by Tim Bradshaw in London Published: March 9 2011 23:39 Omnicom, one of the world’s largest marketing services groups, has struck what it claims are industry-first partnerships with AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, to gain direct access to the internet companies’ consumer data. The deals, which follow a similar agreement with Google last year, will give Omnicom’s agencies the ability to [...]

By Tim Bradshaw Published: March 4 2011 20:26 Advertising agencies had confounded the critics who said they would be eradicated by the recession and the internet, said Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP. “There is no complacency but a lot of people were forecasting that a lot of us would go out of business [...]

Enfatico, Designed to Prevent Marketing Turf Wars, Will Be Folded Into Y&R By SUZANNE VRANICA WPP is folding Enfatico, the agency it built as a one-stop shop for all of Dell’s advertising and marketing business, into its Young & Rubicam Brands ad firm, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is a retreat [...]

While other company bosses are mired in gloom, Maurice Lévy appears to relish the prospect of a sharp downturn engulfing his industry.  “It’s the type of situation that excites my neurons,” said the chief executive of Publicis, the world’s fourth-largest advertising group, in an interview with the Financial Times … more

Microsoft Corp.’s $6 billion deal to buy an online-ad specialist called aQuantive Inc. puts into high gear a race between Madison Avenue and a new guard of technology businesses that are trying to dominate the unbridled market in brokering Internet advertisements …more