Change is the new normal. Media channels are fragmenting at an incredible pace, along with their audiences. Always-on consumers are transforming faster than anyone can keep up. Australia’s massive smartphone penetration has created an empowered consumer who demands personalisation, instant gratification and impeccable service. People are using these devices constantly to shop, research, review, search, and sometimes even make phone calls, and all the while they’re leaving more data than ever before.
Amidst these changes sits the media agency, which morphs and evolves alongside these broader shifts. Agencies today are completely different beasts to those a decade ago. They have developed new revenue streams and muddied the divisions between their creative and digital brethren.
But perhaps the biggest disruptor in a fully digital world has been the explosion in datasets and the rise of automation, in particular programmatic buying.
The future of media buying
There’s little doubt that programmatic buying is the future of the media industry. It has moved well and truly beyond the digital display space, and is heading into areas that were traditionally above the line, like radio, outdoor and TV. Just last year we saw the first Super Bowl TV spot bought programmatically. As traditional channels become digitised (think Apple TV); and as infinite amounts of data are generated by consumer interactions with smartphones, tablets, desktops and other digital devices; the inevitability of pervasive automation seems obvious.
With this exponential growth in automation, one might be tempted to question the place of media agencies. We increasingly live in a world of algorithms, and while it is early days yet, there will come a time when the vast majority of media, if not all media, will be bought and sold by a digital program. If there is no need for the manpower, can’t brands just bring media in-house?
In a programmatic world, will work be sucked away by the very systems that agencies have worked so hard to promote?
People power prevails
The problem with such a view is that it assumes pure play media buying is the only function a media agency performs. But let’s for one moment leave to one side the fact that agencies have developed considerably in the past decade, creating much broader skillsets that move well beyond the traditional media buying model.
Instead the more pertinent question is whether clients are in the best position to drive automated, data-centric media buying from the comfort of their own home. There are many clients with such immense size, scale and resources that they could give it a good whack, but even those clients would be approaching the market from the singular point of view of an individual brand.
In fact, the immense changes I mentioned earlier have transformed media agencies into the ideal players to drive the automation charge. Amidst developments in technology and consumer behaviour, media agencies have had to transform the way they are structured. Not only do agencies need to have considerable breadth in expertise, hiring generalists who understand how each channel interacts and its role in the consumer’s path to purchase.
There is also the need for pockets of intense depth of knowledge, superstars who can turn thousands or millions of data sets into actionable insights. Agencies need comms strategists and account leads who understand the interplay between traditional media and newer channels like search and social, but they also need technological masters who know which platforms to use.
Even in a world of increasing automation, media will never be an entirely algorithmic affair. Talent will always be key. And in a changing environment, the best media agencies have been finding, nurturing and developing the widest range of talent for several years, as they adapt, expand and evolve – from strategists and account managers, to data experts and technologists, to content marketers and designers and creatives.
What’s more, larger agency groups have the broad range of clients which give agencies comprehensive market expertise and the considerable resources that can only be achieved through combined scale.
The money shot
There is no doubt that data and automation are changing everything. But data is not the be all and end all. Brands that simply base their entire marketing output on the data trends of the past will not experience true metamorphosis. The greatest marketing successes have been driven by innovation, disruption and creativity. Do you think the famous reinvention of the Old Spice brand was driven by pure data analysis of past sales? No. It was driven by human creativity, the kind of creativity that can only emerge when you place a bunch of disparate skillsets together in a room.
The money shot, of course, is the combination of data and creativity. While there is still a long way to go on this front, media agencies are in an ideal position to leverage the mixture of technology and talent. But complacency is a killer. The secret sauce for media agencies is the same as it has always been: hire people from as broad a talent pool as possible, and foster an environment of disruption and creativity.
For all the changes that media agencies have experienced in recent years, they still do essentially the same thing, which is using the best industry talent to bring consumers to brands or brands to consumers. Automation and data might be the future. But talent is the past, present and future, the one constant that will always ensure success.
By Atomic 212 CEO Jason Dooris