Media Buying Briefing: How indie Exverus grew its clients and programmatic practice to behave more like a big shop

By Michael Bürgi

I’ve written before that it feels as if 2022 ma y be the year of the independent agency. One Los Angeles independent, Exverus Media, is out to prove it, growing its client roster as it adds or enhances newer disciplines like programmatic investments that used to be the terrain of holding company giants.

In many ways thanks to ad-tech, which has been beaten up more than lauded in the industry (and press) in recent months and years, smaller agencies have greater ability to build out their tools and offerings in (smaller) mirror images to their holding company counterparts. So it is with Exverus, which is building out its year-old programmatic trading desk with an AI bent and a new hire in Sean Edwards, associate director of programmatic media, who came over from a similar role at PHD. These moves have saved their clients typically 15 percent, touted Bill Durrant, Exverus’ founder and president.

“Ultimately, we’re seeing that now tie back to a holistic, comprehensive measurement solution that doesn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for the client, but allows them to see precisely what’s working at driving their sales everywhere that they’re distributed,” Durrant said. “Which in this kind of omnichannel world, we want to do that precisely and deterministically — and we can do within 95 percent confidence.”

Specifically, Durrant said the agency saw an opportunity to connect more modern measurement solutions to the programmatic ecosystem (from The Trade Desk to Amazon to DV360), particularly for the consumer packaged goods clients that comprise a big part of Exverus’ roster (new client Jovē Wellness, Premier Nutrition). The media agency is in alpha testing to unify AI-algorithmic enabled measurement with outside measurement providers to better understand sales, attribution and forecasting for all media channels, then break that down on a more granular level in its programmatic trading desk.

“That’s all now feeding into those algorithms, to allow us to make better choices on what specifically is driving results for the brand — it doesn’t matter if they come online or offline,” Durrant added. “Being able to do that in a way that does not rely at all on cookies or technology that’s being deprecated is the only way to move into the back half of 2022 and then into 2023.”

“Generally, independent agencies don’t have the financial wherewithal to fund these kinds of new products,” said Evelyn Mitchell, an analyst covering digital media and tech for Insider Intelligence (formerly eMarketer). “But with tech like this, you can’t just set it and forget it — you need to keep refreshing it given all that’s going on with changes in the privacy marketplace. I haven’t heard of smaller agencies doing this.”

Prior to the programmatic buildout, Exverus’ CPG chops were honed by working as a strategic consigliere to startups like Jovē’s bottled water offering, which launched during the COVID pandemic. Besides new client Jovē, Exverus also added to its CPG core with pet-food company Stella & Chewy’s, …read more

Source:: Digiday