Tim Libby

CMO’s and agencies are so enamored with bottom-funnel targeting tactics that they totally lost the ability to move people effectively—their judgement is out of balance with real needs today. The targeting down funnel ‘disease’ gives marketers a feeling that they aren’t being wasteful but so much is showing they aren’t being effective either. “This ….reveals …a fundamental mismatch. Respondents are applying bottom-of-funnel tactics to what they've identified as top-of-funnel brand building objectives.”

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Until recently, channels like Roku, Paramount, Pandora, or iHeartMedia were reserved for enterprise-scale advertisers with advanced programmatic infrastructures. For emerging and mid-sized CPGs, these platforms were too complex, too fragmented, or too expensive to navigate. Some recent announcements from Kroger Precision Marketing have changed that. Service-Led Activation Model: KPM provides a managed-service approach - handling all the technical complexity of programmatic buying on behalf of the brand. This removes the barrier of entry for brands lacking in-house programmatic expertise. Data-Powered Precision: Campaigns are entirely fueled by Kroger’s massive first-party data set (over 60 million households), ensuring that ads on CTV or audio platforms are precisely targeted to verified, high-value shoppers. Closed-Loop Accountability: KPM is not just selling reach; it’s selling a measurable outcome. The managed service is tied directly to Kroger’s sales data, allowing brands to prove that an ad seen on a streaming platform led directly to a product purchase in a physical or digital store. #RetailMedia #CommerceMedia #CPGMarketing #AdTech #KrogerPrecisionMarketing #ConnectedTV

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The Four Factors Behind DigitasAI’s Impact At Digitas North America, we’re obsessed with proving DigitasAI's value—not just promising it. That’s why we measure the impact of DigitasAI across four factors that actually move the needle: Accuracy: Are we seeing the full picture—unbiased, holistic, and real? Efficiency: How much precious time does AI save our teams, freeing us for lateral leaps and bigger ideas? Impact: Is there measurable lift—for our clients’ business, and for ours? Sparkle: (Yes, you read that right.) Does AI unlock creative magic—unexpected thinking, inspiring ideas, that “wow” factor? And this has direct line to our core principles: Networked Experiences—integrating brand, platforms, and people in ways that earn attention. Earn Your Way In—using intelligence to create real value, not just noise. Integrated Intelligence—where every solution is powered by insight, not instinct alone. We want AI to deliver more than efficiency theatre, so we're measuring what matters. I'll be posting updates on how we're tracking as regularly as possible! #NetworkedExperiences #DigitasAI #EarnYourWayIn

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For years, digital advertising has claimed to be “contextual,” but most solutions have relied on keywords, not a true understanding. That approach overlooks nuance, culture, and emotion, particularly in non-English-speaking markets. AI is finally changing that. By reading meaning, tone, and context, AI-powered tools allow brands to engage audiences with relevance and respect, not just data points. This is how we move from talking at people to speaking with them and why OOH and premium media can lead the way in human-centered advertising.

