The Big Story: The Strange Case Of The Vanishing Media Agencies

The Big Story is a breezy new podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

The temperature is cooling, the leaves are falling and the skies are turning the color of slate.

It’s a time for mystery.

This week on “The Big Story,” the team investigates the baffling situation of the missing media agencies.

The cross-continental trail begins at the annual DMEXCO conference in Cologne, Germany, where AdExchanger editor Rae Paoletta searches for the buy side, but mostly finds vendors and “sellers talking to sellers.”

What happened in DMEXCO? Who was there? What did they see? Following a contentious divorce last year between the conference organizer and its founders, the event seems to be shrinking, becoming less international and more focused on the interests of its native Germany.

Back Stateside, editor Alison Weissbrot digs into Forrester’s Global Media Agency Wave and its eerie conclusion: The media agencies are dying.

The AdExchanger team tries to reconcile that strong language and interrogates the suspects: the encroachment of consultancies into agency territory and brands taking their programmatic media buying in-house.

And because there can’t be a Forrester Wave without a ranking, the team also dives deep into who came out on top, and why.