Ebiquity rebrands global digital offering, reshuffles senior roles

A year after acquiring digital media monitoring firm Digital Decisions, Ebiquity has unveiled how the firm's 'source marketing' solution will be integrated into its new global digital offerings. 

From now on, Digital Decisions will operate as Ebiquity's Digital Innovation Centre, a central digital services hub that is now live across Ebiquity's 56 global markets for clients like Mars and Huawei. 

To drive the new integrated offering, Ebiquity has made some key staff changes with Digital Decisions staff. Ruben Schreurs (formerly CEO of Digital Decisions) has been named group chief product officer at Ebiquity. Former CCO Peter Hanford is now Ebiquity's group director of digital growth, while former COO Lars Noordewier becomes managing director of the new Digital Innovation Centre. 

Netherlands-based Digital Decisions has offered clients something called ‘source data monitoring’—a service allowing brands to monitor and optmise their media spends across the digital media supply chain in multiple geographies and buying platforms. Whereas previously media monitoring relied on data templates to produce less timely and actionable annual reports, the new infrastructure means data processing becomes largely automated and reported monthly. It also means the quicker intelligence can be turned into forward-looking recommendations on how to cut waste and step up the value of investments.

Now, after a long front and back office integration with Ebiquity's full global network, Schreurs claims the scale of the new service is unmatched, extracting trillions of digital ad impressions worth billions of spend directly from sources on clients' behalf. 

The World Federation of Advertisers, whose digital media benchmarks are then applied by Ebiquity to all of these impressions, welcomed the latest developments. "Now that they move to full integration, we look forward to a turbocharged partnership at a time when accountability of digital ad spend is of utmost importance to brand owners," said WFA CEO Stephan Loerke.

Vinod Subramanian, global marketing and procurement director at Huawei, who is already using the new service, said brands need more joined up digital audits that are wider in scope and more actionable. 

"With digital and performance media investments increasing, it is imperative that the traditional audit practices are revisted," Subramanian said.