Advertising and marketing services major WPP plc WPPGY has joined forces with messaging app Snapchat and news publisher The Daily Mail to launch a new content marketing agency called Truffle Pig.
The trio made the announcement on board the Mail Online yacht at the Cannes Lions festival yesterday, striving to stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly mobile era that seems to be shifting radically toward content creation for vertical screens.
The new agency will enable the companies to tap growing demand among marketers for advertising formats that look like editorial content, and cash in on some of the estimated $544 billion in media ad spending.
The collaboration will focus on enabling marketers to produce and distribute branded content designed for new formats, such as “vertical video,” a technique of shooting short-form videos for smartphones made popular by Snapchat. It will deliver services such as content creation, video and photography, multimedia like infographics and GIFs, audience development and social media management.
The three partner companies stressed that Truffle Pig will not be tied to working with WPP’s advertising clients or with the Daily Mail or Snapchat. Instead, it will be open to working with any media company and advertisers.
It is believed that WPP and The Mail will hold equal large minority stakes in the venture, with Snapchat taking the smaller residual share.
In the initial stages, DailyMail.com, Elite Daily and Snapchat will serve as test beds for the original concepts in story-driven marketing as churned out by the new venture. However, its content and services can spread out to any digital properties that the client brands wish to market on.
Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s legendary CEO, asserted that in this era, technology, data and content were crucial to differentiate ad offerings, and the new venture will enable pooling of these very resources.
As the world's largest ad buyer, WPP generates $19 billion in revenue — 36% of which comes from digital advertising, mostly spent on ads placed with Google Inc. GOOGL and Facebook. This latest initiative underlines WPP’s strategy to build closer links with media companies, as it strives to maintain independence in the burgeoning mobile ad market and challenge the growing dominance of Google and Facebook.
WPP currently sports a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Other stocks in the advertising and marketing services industry that are worth a look now include Publicis Groupe SA PUBGY and Coupons.com Incorporated COUP, both carrying a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).
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