Advertising: New Unit to Turn Brands Into Publishers

Just a few months earlier, IPG Mediabrands, a division of the Interpublic Group, a competing conglomerate, provided its own signal, albeit a less flashy one, that data collection was gaining importance: it announced that it would automate half of its media-buying business over the next three years.

The move to automation — high-speed, algorithmic programs that buy and sell ads based on a desired audience — was expected to be complemented by a second announcement by IPG on Thursday. The company is creating a new internal publishing group that will help advertisers create content like videos and manage their Web sites and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

“Everybody who had anything to do with the New York Stock Exchange could have told you the exchange could have automated probably decades before they did,” said Matt Seiler, global chief executive of IPG Mediabrands.

Employees in IPG’s new publishing division, which will be called Mediabrands Publishing, will spend their time “creating the digital content that matches up with the automated delivery,” Mr. Seiler said.

Automation will help the company save costs by buying and selling media more efficiently, Mr. Seiler said.

“There will be new people coming in with different, very highly valued skills, people within the organization who will be redeployed and there will be people whose jobs are replaced with technology,” he said.

“As we get to that 50 percent,” he said, referring to the balance between automated ad buying and created content, “we’re able to reinvest the saved dollars and reinvest more on the custom and sponsorship end.”

Susan Bidel, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, said automation could lead to staff cuts, but relationships between sellers and buyers “are important and lead to the biggest programs and the largest chunks of revenue.” Sales staffs will be smaller but more strategic, Ms. Bidel said.

“They will be made up of women and men who can understand the technology and understand the audience and package it appropriately for advertisers,” she said.

Mr. Seiler said that media agencies had traditionally been planning and distribution vehicles, with creative duties being “outsourced to somebody else.” Adding a publishing division will create a new agency model of “you come up with it, you make it and you distribute it,” he said.

The new division will be led by Mark Himmelsbach, who will become its chief operating officer, and Teddy Lynn, who will be the chief creative officer. Before IPG, both men worked at BBDO, an agency in the Omnicom Group.

“We will not be looking to have brands to produce content to put out on NBC,” Mr. Himmelsbach said. “We will be looking to help brands produce content to put on their own channels,” like a Web site or social media.

“Instagram, Vine, Twitter, Facebook, each channel requires something different that must resonate with consumers,” he said.

Having one location to manage all of a brand’s media assets will give IPG a competitive edge when it comes to creating multiplatform advertising campaigns, Mr. Lynn said. “It’s not just social but what happens when you are in a parking lot reading Twitter, what happens when you walk into a store,” he said.

Susan Jurevics, a senior vice president at Sony, a brand that works with IPG, said the new publishing unit, combined with more automated media buying, had the potential to help streamline all of the moving parts of an ad campaign.

“Producing content that’s relevant to your audience is actually really hard, especially if that’s not a core competency of what you do,” she said.

Understanding how to create and distribute different types of content for specific audiences across multiple platforms is a challenge for many brands, she said.

One target for Sony is consumers from 13 to 30, the so-called millennials. Traditional 30-second ads are not as effective with that group, Ms. Jurevics said, adding “they really don’t want to be marketed to.”

Marc Speichert, chief marketing officer at L’Oréal USA, said, “We’re excited about the initiative because more and more we position ourselves as publishers.”

For a beauty and cosmetics company like L’Oréal, the desire for video tutorials on how to use products is great, Mr. Speichert said.

“It means creating more assets than ever before,” he said. “The whole point about how you take media and creative and bring them together, I think it’s what all agencies should be obsessed with.”

Twitter Lets Brands Find Viewers of Their TV Ads

For those inclined toward social media, using Twitter while watching television has become a ritual, with viewers commenting on everything from sports events to nighttime dramas. On Thursday, executives from Twitter discussed how they planned to capitalize on that activity by allowing advertisers to send ads to people who are watching specific programming.

The new product will help brands match advertisements with Twitter commentary by viewers. Brands can then send messages to selected Twitter users who have already seen their ad on television.

“When people turn on TV they turn on Twitter,” said Matt Derella, the director of brand and agency strategy, who led a presentation on the product in Manhattan.

Twitter also announced it would work with a number of media companies, including Time Inc., Bloomberg, Discovery, Vevo, Vice Media, Condé Nast Entertainment and Warner Music Group, to sell advertisers content, in a partnership called Twitter Amplify. The content will probably be digital video or television content like clips from shows. It can then be shared on Twitter, and advertisers can run ads before the videos are viewed.

The format is similar to a partnership Twitter announced last year with ESPN and Ford, which embedded replays from football games in posts sent via Twitter. ESPN and Ford promoted the posts to people who had been identified as being interested in sports based on the accounts they followed on Twitter and the subjects of their posts.

Jim Nail, an analyst at Forrester Research, said Twitter would have to be careful about the number of advertisements it allowed on its platform. By injecting too many ads into a user’s feed during a television show, “they risk driving those fans away and having those fans unfollow the show,” Mr. Nail said. A representative from Twitter said the company already had limits on how many ads users would see in a day.

“This will allow us to really align much more of the work we’re doing day in and day out,” said Tim Castree, the chief operating officer at MediaVest USA, part of the Starcom MediaVest Group, of the new advertising offerings. Instead of focusing advertising during major events, advertisers can now “extend the time period for the spot we already had planned.”

Last month, Twitter signed a multiyear deal, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, with Starcom to, among other things, allow the companies to combine some of the resources they use for measuring and tracking data and advertising.

This week, Twitter made other brand announcements including a two-step authentication process that would provide more security for Twitter accounts. The accounts of several prominent brands, including Burger King and Jeep, were hacked in February.

The company also announced a feature that allows users to sign up for offers from brands without having to leave the site.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 24, 2013

An earlier version of this article described the Twitter Amplify program incorrectly. It involves Twitter’s media partnerships, not its advertising targeting program.