The current agency model is broken. Agencies aren't built to accommodate innovation. Online marketing requires too many specialists to be effective.
Those are some pretty bold statements, no? They seem even more outlandish when you consider they came from an ad:tech panel called "The Modern Agency," full of agency honchos assembled to discuss compensation models and the delivery of cross-media expertise.
Online advertising has led to a plethora of startups and vendors, all pushing new innovations and marketing solutions. But when it comes time to finding a way to deploy innovative new technology, the agency might not be the best place to look.
"Find a client champion rather than an agency champion," advised Paul Wollmington, founding partner of Naked. "It's a shame, because I'm an agency guy, but I've felt the frustration of being shuffled around before."
Wollmington advised developers and agencies to ask what a new technology can do for a client before making the decision to use. In the end, all innovation has to help boost the clients bottom line to be worthwhile.
One reason digital is struggling with acceptance is the variety of specialists required. Many aspects of digital are siloed, and with a lack of talent entering the field, agencies can't... Read more
Tags: ad:tech, agencies
Posted in Media Planning & Buying | No Comments »
In the welcome letter to this year's iMedia Breakthrough Summit, Daisy Whitney, the new iMedia Senior Content Producer, wrote about being uncomfortable.
"Being uncomfortable when it comes to new marketing channels is good," she said, "It means we're thinking, challenging ourselves, stepping (or being pushed) across the borders of comfort."
Discomfort is a theme that's been touched on in some of they keynotes here at Breakthrough (titles like "The Hope Beyond the Hype" and "What's Next in Emerging Media").
But, to me, the most valuable things about these iMedia Summits are the conversations that happen around the bar and lunch table. It's a rare opportunity to talk with brand marketers and peers from other agencies about shared issues we are all facing. And being uncomfortable seemed to be a common theme in those venues too.
So, much has changed. The economy has put accountability in the spotlight. Everything is shifting to digital because it is measurable, but this expectation of quantifiable returns often stifles innovation. Social media has gone mainstream and while advertising, media and PR agencies grapple to own the space, the reality is that companies must weave social marketing practices into every facet of their organizations.
I took an informal... Read more
Tags: agencies, breakthrough, emerging media, imedia, imedia breakthrough, summit
Posted in Emerging Platforms | No Comments »
Back in July in this Behavioral Insider article, Laurie Sullivan brought up what has been a vexing roadblock along the path to success in online ad targeting: how to manage the vast amounts of consumer data that can be collected by cookies and ad tags.
While there are many ways to deal with this thorny issue, the fact is it's not really a question of storage and CPUs, but one of analytics. When you think about the issue of data overload, the challenge is identifying and leveraging what is relevant to your campaign from what is dross. But this is a very subjective process: a publisher will have quite different criteria for relevance than an individual marketer
The suggestion of creating standard definitions for relevance is a very publisher-centric view. Standards are great when you're trying to sell impressions, but less so when you're a marketer trying to obtain unique audience segments. A standard criterion for relevance of an automotive segment, for example, might be all adults aged 18-35 who have visited an auto site in the past 30 days, but for an individual auto marketer, it may be that only those who have visited a specific competitor in the last five... Read more
Tags: ad tag, ad tags, agencies, analytics, audience segmentation, behavioral segments, consumer data, cookies, Data, data filtering, data mining, data overload, data storage, demand side networks, demographic, etl, impressions, networks, publisher, relevance, Targeting
Posted in Web Analytics | No Comments »
In a recent post in iMedia Connection, Michael Katz of interCLICK described the challenges ad networks face in delivering client ROI at scale. One of his main points dealt with the difficulty of consistently valuing and pricing consumer data sets.
From his perspective, of course, this is a vexing issue: an ad network has to consider what data to license and how much it's worth, and it's difficult to pin down the value of data in any consistent manner across a spectrum of clients. An ad network has to make decisions on data valuation based on the broader needs of many clients, and doesn't have the luxury of managing client by client, making individual decisions based on a client's needs.
But this is exactly what an agency is set up to do. If you're an agency account team lead managing a single client, you're set up to aggressively purchase inventory solely for that particular client; you have clarity of purpose and an organization set to do so in an effective manner. On the buy side it's very easy to know what data is worth for a particular client. You find out very quickly with a trial run. You know exactly... Read more
Tags: ad agency, ad net, ad network, agencies, agency, audience segments, buy side, client management, Data, Holding companies, media plan, networks, Optimization, performance, ROI, scale, technology
Posted in Ad Networks | No Comments »
Posted by
DJ Francis on July 28th, 2009 at 12:00 am
The doldrums of summer notwithstanding, I've noticed no dearth of self-reflective articles discussing the changing role of the advertising/marketing agency in a web 2.0 world.
Great minds wax poetic about the move from push to pull, from TV to web, from monologue to dialogue – and these are great discussion topics.
But you know what? Almost none of these articles talk about sales.
Are we forgetting our purpose?
Bursting A Bubble
I remember back when the internet was the shiny new object of fascination. Over time, businesses that marketed online to sell products survived (i.e. Amazon.com) and those that just focused on the fun online marketing stuff…well, didn't (i.e. Pets.com).
Are we seeing a similar trend with social media? A lot of brands are throwing money at engagement and conversation and friending – but is this making the cash register ring?
Real Marketers Still Make – And Sell – Stuff
Phil Johnson's Ad Age piece entitled Agencies Should Be Defined by What They Know, Not What They Make is one of the articles about the modern agency that rubbed me wrong.
As I read it, his article focuses on what we know (communication) at the expense of what we make (ads/experiences... Read more
Tags: agencies, creative agencies, dj francis, marketing, modern agency, online marketing, phil johnson
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
Copyright © 2012 iMedia Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
