Category: In the News

January’s TikTok outage has served as a wake-up call for brands, reinforcing the need to diversify their spending across multiple platforms to avoid over-reliance on a single channel.

That’s meant marketers have spent more on other platforms like Instagram and YouTube, both of which outpaced TikTok’s spend in the month following the platform’s Jan. 18 outage, representatives of influencer marketing companies Later, Collabstr, BENlabs and BrandCycle told Digiday.

Although major advertisers such as Unilever are upping their spending on influencer marketing — and some brands are continuing to increase their spending on TikTok — influencer marketers see this trend as evidence that brands are still hedging their bets around TikTok marketing amid the uncertainty surrounding the platform’s potential U.S. ban.

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WPP surprised the marketing and media worlds today with the least-surprising news possible. The agency holding company said it is purchasing InfoSum — the data firm once run by its current global CEO of GroupM, Brian Lesser. From the day Lesser took the reins at GroupM last July, it’s been speculated that WPP might purchase the firm — and now it has.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sources close to WPP said InfoSum’s last valuation was $300 million.

But the deal represents a leveling-up on WPP’s part in the data-driven arms race among the agency holding companies. It comes just weeks after Publicis purchased Lotame, and months after Omnicom moved to acquire Interpublic Group, which comes with Acxiom.

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