Mark Lollback is calling time on his GroupM CEO role at the end of this week after a five-year stint at the helm of the WPP AUNZ media business.

With the swiftness of response by social media giants to remove President Trump’s from their platforms following the violent attack on Washington DC last week, it was easy to lose sight of other news around brands choosing to use – or not use – these platforms. Yet just before Christmas, Unilever confirmed it will cease its boycott of social media platforms and recommence its presence from January 2021.

Ecommerce has gone from strength to strength across Australia off the back of the COVID-19 global pandemic and rapidly accelerated digitisation in 2020, several new reports highlight.

The sharp declines seen across global advertising spend thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic are less significant than first thought, two fresh reports claim.

Building the right creative approach and assets required are the biggest challenges NRMA has faced in taking advantage of smart TV advertising, its media lead says.

So profound are the changing dynamics in the online world - the increasing shift to digital and the ongoing disruption of the coronavirus - brand safety givens are being rapidly overturned and even discarded.

Global ad spend will fall by almost 12 per cent this year (excluding US political advertising), but this will be followed by growth of 8.2 per cent on a comparable basis next year, according to GroupM’s twice yearly This Year, Next Year report.

In the wake of increased digital marketing following mandatory isolation, new research shows six in 10 consumers are less inclined to use a product if their data is used for any purpose.

In just weeks, Australian advertisers will get what many in the industry see as a game-changing capability for gauging what modern television consumption, reach and frequency truly looks like.

The latest GroupM global media and advertising forecasts show continued deceleration in advertising growth in 2020 off the back of slowdown this year.

CMO has filled our virtual sack with Christmas campaigns from the supermarket chains and big retailers to department stories and even the postal service to see how they’re sharing the message of Christmas this year. And we’ve canvassed some industry insiders and experts who share their reactions and analysis on this year’s batch of Christmas campaigns.

Agency and industry players who haven’t yet grasped how important marketing and advertising software systems are in the industry’s long-term future risk falling into the same trap their predecessors did when they failed to recognise digital’s significance.

​Global ad fraud is worth $22.4 billion and Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, excluding China and Japan, accounts for 1 per cent of the share of ad fraud, according to new research from GroupM.

If there's one thing about marketing that can be said to be constant, it's that it always changes. With new technologies, such as voice, AI, machine learning, virtual reality, augmented reality, natural language processing and facial recognition, about to become mainstream, it can feel as marketers, that we are always chasing our tails.

Australia’s ad spend is expected to grow by 4.4 per cent to $17.2 billion in 2019 off the back of strong display advertising investments and as TV records its first growth in six years.

The makers behind a new addressable TV solution bringing owned and third-party data to TVC media buying say the tool will finally give marketers the ability to target broadcast audiences as granularly as they do in other digital channels.

There’s no doubt the media industry is going through fundamental change, and agencies are at the pointy end of the stick. The list of challenges is a hefty one: Ad viewability and adblocking, trust erosion around media agency charging practices, changing client relationships thanks to digital and customer data disruption and an adtech explosion, to name a few.

GroupM has joined forces with Twitter to kick off beta trials of its first 100 per cent viewability campaigns on the social media platform.

Digital ad spend might be growing by double digits, but GroupM has still written down its global ad expenditure forecast for 2016 from 4.5 per cent to 4 per cent after witnessing slowing growth in the emerging markets of China and Brazil.