Agencies aren’t ready to “step up” yet to the challenge of real time and data, according to PwC associate director digital innovation Tim Lovitt, who says brands are better placed to hold ownership of customer data than agencies are.
Lovitt was speaking as part of a round table event hosted by data management platform Krux. He said, looking at the impact of data on the broader marketing and marcomms space, “agencies are starting to struggle”, in terms of the scale needed for real time creative work, and using insights from data.
“Agencies are unlikely to hold ownership of customer data especially when the brand has more access to it and use for it they than they do,” Lovitt said.
“They struggle with [data] in their own right as media agencies, let alone help their parters and clients understand it.
“Sometimes it's publishers that are coming to us and saying 'we can do amazingly well-tailored pieces of activation or content', and the brand wants to do it, but their agencies aren't ready to step up yet.
“They're not ready to create content at that scale or frequency and it's a key issue for creative, let alone media.”
Lovitt said that moving to an “always on” mindset needs to be a key priority for brands. In PwC's latest Outlook report which predicts advertising trends to 2019, Lovitt said customer centricity has become a central theme.
“This is quite often a multi-year or multi-decade journey and where someone might have a campaign mindset, there is a long long way to go before they're in that always on, experimental and really focused cycle of delivery,” Lovitt said.
“I see almost no one ready for 'always on' in Australia – there are a handful at best. At a publisher level, yes but at a brand level, most are struggling with this.”
“Some of the big guys are starting to get their heads around it, and if you look down a tier or two there are few that are experimenting with always on and personalisation, but if you want results, it's critical.
Krux founder and chief technology officer Vivek Vaidya said marketers are coming around to this type of thinking in realising they have an active role to play in the implementation of data strategies.
“Marketers have finally shown up in a meaningful way to adopt a data management platform for doing data-driven marketing,” Vaidya said.
“Previously marketers were too reliant on agencies to execute a marketing strategy, but with data, the agencies don’t control the data, marketers do.
“The role of the DMP is to consolidate all those data assets into one platform and you can't do that if you're just working with an agency. So marketers are now realising that they have an active role to play.”
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