Ad Agency

UniWorld Group, Inc. has announced a new executive addition. Victor Paredes has joined UWG as VP Creative Strategy.

Alma, part of the Omnicom Network, yielded exceptional results at the 50th Annual U.S. Effie Awards. The agency was named the fourth most-effective agency in the U.S. and was awarded five Effie Awards across four major clients and multiple categories, making it the most highly-awarded multicultural agency of the year.

At the end of 2017, Adobe published a report showing that almost two-thirds (62 percent) of marketers planned to take all their programmatic media buying in-house by 2022, with the remaining 38 percent planning to take some elements of programmatic under direct control in the same period. A 2018 ANA report showed a similar effect from in-housing. The ANA's "The Continued Rise of the In-house Agency" report, which replicated and updated similar studies from 2013 and 2008, found that the number of advertisers with in-house agencies has grown substantially, standing today at 78 percent of brands, compared to 58 percent five years ago and just 42 percent a decade back. Sixty-five percent of advertisers said that the in-house agency workload had grown "substantially" in the past year.

After a decade of steady growth, in-house agencies are finding their place in the sun. In March, marketers from some of the world's best-known brands took the stage at the ANA In-House Agency Conference in Orlando to celebrate the evolution of their departments from transactional "creative services" shops to high-value divisions that drive growth and customer engagement in a changing media and consumer marketplace.

The ANA released a new report, "Enhancing Trust Between Marketers and Agencies," in 2019 — for which 119 ANA client-side marketer members were polled.

Agencies have always operated in a competitive market, but now, they must contend with brand clients bringing marketing tasks in-house and consultancies encroaching on their turf.