The move by advertising agencies to reclaim media planning and buying authority in the marketplace is shifting into higher gear. This is particularly relevant to planning and buying online, but the implications should extend to offline where new skills and practices learned in the digital arena will offer agencies the chance to re-assert their value to marketers.
The enabling device, of course, is data, and ad agencies are signaling that they can and will invest in the means to manage large audience databases and harvest the information in the interest of their customers. This was the real story that The New York Times missed in its report today (“Put Ad on Web. Count clicks. Revise.”) about how data allows agencies to manipulate ad spending based on results and behavior. Everyone has already heard the news about data (was the headline from the Time’s piece really from 2009?), even Congress. The fact that the Times report was largely about ad agencies and their offshoots, such as Varick Media Management, and that it never mentioned a behavior ad network was the real headline. MediaPost came much closer to the heart of the matter in its story today about Interpublic’s new media trading system, Cadreon, with a title that aptly begins, “Searching for the New Heart of Madison Avenue…”
Indeed, searching for the new heart of Madison Avenue has been the past-time of many people inside and out of the industry for years. Maybe love has finally found a way. Once again, information is power and much of it derives from the sort of relationships that ad agencies have continued to enjoy – albeit in serf fashion – with their clients. Sitting atop copious amounts of campaign data, which they have watched get turned into fortunes by vendors with shifting attachments to the strategic welfare of a client, ad agencies have decided they are - and ought to remain - media planning and buying vendors of first and last resort.
Good for them. Now they just have to figure out how to get paid for it, but the excitement and opportunities increase when they consider how data can begin to play a livelier role given the expansion of digital media technology to all places offline, especially TV.
Stay tuned for more from the publisher (content) side, as well. Everyone has decided that data is proprietary, not just the advertisers and ad agencies. Cable companies are considering their subscriber boxes, web publishers their audiences. And newspapers, with their backs more against the wall than most, finally held a meeting last week to link arms around the issue of content and audience data.
Provided everyone steps out of the shadows and conducts business transparently, the media planning and buying business is headed for a period of renewed creativity and value led by ad agencies back in control.
