A (0:01)

A word from our sponsors Advertisers Are you ready to become a certified Converged Linear CTV and Digital Video Media Master? Introducing Nexen U, the online educational program dedicated to helping you better plan, buy, optimize and measure your converged campaigns. Taught by industry leaders from both the buy and sell side, Nexon U experts tackle the challenging topics like data analysis, identity, creative optimization, and more. So whether you're looking to fine tune your existing skill set or dive deep into new concepts, Nexen U is the place to be. Enroll today@you.nexen.com Again, that's u n e xxen.com.

B (0:49)

This podcast is brought to you by Audiohook, the leading independent audio DSP. Audio Hook has direct publisher integrations into all major podcast and streaming radio platforms, providing 40 more inventory than what could be accessed in omnichannel DSPs. What's more, audiobook has full transcripts on more than 90% of all podcast inventory, enabling advanced contextual targeting and brand suitability. Audio Hook is so confident that in addition to CPM buys, they offer the industry's only pay for performance option where brands can scale audio and podcasting with peace of mind, knowing they are only paying for outcomes. Visit audiohook.com to learn more. That's audiohook.com foreign.

C (1:34)

I have to warn you now there is a lot of advertising talk to cover off on this week. I'm Kate with Merchitecture and this is the Refresh, your weekly download on what went down in advertising. Today is Monday, June 16th and this week we're covering off on a busy and maybe slightly dramatic week in ad land, starting with the Warner Brothers Discovery split, Mark Reed leaving WPP and a rapid fire roundup of a lot of product announcements that were made ahead of Cannes. So let's get into it. Starting things off with Warner Brothers Discovery, who announced last Monday that they'd be splitting WBD into two separate entities, one called WBD Streaming and Studios, which no surprise will house its streaming and production entities like hbo, Warner Brothers Pictures and DC Studios. The other will be called WBD Global Networks, housing its cable assets like tnt, Food Network, CNN and tlc. This split comes just a few years after Discovery acquired Warner Bros. Studios, a move which at the time was meant to introduce scale alongside quality with HBO Max's premiere shows like the Last of Us and the White Lotus providing the qual quality, while discovers cable network assets like TLC and Food Network would provide easy daytime entertainment scale. As part of the spinoff, Global Networks will take on most of the company's debt while retaining a 20 stake in the streaming and studios business. Newly appointed WBD Streaming and Studios CEO David Zaslav said the move will empower these iconic brands with the sharper focus and strategic flexibility they need to compete most effectively in today's evolving media landscape. And in case you're wondering, yes, we have seen this film before. Comcast made similar moves last fall, while Lionsgate Studio Core separated its cable and streaming platform Starz Entertainment in May. The decision to split is becoming a popular solution since it allows both the new streaming entity and the new cable entity more flexibility and freedom to pursue their own self interests like mergers, acquisitions or licensing deals with other networks and platforms after the divorce. I said this after Comcast's cable asset spinoff, but this just goes to further prove what many of us know to be true, even if we don't want to admit it. The writing is on the wall. Cable stays are numbered. Someday, in the not too distant future, 100% of our TV viewing will take place in a streaming environment. One of the factors accelerating this trend is consumers being caught between too much content and not enough time. As time spent with media continues to fragment between various platforms and environments, the time we do allocate to leisure TV viewing will most likely go to premium high quality content within the streaming platforms we've already bought into. Moving over to wpp, who's been generating a lot of buzz lately, and not always in a good way. On Monday, WPP CEO Mark Reed announced he'd be retiring by the end 2025. While the news sent some shockwaves to the industry, the announcement itself wasn't entirely shocking. WPP's stock is down 50% since Reid was appointed CEO in 2018, a product of what many view as a failure to keep pace with rivals like Publicist and perhaps more importantly, an advertising landscape that has undergone significant transformation, especially in recent years. While everybody's talking about the drama with wpp, I want to talk about what got them here, because it should serve as a cautionary tale. WPP and Publicis are the agency world's tale of two cities. One kept pace with and adapted to where the industry was heading, and the other largely failed to. I'll let you guess which was which. The irony here is that most of WPP's recent moves underscore some critical changes they recently made that really should have been made years ago. The first Acquiring a company that definitively sits in the ad tech space and not the agency space. Infosum While there's been debate over the value of this acquisition. It was a necessary strategic move toward an offering that's become advertising table stakes. The ability to own, manage and activate on data Now I'm going to get on my soapbox a little bit here, but in my personal opinion, one of the most important shifts for agencies to lean into right now is to move from the mentality that you're an agency to the mentality that you are an ad tech company. It is 2025 and the vast majority of advertising runs through ad tech powered pipes. While big ideas and splashy brand campaigns still matter, these marketers are prioritizing sophisticated data activation and measurement tools that enable informed buying, proving out investments and driving performance goals forward. Partnerships, integrations, or even owners of ad tech solutions. Not just having vendor relationships is a non negotiable. Another component of operating in an ecosystem that's primarily powered by ad tech that's become quite the challenge