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Ad agency margins have been plummeting for decades, says the WSJ. We shouldn't be surprised. The big media platforms (Meta, Google, Trade Desk) have been working hard for a decade to make this happen. They've done an amazing job at discrediting every single hard-earned industry belief in the name of driving media dollars in their own direction. The idea is a simple one: the platforms had finally made fully accountable ad spending possible, and it was catnip for marketers who shifted huge percentages of their media spend to response-based formats with the expectation that they would finally be able to measure the exact ROI on advertising. This change in thinking reframed marketing entirely. Now advertising was simply a financial transaction. Gone was the art, gone was the idea that it's a long-term investment, gone was the strategy. An ad was simply a widget like any other part of the supply chain whose price can easily be negotiated down by the procurement department. Fast forward a few years, and you end up with a new generation of marketers who don’t believe that the creative part of advertising has any value, and why would they pay extra for something they don't value? The only thing they know they need is media planning and buying and you can see what's happened as a result. Publicis is simply throwing the creative in for free with the media. Holding companies are downsizing, merging, jettisoning production, and putting all their resources into data and media buying. Marketers are handing their brands over entirely to influencers. The outlook gets even worse with AI threatening to execute all the ads and variations in seconds. If marketers see advertising as a numbers game why wouldn’t they just hand the execution over to a low-cost semi sentient computer program? In reality, the tools that the platforms have been pushing are not good value. They can’t anticipate a purchase, can’t accurately predict an audience, and they devalue the very brands they're promoting. The likelihood of a single online ad converting to a sale is around the same as being struck by lightning over the course of your life. That is not pinpoint targeting, it's a probabilistic system that, given enough scale, gets lucky every once in a while. There's also the reality that when everyone is placing ads with the same tools, and the same data, and the same idea generators, marketing becomes nothing more than a test of who’s willing to pay the most for an impression (and I don't have to tell you who benefits most in that scenario). At that point, ironically, the only way for brands to develop any sort of advantage over their competitors will be through strategy and ingenuity, with an original creative idea that stands out from the noise, sticks in a person's brain, and shapes the way they feel about a product long before it comes time to buy it, the very type of idea that nobody is willing to pay for anymore.

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This Omnicom/IPG merger reads like a confession, not a power move. It signals pressure from a market where Publicis grew faster by getting simpler. That’s the lesson. Tight systems create momentum. Heavy systems chase it. Brands already cut layers and brought the work closer. Because in modern content, the only advantage left is operational. Everyone else is catching up.

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WPP yesterday declared itself "no longer a holding company." That's the right diagnosis. Seven years after Publicis proved the model was broken. But read what replaced it. Rose calls WPP an "intelligent orchestration layer." The holding company is dead. Long live the holding company. Here's the problem. The cost and complexity of coordination have fallen. AI made it cheap. Almost free. That changes the logic of scale. That changes the justification for the margin. What hasn't fallen is exposure. Automation compresses time. Distribution is instant. When something misfires, it rarely stays contained. It propagates across markets before governance can react. That's not a production issue. It's a liability issue. Platforms cap their downside contractually. Models carry none by design. Clients absorb reputational and commercial risk. So the strategic question remains: if coordination is easier, where does accountability sit at scale? The agencies that stay indispensable won't differentiate on capability alone. They'll differentiate on how clearly they structure consequence. Shared downside. Defined governance. Decision rights that hold under pressure. That shift isn't cosmetic. It changes procurement conversations. It changes legal exposure. It changes margin structure. Becoming structurally optional is its own form of compression. Elevate28 may reassure investors. Clients will still ask who stands behind the outcome when it breaks.

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Criteo got in the door first! It's a familiar platform, and will improve the reach of audience based media efforts. After Google Display Network became *like* an unpoliced cesspool of spam, Criteo brings great opportunity to engage with the web.

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Really appreciated being part of this conversation. Big industry shifts raise questions, but they also create space for new ideas and new ways of working. Chicago’s creative community has been through change before, and it always finds its footing.

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I just came across Forrester’s provocative framing on the agency big bang: the idea that agencies are rapidly reshaping themselves into “algorithms of record”: integrated marketing OS + proprietary data + execution logic that brands buy as algorithmic capability, not just talent or services. It’s a clear sign that the market is already moving past traditional agency value and toward organizations that can codify, automate, and scale strategic and creative muscle. But what if we pushed this one step further? What if the same logic applies at the individual level? What if you could become your own algorithm of record? 👉 Not your résumé. 👉 Not your hourly rate. 👉 Not your titles or your tools. But a trainable model of how you think, see, and make sense of the world, your cognitive signature. In the next phase of AI-augmented work, I’m convinced: individuals will be hired for their algorithmic identity; the distilled pattern of taste, insight, judgment, and cultural acuity they encode into a model. Brands will license personal algorithms just like they license technology stacks; “work” becomes not what you do but what your algorithm consistently produces and how it orients complexity, surfaces signal, and shapes meaning at scale. This flips the old value curve: from labor to cognition as IP. For agencies, the shift is from service provider to algorithm orchestrator. For individuals, the opportunity is from skill holder to algorithm owner. And that’s not just a semantic twist, it’s a new economic architecture for talent, creativity, and strategic value creation. If agencies are becoming algorithms, people will too.

