Affiliate Leaders rounds-up the latest mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, and account moves for marketers.
Deal Desk is a new series from Affiliate Leaders, which rounds-up the latest moves across the global affiliate and digital marketing industry and why it matters.
This week, we examine Amazon Ads partnership with Global; WPP integrating Google Earth into its marketing platform; Publicis Group’s acquisition of Fabric Social and more.
Amazon Ads and Global announce programmatic partnership
Amazon Ads and Global have teamed to integrate Amazon DSP directly with DAX, Global’s digital ad exchange platform, which offers programmatic and data capabilities.
The integration will give advertisers using Amazon DSP access to the UK’s biggest commercial audio brands, including Heart, Capital and Smooth. Advertisers will be able to access audiences online and on mobile via the Global Player app and on smart speakers such as Alexa.
It also will bring Amazon’s trillions of shopping, streaming and browsing signals together with millions of Global’s listeners, enabling advertisers to reach engaged audiences at scale with full-funnel measurement and attribution.
Phil Christer, managing director, UK, at Amazon Ads, said: “By combining Global’s iconic audio brands, which reach millions of listeners throughout their day, with Amazon first-party signals, AI-powered tools, and measurement capabilities, we’re creating powerful new ways for advertisers to connect with engaged audiences at scale.
“Amazon DSP now offers advertisers extensive reach across premium audio in the UK, setting a new standard for how brands plan, activate, and measure audio advertising.”
Leaders take
The opportunities this integration presents marketers with is huge. Just the fact that in 2025 alone, Global radio brands saw more than one billion listening hours on Alexa means those hours are now directly shoppable and measurable through Amazon’s attribution tools.
According to Global, its podcast portfolio – which includes The News Agents, My Therapist Ghosted Me and the new Formula one shot Up to Speed – will also be available via this programmatic integration.
WPP integrates Google’s Earth AI
WPP has become the first advertising holding company to integrate Google’s Earth AI models and datasets directly into its own AI agentic platform – WPP Open.
Through this expanded partnership, WPP’s agencies can help clients predict demand and automate marketing at a hyper-local level, while at the same time ensuring data remains secure and protected.
It will help with three core areas: advanced audience intelligence through real-world physical dynamics such as weather, community health trends or movement patterns.
The second is predictive media planning – the integration enables WPP to pre-validate campaign activations against population metrics. The final one is introducing maps-based production workflows, which could unlock more innovation and granular localisation and identify emerging cultural trends.
Stephan Pretorius, chief technology officer at WPP, said: “Google Earth AI brings together a whole universe of datasets representing the physical world into a single foundation model that for the first time, allows us to make decisions in an entirely new way.
“As an industry, we have had access to enormous amounts of digital data to understand human dynamics, trends and what content people consume. But people don’t just live in the digital world – they live in the physical world. By integrating this foundational physical-world data with our marketing data, we are changing the way the marketing industry thinks about consumer journeys.”
Yael Maguire, vice president and general manager of Google Maps platform and Google Earth, added: “Google Earth AI brings together our decades of modelling the world, along with Gemini’s advanced reasoning, to help businesses achieve much deeper insights about the planet. WPP is using Earth AI datasets in novel ways that can transform industries, and we’re proud to help drive impact for their clients.”
Leaders take
The marketing industry, including affiliates, have long spoken about personalisation and geo-targeting, but this takes that to a whole new level. With more than 80% of retail sales happening offline, according to Capital One data, WPP is bridging the gap between digital and physical consumer behaviour. It is giving clients the ability to understand in real-time what drives consumer needs – such as traffic, weather, neighbourhood movements etc.
Publicis Groupe UK acquires Fabric Social
Publicis Groupe UK has acquired Fabric Social, an agency known for its expertise across PR, social and influencer.
Fabric Social will join the PR, social and influence practice (PSI), alongside MSL, Taylor Herring and Publicis Sports and Entertainment. The agency will act as a ‘power of one’ social capability within Publicis Groupe UK and operate as a standalone shop with Laura Tannenbaum continuing as chief executive.
Niall McGarry, founder, Fabric Social, said: “Fabric Social was built to help brands show up meaningfully in culture and build genuine communities through social. We’ve always believed that social sits at the centre of modern marketing.
“Joining Publicis Groupe UK allows us to continue that journey at greater scale, combining our specialist expertise with broader integrated capabilities, while staying true to what makes Fabric distinctive.”
Rebecca Grant, UK chief executive and chief client officer, EMEA, PSI Practice, Publicis Groupe UK, added this acquisition signals the holding companies investment across PR, social and influencer marketing and “supercharges our ability to radically scale ideas, deliver unrivalled cultural cut-through and drive business impact for clients”.
Leaders take
Publicis Groupe has been investing in social media and influencer marketing since its acquisition of Influential in 2024 and Capti8 last year. Bringing Fabric Social into its portfolio of agencies builds on that momentum, particularly at a time when social media is becoming a core part of a marketers strategy. For affiliates, this move is a signal that social media and influencer marketing could be where they need to invest.
Other key deals
Affiliate platform impact.com has expanded its collaboration with YouTube and become an early adopter of its Creator Partnerships API, which gives brands and agencies another way to manage creator marketing campaigns on YouTube.
Omnicom has expanded its Adobe partnership to co-develop an enterprise-grade, agentic operating model for retail, financial services, pharmaceuticals, and automotive. The holding company will integrate its Omni platform and agentic framework with Adobe to leverage 2.6 billion verified IDs from Acxiom Real ID over 12 months.
Trainline has signed a first-party data deal, expanding its relationship with WPP Media. A first partnership of its kind for the travel platform, this move sees WPP plug Trainline’s transactional data into its AI agent, WPP Open Intelligence, which powers its marketing platform WPP Open.
NVIDIA has expanded its partnership with Adobe and WPP, with the aim of bringing agentic AI into marketing operations. Announced at Adobe Summit by NVIDIA, founder and chief executive Jensen Huang and Adobe chief exec Shantanu Narayen, the collaboration is to bring three core elements of together for better marketing: the creative and customer experience through Adobe’s new CX Enterprise Coworker, media and marketing expertise of WPP and NVIDIA’s computing and software stack.
