Media Buying Briefing

In an email, David Jones, CEO of Brandtech Group said: “At Jellyfish, we can go seamlessly from insights to creation to engagement with a seamless AI-based approach.” “Humans and agents are working together to create a brand new world. Clients don’t need old studios or research companies that are sluggish and rely on people. Jones believes Brandtech is more interested in executing than stating its intentions. “We have a mantra that ‘cases studies beat demos and press releases’.”

Jay Pattisall is vp at Forrester and senior agency analyst. He credits Brandtech for its progress, but also believes it is keeping up with, er, the Joneses. He said that what Brandtech does is “on trend” and on par with other things he’s seeing in the industry.

Despite being an anti-holding firm — Jones and Jellyfish’s CEO Nick Emery were both holdco refugees and are now trying to act differently. Brandtech has developed multiple tools and products over the last year. Most of them have benefited Jellyfish and all of them use machine learning and generative artificial intelligence. These include:

• One Search which has been used by clients like Swarovski to update their search offerings and results, with the goal of achieving results while spending less.
• Now-Next Soon, a budget-allocation and forecasting platform that tries speed up the marketing-mix model process.
• Switchboard, a reporting suite powered by AI that fuses performance data and audience insights, along with creative insight for clients to improve campaign performances.
• Pattisall is impressed, but not overly impressed by Brandtech’s emphasis on search and SEO. It’s a hot topic right now, because it’s directly impacted by the drop in traffic. “But it’s an issue that all providers are talking about, and looking for ways that they can actively address it using their stacks and services.”

  Jeff Matisoff is a partner at Jellyfish, and the head of U.S. Operations. “A billion questions are asked of LLMs every day for brand preference, and now that we have an SEO for LLMs, brands are hungry for this because it’s competitive edge,” he said.

  John Dawson added that despite Share Of Model’s agentic ambitions, “We do not believe that agents will render human consumer journeys obsolete.” They will expand and enhance the types of journeys your human audiences take. “We’re thinking both/and, and not either/or,” said Matisoff. Matisoff, who is a member of the Switchboard team, said that he was most surprised at how Switchboard is used by clients. Many of them don’t put in enough effort to generate these kinds of insights. He said that many major advertisers do not have a dashboard for reporting the truth, which they can customize and are proud of. “That they can trust what their agency and different partners are looking together to be able have that single source truth… So, every time we win an account, Switchboard plays a big part in it.”

  A case study Brandtech provided Digiday revealed that a major CPG customer the company declined to name reduced the hours spent building reports, while increasing the recommendations by fourfold.

  Jess Nachtigall is the evp for global investment analytics at Jellyfish. She said, “When you have your data in one location and can look across channels and audiences, you can start to build an holistic, full-funnel, cross-channel testing strategy and share your learnings across your teams.” Nachtigall explained that Now-Next-Soon allows them to not only hit the overarching goals but also the individual channel team goals. This allows for more open and honest discussions between the c-suite and marketing leads, who are both looking at revenue numbers.

  CEO Jones summarized the company’s efforts. “You only create tools if they help someone do their jobs better, faster and cheaper.” Our founding mantra is: “You don’t need tech solutions for problems people don’t have.”

  Color by Numbers

  According to IAB CEO David Cohen, the IAB released its annual report, produced by PwC on U.S. advertising revenue in 2024. The report showed an unexpectedly high year of growth for digital advertising. Tariffs and a recession are on the horizon. 2025 could look very different. Cohen told Digiday that he believes the overall spending will likely decrease, but digital advertising could grow at a disproportionate rate depending on how the industry develops. –Sam Bradley.

  Highlights from the report include:

  • Search continues to account for the lion’s share of digital advertising revenue, with $102.9 Billion spent on the channel representing nearly 40% of the $258.6 Billion spent by brands in the past year
  • Digital video continues to accelerate; last year, spending on video increased 19.2% to $62.1 billion.This is almost a quarter the total US digital advertising spend. Retail media continues to grow. According to the IAB, retail media accounted for $53.9 billionin revenue last year, a 23% increase over the previous 12 month period. Unsurprisingly, industry consolidation continues. More than 80% of digital ad revenues are now concentrated in just 10 companiesdue to a recent squeeze on “long tail” providers.

  Takeoff & Landing

  • Last week, two agency holding companies announced their Q1 earnings. Publicis Group ( ) reported a 9.4% increase in total revenue. Organic revenue grew by 4.9%. Omnicom’s Q1 results were less impressive, with revenue growth of only 1.6%, and organic growth of 3.4%.
  • Only weeks after Crossmedia (19459031) partnered with gaming production firm Vertiqal Studio the latter has officially joined[19[19
  • Account Moves: Stagwell’s full-service agency Doner (19459031) landed media-AOR duties for jewelry company[19459030[19459030
  • Personal moves– David Dweck has joined GoFish (part of a group of agencies owned by private equity) as its general manager

  Direct quote

  I expect that investment in streamers, especially those with a highly differentiated offer, will be up. And I think that investment in the TV market will be flat or even down.”

  — Mike Dean of TV ad agency Ampersand on his expectations for upfront marketplace.

  Speed reading

  • Seb, Ronan Shields, and Marty Swant covered the implications and fallout of the verdict in Google’s trial.
  • SEB, CRYSTAL, AND CRYSTAL
  • Seb Joseph and Ronan Shields once again teamed up to examine WPP’s acquisition InfoSum.

https://digiday.com/?p=576070