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The Astonishing Growth of Dividends at WPP, IPG and Omnicom highlights their Business Model Problem. Not only do holding companies have to liquidate talent through annual downsizings -- they must pay growing levels of dividends to shore up share prices. How long can this go on? Michael Farmer Jun 16 Mr. Farmer's language says it all, 'liquidate talent through downsizing.'

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Is advertising one of the last remaining forms of monoculture? Erich & Kallman's Steven Erich makes a compelling case in this Ad Age opinion piece. Worth a read: https://lnkd.in/eRQy4uE9

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Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Bedrock Platform. Obvious statement of the century: programmatic advertising has a complexity problem. The infrastructure that was built to give media buyers control has, over time, done the opposite. Burying teams under layers of operational overhead, legacy tooling, and opaque supply chains. Bedrock is built on a simple but powerful thesis: what if you stripped away the bloat and rebuilt the stack around what actually matters... precision, transparency, and speed to execution. Their platform combines AI-driven campaign automation with curated, premium inventory across video, CTV, DOOH, and audio, and aims to be flexible and get smarter over time. Plus, the team (Shane, Austin, Ryan, James) has deep roots in the infrastructure layer of ad tech and understands the plumbing better than almost anyone. We believe the next generation of programmatic will be leaner, faster and AI-first. Bedrock is building that.

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Most would agree with the perspective on the programmatic ecosystem shared by PubMatic's CEO, stating that it is “multifaceted, certainly complex.” Unfortunately for marketers, this is dramatically compounded by the lack of transparency, which allows intermediaries to siphon media dollars into fees, direct advertiser investment to “owned” solutions, and compounds the failure to constrain non-human traffic.

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Sooo... how can the same product, from the same company, with the same experience; suddenly grab market share from the market leader. No flashy launch, no innovation, no nothing. Change your brand positioning. How about if you are Anthropic (Claude), and you go up against a powerful government department like the DoW? Your intent was not brand position change; that'd be too pedestrian. There is of course, a lot of nuances in what happened; but the market does not care about the nuance - most of which I am most likely missing. The market cares about what they see and hear and feel. The Brand Positioning Deck on Amodei's laptop on never changed. Perceptions of the market changed of what Anthropic was. What it stood for, how far it will go for something as abstract, yet important as principles. As an aside: Amodei has re-engaged DoW and opened negotiations again as of late last week. Anthropic is still a business; and sometimes the market make a lot of assumptions, so you never know what is going on behind the scenes. But the users have made up their minds of what OpenAI and Anthropic stands for - rightly or wrongly. Both CEOs played a big role in this evolution. Speaking of CEOs and big companies and their 'products,'.... Nah, that'd be too easy. https://lnkd.in/gyfapkyF

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Omnicom’s forthcoming 4,000 layoffs, plus the thousands more swept up in closures and consolidation aren’t just the price of a merger... They’re the start of a new agency era. Legacy brands like DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe are being folded, long-standing teams are dissolving, and the rules are getting rewritten. In an industry addicted to “synergies,” the real story is who gets left behind—and who figures out what’s next. This ain't just two giants teaming up. It’s the whole damn ecosystem getting restructured. TL: DR ❏  4,000+ immediate layoffs, and thousands more likely affected by agency closures and restructure. ❏ Legacy agency brands are vanishing overnight: If your identity was tied to the logo, it’s time to rethink the playbook. ❏ Consolidation won’t stop with agencies: Media, marketing, and entertainment are next. Get lean, get loud, or get lost. (Analysis/Advice in comments)

