Seeking to address the growing importance of biddable media in advertising, industry veterans John Donahue and Chris Copeland today announced the launch of Up & to the Right, a consultancy bringing together Donahue's advisory business WLxJS, and Copeland's growth consultancy, C2Next. Up & to the Right will focus exclusively on biddable media, encompassing all programmatic channels as well as search, e-commerce, and social platforms. With growth accelerating rapidly over the last 18 months, these channels now account for in excess of 60% of all media investment, with total market size projections increasing by $120B over just the past year.
C2Next and WLxJS have built independent businesses working with marquee advertisers, including The Coca-Cola Company, Diageo, Hershey's, and Linksys. The two companies have also been recognized as leaders in the industry, winning awards including the AdExchanger Programmatic Consultancy of the Year for 2020. Together they have advised in excess of $1.5B in media spend. Up & to the Right will provide marketers with a path to greater agility and higher performance through biddable media.
The growth of biddable media channels has completely changed the approach to media and the speed of response companies now require. Up & to the Right provides expert advice to enhance performance across core programmatic, e-commerce, and social media channels. In 2020, Diageo, working in partnership with Up & to the Right, increased overall advertising ROI by 25% while driving 31% savings in spending on Facebook and 23% savings across all of their programmatic efforts.
Both Up & to the Right founders are veterans of influential advertising holding companies: Donahue spent several years as Global Director of Business Intelligence Analytics at Omnicom Media Group, while Copeland founded the search practice at GroupM, before establishing GroupM's innovation unit, GroupM Next, and spending more than ten years in executive roles there. Leveraging their extensive experience at the intersection of advertising and technology, the two leaders will work to meet the increasing need for marketers to deploy excellence in auction strategy on all relevant biddable platforms, including Google, Amazon and Facebook. Up & to the Right's expertise extends from technology evaluation to optimizing internal and external resources, facilitating effective collaboration between advertisers and their advisors. In addition to brand clients, the company has also collaborated with ID Comms to conduct a variety of agency reviews.
"We are embarking upon a new era for our company and leveraging the power of biddable media channels. Up & to the Right is helping us create outstanding processes for this approach while also helping us realize great potential and growth," said Harry Dewhirst, CEO of Linksys.
"ID Comms helps advertisers maximize their media investments at a time of massive change," says CEO and founder Tom Denford. "John and his team have worked with ID Comms to design ways to conduct real-time agency assessments of programmatic media, driving partners to deliver exceptional performance in order to win."
Donahue and Copeland are joined at Up & to the Right by Bill Callahan, who will focus on the role that creative assets play in auctions, and Michael Dowd, an industry leader in performance media optimization through search and e-commerce channels.
"The industry evolution from reserve markets to auction markets has accelerated-and has been quicker than the pace of change at advertiser and agency organizations," said Donahue. "We believe we can help align technology and talent in this new world to everyone's benefit."
