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Marketing Week: ‘Marketer of the Year’ Marc Pritchard On His Quest For Transparency

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Looking back over 2017 so far it is hard to think of a marketer that has made as big an impact as Procter & Gamble’s marketing chief Marc Pritchard. Since making his already seminal marketing speech on media transparency in January, he has galvanised the digital media industry to change by forcing Google and Facebook to listen to the demands of marketers.

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LinkedIn Pulse: Response to Mark Ritson: Are Media Agencies Damned?

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I’m writing this on Pulse because there simply wasn’t room to add the depth of comment under Mark’s post on LinkedIn, which itself is a link to his Marketing Week column. He asked for my thoughts, here they are.

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Marketing Week: Mark Ritson: Media Buying’s Deadly Sins – And Why Agencies Are Too Late To Save Their Souls

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Last week saw the great and the good of the advertising world trundle to New York City for Advertising Week – four days of talks, events, awards and general navel-gazing. If you have been to any advertising event you can imagine how it generally went down: the usual ongoing orgy of ‘disruptive digital purpose’ and ‘purpose-driven digital disruption’, and of course the big keynote on ‘the digital disruption of purpose’. Take your pick.

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Mumbrella: ‘There’s an enormous lack of trust’: Agencies need to clean up their acts, warns former Carat boss

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The way major holding companies have been treating clients’ media money without their knowledge is the key factor in the loss of trust by marketers in their agencies, a senior industry executive has claimed.

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Digiday: In China, Platforms Are Cutting Out Media-buying Agencies

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If China is where the future happens, that’s bad news for media agencies. In China, big brands are increasingly moving their advertising budgets from agency trading desks to Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (known as the BAT) for more media transparency. It may make sense from a cost-saving perspective: If brands can strike deals with the BAT at a good price on their own, why bother to pay a middleman to buy media? Also, brands now have more campaign management service options like vendors and consulting firms, aside from their media shops.

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MediaPost DigitalNewsDaily: The Right Kind of Transparency

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Just over a year ago, in July 2016, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) dropped a bomb on the advertising world in the form of a report on transparency. It found there wasn’t much.

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Advertising Age: Invisible Hand Behind WPP Wednesday: Transparency

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Call it WPP Wednesday: Surprisingly weak second-quarter earnings and dour forecasts by the giant agency holding company sent its stock plummeting 12%, pulling other holding companies down 3-7%.

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MediaPost: Global Marketers Improving Media Oversight: WFA Study Finds More Control, Transparency

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A new study from the World Federation of Advertisers based on a membership survey taken in May concludes that many big league marketers are taking last year’s Transparency Report from the Association of National Advertisers to heart and making substantial efforts to improve stewardship of their media spending practices and relationships with agencies.

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