
The Ad Agency of the Future - bootload
http://adage.com/article/print-edition/agency-future/303798/
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6stringmerc
Quite a bizzarre article. First it starts out trying to discuss change in
'mission' from traditional advertising to relationship engagements and CRM
across multiple devices - okay that makes sense...then 6 paragraphs about how
there will be fewer employees? Automation to reduce administrative overhead?
Where is this going?

> _" No longer is advertising necessarily the best manifestation of
> creativity," he said. "Now, [marketers] are looking toward the lens of
> innovation and effectiveness in terms of brand-experience creation, and
> these new entrants who are becoming very formidable very swiftly."_

Oh, jibberish. Right. Oh well, to each their own.

~~~
mtanski
I work in the industry in the industry and I working to change the industry
(fixing it from one angle). So I'm going to try to summarize what's going on
since Adage manages to be both high level enough but not detail enough at the
same time.

Despite all the technology that potentially available to drive marketing /
advertising the large agencies have not really changed their own organizations
to match this. Sure they've done a bunch of tech acquisitions but you can take
a look at how poorly those were done. So today most agencies are still built
to handle the model where clients pay fixed percentage on media and then
hourly for the people driving it.

Hence agencies were built as a large shops of people, primary fresh out
collage grads (lots of jokes about 24 year old media planers) with a few
senior people on top.

Clearly technology has changed what's possible esp. in search, programatic
(exchange) & automated execution (traditional). This has happen mostly online
but the technology has been pushing into meat space where it's possible to do
much more specific targeting on cable and folks are working on brining this
all to other media. And now technology is making it possible to bring offline
conversion datasets to the execution / planning process.

So agencies now need to become less people organizations with lots of people
that produce forecast, media plans & reports by hand (happens all the time).

Agencies talk about focusing more on outcomes for the clients. It's a pitch
that a lot of folks at the CMO office, obviously it sounds good. But they
don't really have means of doing this, and if they do not a scale (automated)
as that's not the model they are built for.

Obviously, I'm glossing over lots of details. Think of the money ball
analogy... but the agencies in the situation that they right now are full of
scouts, and they need to full of quants.

A lot of large clients are waking up to this fact have some of the more
forward thinking companies have started taking some pieces in house. In many
cases they have their own data about consumers that they can leverage, that
already exists in their 4 walls. This leaves a opportunity to a lot of
smaller, more specialized shops to come in and offer parts of what the agency
offers. One shop can focus on media planing (using market data, real automated
analysis) another company can focus on online-offline conversions.

I'm awaiting the day that companies start hiring behavioral economist as their
CMO.

~~~
6stringmerc
All that mention of technology and advertising and not touching on Acxiom -
not even getting close with a 10 foot pole - kind of undercuts the notion that
the article can speak with any authority regarding technology and advertising.
I mean, this is just one person's experience from mid-market and Fortune-level
experience, but it's a pretty noteworthy oversight. Agencies might still be in
the advertising business, but if you want to lead off with tech in
advertising, the gigantic elephant in the room is usually a good place to
start.

The company that went from clipping newspaper bits to tracking with scary
precision is at the forefront of this 'field' and it is, for lack of a better
perspective on my end, creepy as all get out and rather dark-stain on the
concept of advertising as anything other than trickery and brainwashing.

~~~
mtanski
Well, I was responding to the point of the parent and the article. If there's
an article on targeting data I might comment if I have something to add.

There's lot of other companies outside of Acxiom that do targeting tracking
(it's a large field). Additionally lot of large marketer have their own first
party data that they track from notice, engagement, conversion, lifetime
etc...

Finally, I feel like the data targeting companies have been so successful in
marketing their capabilities that the whole world believes they will be able
to unleash Skynet. Reality is much messier, data is much messier and
capabilities are much more limited.

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dk8996
This is right on point about automation and intelligent systems. At Cortex
([http://www.meetcortex.com/](http://www.meetcortex.com/)), we are building
tools that help remove some of the pain with marking on social media, where
you have to; create large amounts of content, publish content in effective
way, and report/measure performance. Moreover, we are giving content creators
better understanding on what works; colors, keywords, hashtags and what
objects in the image -- so they can be better at their job.