for agencies is that brands are increasingly empowered to in house or self serve their media, allowing them the transparency, control and cost cutting that they're increasingly after. Agencies will need to redefine their value proposition or in some cases adjust their business model in order to prove out why brands should continue to lean on them to provide these services. The next move WPP made was to create a unified front for their media teams by retiring the Group M name and rolling out WPP Media. If you haven't picked up on this, a lot of the business that WPP has recently lost has been media related. The legacy agency model focused on acquiring tons of smaller agencies to build holding company empires and provide specialized services like big idea, creative execution and large scale media buying. These groups were often left to continue to operate independently, creating silos, clunky workflows and disjointed team efforts across various components of campaign work. As I already mentioned, the ways that we plan, buy, activate and measure media have drastically changed. Siloed organizations cannot move with the agility or cohesion that is necessary for this era of advertising. Orchestrating all of your media buying capabilities under one roof while also taking an ad tech first approach enables the adaptability and fluidity that will continue to be needed to gain and retain business. The final shift WPP made recently was to put a decisive stake in the ground on AI, and this is something that I think they've actually done fairly well and with the speed that is demanded by a technology that's moving this fast. In 2021, WPP acquired an AI company named Satalia to bolster their AI and machine learning capabilities and recently invested in stability AI, helping them keep pace with AI advancements. The recent launch of WPP Media wasn't just a unification of their media departments, but a clear signal that they're all in on a future powered by AI. While the human component of this AI transition and transformation may have been poorly managed, the actual product component seems to have been done pretty well. After some deeper research which included watching all the product videos for their WPP open platform and Open Intelligence solution, which is powered partially by none other than infosum, there's that acquisition at work. WPP seems to have created a platform that meets the potential that's being brought to the table by AI providing solutions that are truly valuable for advertisers and media teams. Alright, let's close things out by doing some rapid fire product release announcements because this week has been packed full of them. Apparently everyone wanted to get their conversation starters in ahead of can, kicking things off with our sponsor Freewheel, who has not one but two announcements. The first is for their Universal Ads platform where they've launched new business partner APIs focused on enhanced creative and measurement services. Partners include Canva, Spaceback, House, Incremental, Measured and More. On the Freewheel side, they also announced new partnerships aimed at expanding their premium CTV inventory portfolio. Partners here include Fubo, LG Ads, Philo, Plex, TCL Ads, Tele and Whirlwind. Both of these announcements further Freewheel's mission to provide access to premium high impact campaign activation and streaming TV environments to all advertisers, keeping in the TV theme. Next up is MediaOcean Innovid, who's aiming to match the Trade desk step for step and number of announcements. This week. Two that stuck out to me include their release of Harmony Social, which connects paid social campaigns with CTV and the open web. As video viewing habits move seamlessly across various video environments, Harmony Social allows advertisers to build smarter campaigns and stronger storytelling across all of them. The other announcement is a partnership with Affinity Solutions which will allow advertisers to measure and optimize for performance based on sales, lift roas and incrementality over to the Trade Desk who, like Media Ocean, is ditching out product updates like their birthday party invites. Key announcements that have caught my eye so far focus on retail media and ctv, specifically their Ventura operating system which we haven't heard about in a minute. On the retail media side, they partnered up with Instacart and Ocado to enable access to SKU level sales and customer data for their self serve customers. They also announced the rollout of a native app that's powered by Snowflake and allows retail conversion data to be returned at a SKU level, while also making it easier to connect sales and conversion data with campaign optimization that's happening within the Trade Desk without needing the services of a data engineering team. On the TV side, the Trade Desk announced they're integrating their Ventura operating system with Anoki AI, an AI powered content discovery platform that would bring free advertising, supported streaming television, or fast solutions to OEMs that don't have their own. This gives us more line of sight into the Trade Desk and plans for Ventura while leaving a key question unanswered. Who has adopted the OS so far? Finally switching gears a bit to data enablement and reporting enhancement, Basis Technologies announced a suite of new capabilities for omnichannel reporting, data visualization, paid search, activation and task management within their platform. The most exciting part of this announcement, in my opinion, is the unification of data sources from various components of a media buy into one platform and one interface, search, Social Programmatic display and video Digital out of home audio, ctv, you name it. This is a real game changer for anyone who has ever had to export reports from multiple platforms, upload them to another, mash all that data together to then generate a cohesive report that could still be plagued by Excel errors. If any of these product announcements piqued your interest, be sure to reach out to the companies that rolled them out. I'm confident that they would love to hear from you. We covered a lot in this week's refresh and I can't thank you enough for sticking it out with me. We'll catch you next week. It.