The marketing world is getting far more complex as A.I. tech like ChatGPT allows practitioners to crunch mounds of data to better target and personalize new ads more quickly. Those capabilities often require more firepower than a boutique firm possesses and more flexibility than the large marketing incumbents have.
So Mark Penn, the political pollster and adviser whose A-list clients include the Clintons and former British prime minister Tony Blair, is building a sizable marketing and advertising portfolio of stand-alone ad tech companies to bridge that gap. The 70 portfolio companies are run independently and get fees for referring business to each other. And Penn says they allow Stagwell, the firm he founded in 2015, to gradually assemble the tools he thinks clients need in the marketing wars.
