wpp - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

WPP Group has acquired Blast Radius, an interactive agency based in Canada, for an undisclosed sum. 

Blast Radius, which employs 400 staff with offices in San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Amsterdam and London, has experience in building ad campaigns for social networks. It will be aligned with WPP's Wunderman network. 

The acquisition, reckoned to be worth around $100m if targets are met, will see Schematic folded into the ad giant’s digital unit.

British ad giant WPP has announced the acquisition of internet ad company 24/7 Real Media for a whopping $649m (£329m).

The move is the latest in a flurry of mergers in the online ad market following the Google/DoubleClick deal.

WPP boss Martin Sorrell has dropped a libel action against two employees he claimed had used an anonymous blog to slur his character, instead opting to settle for £120,000.

Marco Benatti and Marco Tinelli, heads of a WPP Italian subsidiary, were alleged to have likened Sorrell to a Godfather-type mafia boss and published "grossly offensive" images of the advertising chief and an ex-lover.

Small businesses have traditionally been locked out of the TV market because of the prohibitive costs of running ads. However, one California-based company is looking to change this by allowing companies to  produce and plan ads online.

Set up by entrepreneurs Nick Grouf and David Waxman, Spot Runner offers a ‘self-service’ platform for businesses to create and plan ads, and says it can allow firms to run campaigns for as little as $1,500. It recently received funding from a string of big media companies, after previously attracting the interest of Google.

Although the firm is focused solely on the US for now, Spot Runner’s Keith Wiley spoke to us about how its service can be used by advertisers and ultimately be adapted to other forms of media.

Google is planning another foray into the offline advertising market by extending its AdWords system to print media.

The search giant has invited 100 advertisers to test out the Print Ads service, which will initially broker space in newspapers in the US.

Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP has made a series of investments in the online space this year, most recently the purchase of a 10% stake in Spot Runner, the US-based online ad agency which had also attracted the attention of Google.

He told us why...

Ad giant WPP has continued its online spending spree, leading a $2m round of funding in internet marketing outfit LiveWorld.

The move comes after WPP and LiveWorld formed a joint venture in July, with both firms saying they have seen growing demand for marketing services focusing on online communities.

Ad giant WPP said “China and the internet” remain its main opportunities for growth after reporting a 30% rise in pre-tax profits in the first half of this year.

The company, which has made a string of investments in online ventures in the past few months, said its direct marketing and digital activities now account for 20% of revenues.

WPP has made its second foray in a month into the social media space with the purchase of a stake in reputation monitoring company Visible Technologies.

The ad giant said it had agreed to buy a quarter of the Seattle-based firm and entered into an option to acquire a further 26%.