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The advertising landscape is undergoing a seismic shift with the impending closure of the Omnicom (OMC) and Interpublic (IPG) merger—a strategic consolidation poised to redefine industry efficiencies and power dynamics. Unlike the ill-fated Daimler-Chrysler “merger of equals” in 1998, which masked underlying imbalances and ultimately unraveled, OMC has wisely eschewed such pretense. This is no egalitarian union; it’s a decisive acquisition where Omnicom’s leadership asserts clear dominance. John Wren remains firmly at the helm as Chairman and CEO, with Philippe Krakowsky stepping in as Co-President and COO alongside Daryl Simm. Yet, let’s be candid: there’s no “co” in Daryl Simm’s DNA when it comes to shared authority—his role underscores Omnicom’s operational continuity and strategic oversight, ensuring streamlined execution without dilution. The projected $750 million in annual operational savings, from workforce rationalization to procurement synergies, represents a masterstroke in cost optimization. However, in an era where client value should reign supreme, these gains are earmarked not for reinvestment in innovative client solutions or competitive pricing, but primarily for bolstering shareholder returns. This raises a critical question for our industry: Will this merger truly elevate service excellence, or merely fortify balance sheets at the expense of long-term client partnerships? As we approach the merger’s finalization in the coming days, leaders in advertising, marketing, and media must scrutinize these implications. What are your thoughts on how this reshapes our ecosystem?

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Breaking free from the digital duopoly of Meta and Google can unlock new growth opportunities for advertisers. While these two tech giants continue to dominate, and rightfully so in many regards, brands that rely too heavily on Google and Meta are becoming increasingly vulnerable. With AI-driven features like Google’s AI Overviews and Meta’s Advantage+ automating key decisions, marketers are losing visibility into performance and control over creative. Expanding into emerging channels can drive better audience reach, diversification, cost efficiencies and ROI. From LinkedIn, TikTok and Reddit, Inc. to #StreamingAudio and #ConnectedTV, it’s about aligning objectives with the strengths of each medium and not putting all your digital eggs in one basket. Diversification isn't just an insurance policy - it's a strategic advantage that not only protects performance, it builds long-term resilience in a rapidly evolving media ecosystem. Check out The Ward Group's recent blog for more insights:

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We've never spent more on advertising yet it's never done less. As advertising’s flagship event Advertising Week hits Manhattan today, how many will admit the effectiveness of advertising is in serial decline? Bravo to Andrew Tindall, a fellow Brit, for shining a light on this industry critical set of data points. Andrew’s appraisal acknowledges the shift to short termism (and kudos to him for pointing out that this short termism and digital are not one and the same and that digital channels can build brands and business) pointing to a demise in creativity in ads and a roll back of emotion in ads of today as the main culprit: * Attention is not dead, it just became more cluttered and splintered * Creativity is still proven to be the biggest single driver of business impact according to the bible of marketing effectiveness Ehrenberg-Bass Institute * There’s too much salesmanship (rational product/facts orientation) and not enough showmanship (pure emotion) * Sh*t that arrives at the speed of light is still Sh*t At a time when marketers have the temptation to hand more of their creative and content output to AI, this is a bloody important message. 💯 businesses are under siege with low growth, tariffs and consumer spending volatility BUT purely chasing cost efficiency alone is a race to the bottom and will further hinder growth. This rightly puts greater introspection on the effectiveness of all marketing, especially advertising.. Great brands were always built through diligently identifying the bullseye target audience and then connecting with that audience through an insight that makes them sit up, lean-in, like or even cry..that said I nor Andrew (I’m pretty sure) are proponents of making the self serving argument that AI shouldn’t be leveraged for content or managing some aspects of advertising. As with always with marketing, it’s about deciding which elements need focus and brain power and which elements can be enhanced, sped up or even automated with technology. The irony is that the latter creates more time for the former, however just as with the binary and nonsensical TV vs Digital argument - from different corners of media owner land - which still rages on, it’s not an EITHER/OR debate, it’s about pointing AI and technology at the right stuff and not going in to auto pilot on the stuff that differentiates your brand and makes the impact on a punter.. More than ever, we desperately need strategists, planners & creatives alongside brilliant analysts and traders to help guide the decisions that will increasingly be made by technology. This piece is also a great reminder that it is through great media + creative that advertising is successful so continuing to separate these and splinter, does not serve brands well. https://lnkd.in/eAUfvFVN

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