Ad Age Insider

In September, satellite radio company Sirius XM offered to plunk down $3.5 billion to acquire streaming music service Pandora. Joining us today is Pandora svp of ad innovation Lizzie Widhelm to break down what the Sirius offer means to Pandora — and vice versa. Sirius has more than 36 million subscribers in North America, Pandora has 70 million monthly listeners — fewer than 6 million of whom pay...

This weekend some 60,000 sneakerheads, hip hop aficionados, jocks, gamers, design nerds and foodies will descend on Long Beach, California, for the fourth annual ComplexCon. The consumer-facing pop culture bonanza is the physical expression of media brand Complex, which CEO Rich Antoniello has been driving for the past 17 years. Rich — who is outspoken on just about any topic you can throw at him...

An Aussie giant of a former Rugby player, Troy Ruhanen joined TBWA as president and CEO four years ago. Today he joins us on the Ad Lib podcast to spill some tea on his competitors — including WPP and Publicis — and give us some insight into clients including Apple, McDonald's and Nissan. We discuss what their pain points are, what his agency's big wins over the last four years have been, and grow...

Launched in 2005 in the ashes of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Walrus is a fiercely independent shop that's worked with such clients as Amazon, HBO, and Staples. Frances Webster — who co-founded Walrus with her husband, Chief Creative Officer Deacon Webster — has been outspoken about the need to train more women for agency leadership roles. She discusses the decision to offer media and buying services,...

For the past 18 months, Andrew McKechnie has been building Verizon's in-house agency, 140. It's no easy task. Networks, unlike the smartphones that run on them, are tough to make especially sexy. Still, he comes by the gig honestly. McKechnie had most recently served as global group creative director at Apple, after holding creative director titles at agencies including DDB, Y&R and JWT. Andrew jo...

After a five-year stint at BuzzFeed and a brief run as the CEO of DailyMail.com the last thing you would probably think to do is start a TV network. From scratch. Yet that's precisely what Jon Steinberg did. The former President and COO of BuzzFeed launched Cheddar Inc in 2016, a new media company with the initial goal of becoming the CNBC for millennials. Two and half years in, Cheddar is a bona...

As two of the four co-founders of media and entertainment company Refinery29, Philippe von Borries and Piera Gelardi have used a pro-women, taboo-shattering ethos to build a behemoth catering to the interests and cravings of young women that reaches an audience of upwards of half a billion globally across platforms. It is an audience that brands love (and to hear Refinery's founders tell it, an au...

"We're not in the advertisement business. We're in the engagement business," says Nick Brien, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network Americas. The advertising company was formed in 2013 to manage parent company Dentsu's operations outside of Japan. Dentsu now generates more than half of its revenue — 59 percent last year — from outside its home market. Yet Dentsu and Dentsu Aegis Network are less known and l...

Chances are, even if you are an avid consumer of short form streaming videos, you've never heard of Studio 71. But you've seen their work — or at least your kids have. From Canadian YouTube superstar Lilly Singh to vlogger Roman Atwood to Good Mythical Morning with Rhett and Link — Studio 71 is the media agency behind videos that generate a reported 9.5 billion views across platforms every month....

When Hernan Lopez left his post as president and CEO of Fox International Channels in 2016 to launch a podcast company people asked him a straightforward question: Are you nuts? But he saw parallels between the nascent medium of podcasting and the cable industry of the early 2000s. The company he started is called Wondery, and today it produces premium podcast fare like Dirty John and Business War...

Michael Ventura wrote the book on empathy. Literally. The founder of the New York strategy and design consultancy Sub Rosa is a multi-hyphenate. When he's not advising a portfolio of Fortune 500 clients and progressive start-ups, he is running an experiential shopping venture called Calliope with his wife, running an art gallery and event space, publishing a newsletter called La Petite Mort — the...

When Terry Young founded the agency Sparks & Honey in 2012, it was billed as a "next-generation" agency that really gets culture. Last month the Omnicom shop announced that it was — you guessed it — repositioning as a technology-led cultural consultancy. If it sounds like yet another agency scrambling to maintain relevance with buzzwords, Young says it's an outward reflection of what they've been...

