• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 26, 2013

If you follow the trade press (including this publication), you’d think that WPP and Publicis dominate Madison Avenue’s technology beat, but according to some sophisticated new research analyzing the impact each of the major agency holding companies -- and their most influential people -- have on the ad industry technology narrative, Omnicom dominates that story, and by a significant margin.

To understand the influence each of the major holding companies is having on the tech sector, including advertising and marketing technology, Online Media Daily partnered with Appinions, an innovative data-mining company that uses a proprietary method of measuring “influence” by extracting and aggregating opinions from more than 6 million sources, including blogs, social networks, forums and conventional news coverage from newspaper and magazine articles.

The holding company analysis, which was based on data from the past 60 days, shows that Omnicom indexed at 129 -- eight points higher than the second most influential company, WPP, and 20 points higher than third-place Publicis. In terms of tech influence, the rest of Madison Avenue were also-rans. Havas indexed at 51, and Interpublic, Dentsu (Aegis) and MDC Partners failed to index at all on the subject of technology.

The Appinions analysis suggests that the influence was driven primarily by topical events -- especially important news stories and deals, including Omnicom’s June 14th announcement of an exclusive partnership with Salesforce to power all of its social marketing and advertising services.

Similarly, WPP’s high-tech influencer ranking emanated from June 6th news of its partnership with Twitter to join its Data Alliance initiative. Twitter’s April 22nd announcement of a partnership with Publicis’ Starcom unit, as well as VivaKi’s June 7th deal with native at start-up Nativo, boosted its rankings, while Havas’ June 5th acquisition of data science firm MFG Labs and its May 16th deal to acquire ElisaDBI, boosted its standing.

While technology is a catch-all for a variety of things, it is short code on Madison Avenue for “innovation,” so it is seen as a strategic imperative and important bragging right for any holding company.

That said, the Appinions analysis also looked at how effective each holding company was at influencing its own story -- the conversations circulating specifically around each holding company’s own brand -- during the same period, and on that basis, WPP dominated with a 142 index, followed by Havas (138), Omnicom (127), Publicis (124), Interpublic (116), Dentsu (105) and MDC (69).