has a central theme for IPG, Mediabrands' Kiernan says it was it's "orchestration strategy," which enabled its disparate units to be more independent, but also more focused by "moving from a holding company-like structure with three discrete brands doing things their way to a simplified, streamlined, integrated, technologically enabled orchestration model where the brands have a role, technology has a role, and they're all interconnected and driving in the same direction to elevate the craft of media.

That was our big 2024 bet."

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