A zen koan for 2018: How, as a media company today, does one build both scale and trust? It might be easy to cultivate one, but it often comes at the expense of the other. The USA Today Network has managed to do both. With 109 local papers scattered throughout the country, the newspaper company has certainly cobbled together scale. And the journalists on the ground are putting the lie to the idea...

On the first day of her job as CEO, Kiran Smith broke her left foot. What could easily be interpreted as a bad omen turned out to be a blessing in a cast: Smith says the boot she's had to wear these past five weeks have endeared her to new staffers and broken the ice with clients. She could use all the help she can get: In its second quarter earnings release last month, parent company Vivendi blam...

Publicis Groupe has had quite a year. In June of 2017 Maurice Levy stepped down as the holding company's CEO, handing the reins over to Arthur Sadoun. That same month, the company made waves at Cannes for saying it would abstain from sending work to awards shows for a full year in order to devote resources to an internal tech platform called Marcel. Still, Publicis missed its revenue targets in se...

For a publication with "news" in its title US News doesn't focus much on what's happening in the papers these days. Formerly known as US News and World Report, the publisher is perhaps best known to the average reader for its annual college rankings. But it is actually something of a digital pioneer. The media brand ditched its print magazine in 2010 to go all digital and shifted its focus to pure...

The Fox Business anchor joined the "Ad Lib" podcast before her news-making interview with President Trump last week. Here, Bartiromo discusses her evolution from a CNBC pioneer—where she was the first reporter to broadcast from the stock exchange floor—to a somewhat more ideological Fox Business headliner. We discuss her "Money Honey" nickname and industry sexism, the future of cable news and the...

With 22 years heading up an independent agency under his belt, DiMassimo Goldstein's Mark DiMassimo believes traditional advertising's days are numbered. Of course, he would say that. A long-ago JWT creative who logged years at holding companies, DiMassimo says he saw the light when he realized agencies fundamentally failed to meet clients needs. Proud to never have been to Cannes over the span of...

At a time when ad tech is besieged by brand safety concerns, transparency issues and industry-wide consolidation, the Trade Desk has been having a solid run. The demand side programmatic ad buying platform — have we lost you yet? — generated $85.7 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2018, a 61 percent jump from the same period last year. Today we are joined by Brian Stempeck, chief clie...

Michael Wolff has some thoughts about conflict. A consummate media insider for decades, the journalist-provocateur-entrepreneur shot into the public consciousness in January with the publication of his sensational peek inside the Donald Trump White House, "Fire and Fury." He, along with the rest of the advertising and media ecosystem, is in Cannes for the International Festival of Creativity. In a...

You may not have heard of David Shing, but you probably know about Shingy. The self-styled "digital prophet" at Oath – the Verizon-owned juggernaut that comprises AOL, Yahoo, the Huffington Post and some 50 media and b-to-b brands – is in Cannes on a mission that seems counterintuitive to what a digital prophet ought to be all about. He wants people to dial down their anxiety-inducing reliance on...

In a challenging time with so much gloom and doom out there, Paul Marobella remains a consummate optimist. The North American Chairman and CEO of Havas creative says the current climate reminds him of the mid-1990s, "when digital was going to change everything." Marobella joins the Ad Lib podcast today to discuss the advantages of being owned by Vivendi as opposed to a traditional advertising hold...

An expansive marketer in an era of the incredible shrinking CMO, Rajamannar joins the Ad Lib podcast to discuss what he calls the CMO existential crisis. We talk about marketing at scale in a time when people hate ads and have the power to block them, the surprising durability of the 20-year-old "Priceless" campaign and increasing gender diversity at his company's ranks. We also talk about a recen...

You're going to be hearing Ken Auletta's name a lot this month. Auletta, who has been writing the Annals of Communication column for The New Yorker since 1992, is the author of a new book about the industry's current existential crisis. "Frenemies" comes out June 5. He'll also be at Cannes at the end of the month interviewing Martin Sorrell on stage. This, however, is our moment to turn the tables...

When Andrew Swinand was tapped to be Leo Burnett's North America CEO last January, he had a daunting remit. Burnett had long been a flagship Chicago agency, but after losing McDonald's in September 2016 — and a few other accounts — the legendary creative shop had lost some of its luster. Swinand, who had most recently been at sister Publicis shop Starcom Mediavest, brought in a history of data and...