Pubicis Groupe reported a 15.5% gain in revenue in the second quarter to nearly $2 billion. Organic growth, which excludes acquistions and currency fluctuations, was much lower at 1.6%. The holding company attributed the low organic growth (considered a key performance indicator for the advertising industry) to continuing economic turmoil in Europe, a tough comparision to the same period a year ago when it had 7.6% organic growth, and the loss of the General Motors media assignment in the quarter. For the first half revenue was up 14.3% to nearly $3.8 billion with net income of $336 million, up 19%. …

Yahoo on Thursday announced enhancements to its Right Media Exchange to improve mobile targeting, reporting, RTB (real-time bidded) transactions, and campaign creation. The upgrades follow an initial set of mobile tools Right Media introduced in October. With the latest changes, Yahoo said mobile advertisers will be able to target by smartphone or tablet users, as well as by device manufacturer and specific makes and models of devices. Specifically, that means more than 300 devices made by Apple, HTC, Motorola and Samsung, and 75 tablet models from Apple, Amazon, Google and Samsung. Right Media is also expanding to targeting …

Google reported Thursday revenue from advertising and other rose 21% to $10.96 billion in the second quarter of 2012, compared with the year-ago quarter. The company's owned and operated sites pulled in $7.54 billion, or 69% of Google revenue, up 21% compared with Q2 2011. Partner sites generated $2.98 billion in revenue, or 27%, in the second quarter of 2012, representing a 20% increase from second quarter 2011 Google network revenues of $2.48 billion. Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of network members, rose 42%, compared with the second quarter …

Twitter introduced targeted Tweets Thursday, giving brands the ability to specific audiences on Twitter without first sending a Tweet to all followers. It lets brands with different launch dates for several countries send specific custom messages at different times per country. The feature works for mobile, too. Mobile app providers wanting to reach customers on one device can do so without sending the message to desktop users. Through Promoted Tweets, advertisers only pay when users engage with the ad. Tweets that generate the most engagement are likely to appear more often.

Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group once again is the world's largest global media services network, but Omnicom's OMD unit is nipping at its heels, according to new estimates released this morning by Paris-based RECMA. Both those agency networks tied with a 10.7% share each of the global media agency network marketplace, as defined by RECMA.

Citing "uncertain" economic condiitons in the U.S. and Europe, WPP's GroupM unit has revised its global ad spending outlook for 2012 down 1.2 percentage points this morning. Worldwide ad spending is now forecast to expand 5.1% -- down from 6.3% in GroupM's previous forecast last year.

GroupM released Thursday a revised forecast for growth in ad spending. The company now estimates 5.1% growth to $506.3 billion for global media spend in 2012, down from 6.3% projected late last year. The 70-country forecast also predicted global ad spending in 2013 will rise 5.3% to $533.2 billion.

Losing access to some 20 plus million TV viewers is no picnic for Viacom networks. Now just about a week old, the DirecTV-Viacom stalemate -- where some 26 Viacom networks are off the satellite programming service due to a pricing carriage disagreement -- has revealed  some major viewership declines, according to Barclays Capital. Barclays says Viacom networks are averaging 27% viewership declines versus a year ago. Nickelodeon -- which has already been dinged by Nielsen this year with double-digit percentage declines in viewership -- is now off 45%; MTV is down 22% year to year; Spike is off 26%; Nick …

Mobile ad network InMobi Wednesday confirmed its acquisition of MMTG Labs, which operates AppBistro, an app marketplace for Facebook brand pages, and AppGalleries, a white-label service for creating branded app stores. Terms of the deal, first reported last week by TechCrunch, were not disclosed. " MMTG Labs fits nicely in our overall strategy to continue to deliver best of breed technology and services to our developers and publisher partners. We are very excited to welcome the highly talented team from MMTG Labs to the InMobi family,” said InMobi founder and CEO Naveen Tewari, in a statement. As part of …

Juniper Research issued a new forecast Wednesday project revenue from mobile search and discovery will nearly triple to $15 billion worldwide in five years. The U.K.-based firm says growth will be fueled in part by high click-through and cost-per-click rates for different types of mobile search because users are often looking for a discrete set of products and services, and so can be accurately targeted by advertisers. When it comes to local search, Juniper suggests local search apps like Poynt, Qype and Yelp represent a bigger opportunity for advertisers than the Web-based mobile search because they provide more relevant ad …