| | Media Buyer & Planner Today | | | | | | | | | #1 Wieden+Kennedy Wins KFC Media Account | | The Yum Brands fast food chicken chain has awarded its $234 million U.S. media ad spending account to Wieden+Kennedy, which is also its creative agency. The account includes media planning and buying across all platforms, including digital and social media. Out is incumbent Publicis media agency Spark Foundry, which only handled the account since January 2017. W+K has handled KFC creative since 2015. KFC gave no reason for the agency consolidation and simply said, "We appreciate [Spark's] partnership and work on the brand over the past year." While W+K is primarily a creative agency, it has a number of clients for which it does both creative and media, including Old Spice, Nike, TurboTax and Secret. | | WHY THIS MATTERS: KFC is a sizable ad spender and losing it is a blow to Spark Foundry. And this sends another message to traditional media agencies that both creative agencies and consultancies continue to go after their clients as they branch out in an ad marketplace where agency roles are becoming increasingly blurred. | | Three Takes: MediaPost | Ad Age | Adweek | | | | #2 Publicis Unveils AI Platform 'Marcel' | | Ad agency holding company Publicis Groupe unveiled its much-anticipated artificial intelligence innovation platform Marcel Thursday, which it developed with Microsoft and which includes five billion data files of information. According to a MediaPost report, the files include information from the Groupe's 80,000 employees across 1,200 entities and 200 specialities, as well as information on thousands of clients. Said Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, "Artificial intelligence can augment creativity. Marcel is an accelerator." Marcel can quickly find the best personnel inside the agency globally help with clients. It can set up meetings, allow employees globally to pitch ideas for creative work on particular accounts, organize data and speed up access to it and even be used to help in agency new business pitches. | | WHY THIS MATTERS: Arthur Sadoun, chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, says, "Marcel is a journey to shift Publicis Groupe from a holding company to a platform and give creative minds the freedom to progress and thrive in this every-changing industry." He says the ad industry "is under massive pressure," adding, "Can we afford to have incremental change or go further if we want to save us? It's time to break the industry in order to reinvent it." | | Two Takes: Ad Age | MediaPost | | | | #3 Twitter Targets Facebook's Frustrated Publisher Users | | The social platform is planning to roll out a website in the next couple of weeks to teach smaller publishers how to produce content, including live and on-demand videos, for use on Twitter and how to best monetize it, Digiday reports. The goal is to motivate publishers who are frustrated with dealing with Facebook to move ad dollars into Twitter. One publisher said, "Twitter has been a breath of fresh air in that they do want to work with you more than Facebook." While Twitter's 100-person publisher partnerships team is busy working directly with some thousand or so larger publishers, the platform sees the need to also help smaller publishers find ways to succeed on the platform, thus the new website. | | WHY THIS MATTERS: Twitter's move in not unique. Facebook has had an educational site for publishers since 2014. But Twitter feels the time is right for it to get more aggressive in trying to lure away business from Facebook. And as Digiday reports, Twitter offers publishers 70% of the revenue they get from selling ads attached to their videos, compared to 50% from Facebook. And Twitter will tout to publishers its rising video view counts. | | A Take: Digiday | |
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| | 21.5 | | Percentage of worldwide creative and marketing professionals who say the primary challenge of utilizing market data is being able to tell the right story with that data, according to a survey by Widen. Some 13.7% also say managing data across different platforms for a single view, while 11.6% say being able to simplify complex data. Another 11.4% say the primary challenge is distilling premium data from numerous data sources, while 9.6% say being able to trust the data. | – Reported by eMarketer
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| | Fox Wins With 'Empire' Finale | by Michael Malone
Fox took top prize in the Wednesday prime ratings, as Empire led it to a 1.4 score in viewers 18-49, according to Nielsen's overnights, and a 6 share. That edged past the 1.3/6 that CBS put up.
The Empire finale did a flat 1.6 and the Star season closer went down 8% to 1.2. On CBS, the Survivor finale rated a 1.5, up 7% from last week. The Survivor Reunion did a 1.1.
NBC did a 1.0/4. A Law & Order: SVU repeat led into the two-hour season finale at 1.2, up 20% from last week.
ABC was at 0.6/3. The film Toy Story 3 scored a 0.7 and 20/20 did a 0.5.
Telemundo rated a 0.5/2 and Univision a 0.4/2.
The CW scored a 0.2/1. It was in repeats. | |
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| • RORY O'FLAHERTY will oversee a new 10-person media team at independent creative agency Mekanism. The new unit will be called Mekanism Media and will be based out of New York, according to an Adweek report. O'Flaherty was most recently VP of media at IPG agency Huge.
• RYAN CROSBY was named VP of content marketing and NICK TRAN was appointed VP of brand and culture marketing at Hulu. Crosby was previously director of global creative marketing at Netflix, while Tran was formerly head of brand culture at Samsung Electronics.
• NEIL HEYMANN was promoted to chief creative officer at independent agency Droga5. He was previously executive creative director. Heymann has been with Droga5 since 2009. Prior to that he was associate creative director at Y&R, and before that was interactive associate creative director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
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