Following IPG Mediabrands‘ acquisition of Media Experts last week, there are no plans to outsource digital specialties like search and programmatic that are considered foundational to media agency’s business model, according to its founder and CEO, Mark Sherman.
Although Mediabrands has its own central programmatic trading desk, Cadreon, where it has consolidated most of the programmatic buying for its flagship global agencies, Media Experts will maintain its own Xpeto trading desk to conduct its clients’ buys.
“We have a way of doing things that’s been successful and impressive enough for IPG to want to buy us, and they don’t want to interfere with us,” Sherman told Marketing.
He said that having a trading desk in-house is more important to Media Experts than just being able to execute programmatic for clients, because the data that’s collected by Xpeto is used throughout the agency — even on radio and TV planning.
“Early on, we thought that tearing down silos was the way to solve the traditional and digital integration issue,” Sherman said. “But now we understand siloes are simply areas of specialization that need to have windows punched in them. So the different areas of specialization are able to communicate and share important consumer behavioural information.”
However, Media Experts will benefit from a closer partnership with Cadreon and other Mediabrands specialist agencies. It will gain access to some of the technology and data that Mediabrands have licensed, “And similarly they’ll be able to learn about some of the things that we’re doing that they’re not doing,” he said.
Cadreon licenses technology for ad serving, data management and RTB buying from a wide variety of global third-party vendors. In the past year, it’s announced a partnership with TubeMogul to build a data-driven TV buying platform, and another more recently with Rocket Fuel to power first-party data onboarding for advertisers with offline transaction data they want to use for programmatic targeting.
Sherman said that Mediabrand’s flexibility with respect to ad tech aligns well with the approach Media Experts has developed. “One of the key reasons we did this deal with IPG is because they share our view on ad technology, that ad tech should be chosen and applied to each advertiser based on their specific needs,” he said.
