Stagwell

Stagwell expands its global marketing services into Africa through affiliate partnerships with Incubeta in South Africa, SBI Media in Nigeria and Dubai-based Orient Planet Group. To date, Stagwell has added over 50 affiliates to its roster, representing countries across Latin America, MENA, Asia-Pacific and Eastern Europe. Incubeta is a digitally focused firm working with clients in such sectors as retail, travel, finance FMCG, iGaming and app development. SBI Media's capabilities span branding, strategy and planning, PR strategy formulation, media management and digital marketing. Orient Planet Group is a public relations, marketing and communications consultancy serving clients in North Africa and the Middle East. “Stagwell's growth in the region will guide global brands to engage authentically with consumers across Africa," said Stagwell chairman and CEO Mark Penn.

Simon

A new D S Simon Media study says that communicators are relying far more on a brand’s own spokepeople than they are to third-party influencers. In the TV Interview Trends 2022 survey, eight in 10 (80 percent) of those surveyed said they plan to feature their own spokespeople in on-air interviews. While 70 percent said they prefer to feature one spokesperson during satellite media tours, of those preferring two, more than 90 percent said that should include at least one company or brand spokesperson. The company also says that an in-house spokesperson was featured in 78 percent of the media tours they conducted in 2021. Also, reflecting the popularity of virtual interviews, 68 percent of respondents said they prefer to use Zoom when conducting media tours. The survey included responses from 94 communicators between December 2021 and January 2022.

CTRx

The Next Practice Group launches CTRx Pathways, a service designed to accelerate and diversify clinical trial enrollment. The service represents a series of media models created while The Next Practices team worked over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Department of Defense as part of Operation Warp Speed. The accelerated enrollment initiative and partnership with Hopkins and the DoD was led by Michael Roth at The Bliss Group and Colin Foster at The Next Practice. Each model thinking from a mathematical, PESO (paid, earned, shared, owned) media and marketing standpoint. “Our version of ‘Warp Speed’ was to create a series of new models, based on media, marketing and math, that greatly improves the effectiveness of how we enroll trials and builds a system that gets more intelligent with time,” said Bob Pearson, chair of The Next Practices Group and CEO of The Bliss Group.