Media Buying Briefing: iProspect adds brand-building powers to its performance reputation

The three additions include: Dave Sederbaum, Dentsu’s head of video investment, who became chief investment officer earlier this year; Michelle Snodgrass, who’s a longtime strategy head at iProspect’s origin agencies including Vizeum; and Liz Vance, chief client officer, who’s another Dentsu vet.

The performance-oriented agency has been on a mini-tear of late, winning new clients including eBay, Reckitt Nutrition, Principal Financial Group and Ferrero Group all in 2024.      

Dentsu’s iProspect grew out of performance-driven agencies like Vizeum and was known for generating lower-funnel results for its clients. But the growing awareness that performance alone will not generate new business, but a blend of performance and brand-building work will, drew Rutgersson to make the moves she’s made to her ELT. 

“Last year was focused on leaning into our building brands with the performance mindset, with this powerhouse of performance media experts and the skill set and breadth and depth of full funnel media,” said Rutgersson, who’s a longtime Merkle veteran. “What that enhanced team was able to achieve was our biggest ever new-business year, and not just the acquisition of clients that were classic iProspect clients, which were focused on digital media or on lower-funnel media, but true full-funnel, brand-focused advertisers that wanted to take a performance centric approach to the entire media ecosystem.” 

The eBay win, she said, offers a perfect example of a client that reflects the broader skillset iProspect has tried to convey to the market. “That win was actually particularly focused on upper funnel media,” she said.

Seth Garske, who handles global media strategy and planning at eBay, said that by partnering with iProspect, “we are setting ourselves up to be far more nimble as an organization, and given all of the recent global economic uncertainty, that will become a huge asset going into 2025.”

Perhaps the embodiment of Rutgersson’s ELT moves comes in the form of Sederbaum, a veteran of many upfront negotiations who knows the video investment landscape intimately. To her mind, he brings the kind of brand-oriented approach to the agency while he enjoys the challenge of broadening his knowledge base into lower-funnel and broader digital channels.

“I wanted to have someone with a ton of credibility, a ton of history in the marketplace, a reputation for investment prowess in a more traditional sense, to complement the performance heritage that my leadership team has,” said Rutgersson. “I needed someone with much more of a traditional media lean, who could translate that background and that historical understanding of the marketplace to the client base that we now have who cares about all kinds of media but wants to understand how to translate traditional forms of media to be performance driving.” 

Sederbaum said he’s come in with “the perspective of needing to take that performance mindset into every investment decision that we make, regardless of channel,” he said. “The reality of today is that all the dollars need to be accountable in everything that we do as as an organization, as an industry … The DNA that they had forever, of performance excellence and bringing some of that way of thinking into the full funnel is really what excited me.”

Sederbaum will also be charged with building new investment tools with other Dentsu units including Amplifi — but he and Rutgersson declined to go into detail about those efforts.

On the strategy side, Snodgrass has held strategy roles with Vizeum and 360i before zeroing in on iProspect. She said a core belief is that the agency shouldn’t worry about “staying in our lane,” which historically has been lower-funnel work.

“We believe the future of media is 100% addressable, connected, shoppable, automated, and accountable,” she explained, adding that to her, what makes iProspect different is “we have a customer-out approach to building audiences to identify the biggest opportunities for brand growth and the next best segments to acquire … We are a team of hyper-specialists who focus on driving performance out of every channel in our plans — both traditionally performance and traditionally brand channels — to ensure every dollar invested is accountable to outcomes.”

Vance, meantime, has quietly held the chief client officer role since last year, and has focused some of her time on crafting a new segmentation model to ensure all clients get custom teams built for them.

“Liz’s role ensures that we have a consistent approach to what clients get access to at Dentsu, the way that we treat and partner with our clients across this entire portfolio of over 100 of them,” she said. “We’re ensuring that we have the right leadership and the right team organizational structures to meet our clients needs, regardless of their size and scale. And Liz has really been at the forefront of designing that.”

Vance said the segmentation model helps both internal teams coordinate with other Dentsu units but also provides clarity for clients. “We have a very wide range of clients with varying needs, so we conducted an extensive analysis of each client to outline their needs of today and the future,” she said. “We’re fully transitioned into our new structure and are already seeing a positive impact in terms of client engagement and performance.”

Rutgersson did note that much of the organizational motivation behind iProspect’s moves stem from prior Dentsu Americas CEO Michael Komasinski’s efforts to reorganize all of the holdco’s media agencies and units to work more seamlessly with each other. 

“Michael’s reorg allows for much easier cross collaboration across the entire network and means that it’s much easier for our client teams to tap into all that Dentsu has to offer, and vice versa,” said Rutgersson.

Color by numbers

In case you haven’t noticed, AI is kind of a big thing in the agency world — the latest example being WPP’s investment in Stability AI announced last week. A recent study from Epsilon shows why: Marketers are pretty into it too. Conducted in partnership with Phronesis Partners, the online survey reached 259 U.S. marketers in retail, financial services, CPG, restaurant and travel industries. Some of the findings: 

• 94% of marketers have adopted AI for marketing;
• 93% of marketers say they’re planning to allocate at least 5% of their budget to AI initiatives;
• 85% of organizations currently use data insights and analysis AI tools and technologies;
• 41% of organizations say return on ad spend has improved the most due to AI.

Takeoff & landing

• Fresh from its spinoff out of former parent Vivendi, Havas’ 2024 results delivered 1.5% growth in net revenue (to 2.7 billion Euros) and 2.4% growth in net income, but organic revenue growth stalled at -0.8%. The worst performing region for the holdco is North America, which dropped 6.6% in revenue mostly due to losing Pfizer’s media business. 
• GroupM won global media duties for game maker Electronic Arts, but word leaked out at week’s end that its North American media work for Coca-Cola is being quietly reviewed.  
• Personnel news: Gale founding CEO Brad Simms retired last week, as the Stagwell-owned agency named two to replace him: Andrew Noel is the new global CEO while Sophia Zhang is North American CEO … Omnicom’s OMD named two Publicis execs to its C-suite: Dan Rolli comes in as chief investment officer, replacing Kelly Metz who’s left the agency, and Kim Einan was named chief strategy officer … Longtime T&Pm London CEO Sarah Golding is leaving the agency … Longtime GSD&M CEO Duff Stewart is also stepping down, replaced by president Lee Newman. 

Direct quote

“Industry challenges like ad fraud, hidden fees, and inefficiencies have made agencies ask tougher questions of SSPs. These challenges have led us to prioritize directness, transparency, and quality from SSPs to ensure the effective investment of media budgets.”

— Wayne Blodwell, global svp of programmatic at Assembly, as told to Seb Joseph. 

Speed reading

• I wrote about Coca-Cola’s pending decision on whether to move its North American media business out of WPP. That decision is expected this week. 
• Sam Bradley looked the changing relationship between The Trade Desk and media agencies, noting how the DSP giant is courting more direct relationships with agencies’ clients. 
• Marty Swant examined the reasons behind Publicis Groupe’s surprise purchase of Lotame, expanding its global identity and data-management capabilities. 

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