Amazon Prevails In Privacy Battle Over Alexa Ad Targeting (mediapost.com)

Harry Quadracci founded the company 52 years ago this month. Harry’s son, Joel, is now CEO. He took over in 2006, as print continued its slow decline and before the great recession upended the global economy. “I did everything my father told me not to do, which was go public and buy broken down printing companies,” Quadracci told Adweek during Cannes Lions last month. It was Quadracci’s first time at the Festival of Creativity where the intersection of creative, brand, platform and production merge. It’s also the intersection Quad aims to transect with a rebrand resulting from a 15-year transformational journey. “For us, it was we better become the consolidator, or the consolidating is going to be done to us,” Quadracci said. While its roots are indelibly in print, Quad now calls itself a marketing experience company that aims to rid companies of wasteful processes.

Phoenix Innovate (PI), a leading marketing communications firm headquartered in Troy, Mich., has acquired Carmel, Ind.-based UN Communications Group, Inc. The leadership and staff at UN will remain on and are thrilled to integrate the strengths of both companies with a focus toward creating a new standard for effective marketing solutions. “Our ability to serve our clients' brand awareness and marketing supply chain needs got a big boost today,” said Denise Purvis, President of UN. “The addition of strategic marketing, application development and data analytics expertise Phoenix Innovate provides will help our clients achieve a new level of integration, automation and increased ROI. The combination of our talented team members will continue to create game-changing marketing solutions for our clients.”

As part of its ongoing efforts to help mitigate greenwashing on Madison Avenue, the Institute for Advertising Ethics (IAE) is exploring the creation of a new industry entity that would help develop common standard and guidelines the ad industry can use to self-regulate the practice. The entity, dubbed “Common Consortium for Greenwashing Prevention” (CCGP) was disclosed in a letter sent to the Federal Trade Commission this morning, in response to the commission’s request for public comments to update the agency’s own “Green Guides” for the use of environmental marketing claims, which followed several congressional hearings last last year on the practice of greenwashing campaigns developed by major ad agencies and PR firms for fossil fuel marketers.