Oliver Gertz

Omnicom’s recent acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) has created the world’s largest marketing services group, but the deal’s importance goes beyond just scale. It’s the latest signal that agency holding companies are racing to reinvent themselves—not just as a collective of specialized agencies, but as fully integrated marketing platforms. Agency consolidation redefines how marketing gets done, who owns the systems, and where value is created.

There are good reasons that Netflix runs over 1,000 marketing tests per year and Amazon more than 2,000, while Booking.com runs over 1,000 experiments at any given moment, dynamically changing the layout and structure of web pages and offerings. These companies have harnessed the discipline of experimentation to improve their business on several fronts, in response to marketplace realities.

Predictive targeting: This ad is for you Oliver Gertz and Christian Schmalzl Predictive profile-based targeting is the trading of ad space by audience. Audiences can now be defined based on up to 600 variables, providing high levels of anonymous segmentation.