The Modern Agency
Ad agencies are engaged in a wrenching transition, driven by technological change. The very underpinnings of the agency business are shifting, as the business confronts a variety and challenges in digital media. Digiday is embarking on a series of video interviews with agency leaders to discuss how the modern agency is built. There’s little doubt there is not an easy blueprint for the “agency of the future.” There will be new agencies, evolved “traditional agencies,” and even new hybrid marketing companies that are part agency, part tech and part media.
The series is made possible through the sponsorship of Videology, the video advertising platform until recently known as TidalTV. To introduce the series, I sat down with Videology CEO Scott Ferber to get his view on how technology is shifting the agency’s role. Ferber, who founded Advertising.com and sold it to AOL for $435 million in 2004, believes that agencies will evolve to become technology enablers, stitching together pieces of tech created by others. He’s mostly down on the idea of agencies owning technology. See the full interview below.
Paid, Owned, and Earned Content…Ineffective Without Optimization
If content is the crux of all our marketing efforts, we should be learning, adjusting, and optimizing. If not, it will lead to a negative consumer experience.
One of my first columns for ClickZ was the importance of content and its role as a tangible media format. In the last few months, content continues to be a hot topic. The volume of content being distributed is increasing and the way an advertiser collects and uses data is changing. In our everyday professional lives, it’s easy to “set it and forget it,” but this can counter all the hard work put into content development and distribution.
So where to begin? The most common way a user will reach your content is through a basic search, meaning that search engine optimization is vital to your content planning approach. The optimization plan will need to take into account how all the content is distributed, be it via web, video, mobile, tablet, and social posts.
With media planning in its traditional sense merging with these specialized fields (search, social, mobile, experiential, and video), it’s important to make cross-channel content optimization central to any strategy. To do so (and remain sane), here are a few guidelines:
1.What are consumers already telling me? Social behavior, social trends, and search queries represent some of the best data for determining content needs and optimizations across all channels. It’s easily accessible to advertisers and beneficial when tied to syndicated and longer term research.
Example: Use data from Twitter, Facebook, or Google. The consumer is already being vocal, and as an advertiser you have access, so mine this data to improve content development and inform optimizations for existing content.
2.Is my content relevant to the experience? What is your consumer seeking? Take the research from step one and apply it to their experience, get a basic understanding of the consumer’s needs in a specific environment, and make sure your content answers their question.
Banner future for digital advertising
Online spending has leapfrogged every traditional medium except television, and that gap is narrowing
When Sprint Nextel this month moved its $1.1 billion account from San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to Digitas Chicago and Leo Burnett, it was one of the biggest wins in Chicago advertising history.
Beyond the 300 or so new jobs the account will bring to the city, with online-focused Digitas named lead agency, it also represents what may be the tipping point for digital advertising, which has rapidly transformed from a fringe buy to an integral part of the media mix.
“I think it’s a validation of the next evolution of this industry,” said Tony Weisman, president of Digitas Chicago.
Once the insular domain of direct marketers and tech-savvy programmers, online advertising accounted for just a fraction of total media spending in the U.S. at the start of the new millennium. Since then, the medium has leapfrogged every traditional advertising vehicle except television, and it is closing ground fast.
“The Internet has become as important as television to advertisers,” said David Hallerman, principal analyst at eMarketer, a New York-based research firm. “This is where people spend a large share of their time. Marketers chase the audience.”
Read More: Chicago Tribune
Akamai is acquiring Cotendo for $286M
App delivery company Akamai is acquiring app delivery network Contendo, the companies jointly announced today.
Akamai will purchase all of Cotendo’s outstanding equity for a net cash payment of $268 million.
Pending regulatory approval and other typical acquisition conditions, the deal is expected to close sometime over the next six months.
In a release today, the companies stated that they expect their combined technologies, which each have a lot to do with safely and securely delivering content and application packages in the cloud, to accelerate innovation in cloud and mobile services.
“As we look to accelerate growth across the dynamic landscapes of cloud and mobile optimization, we are excited to be joining forces with Cotendo,” said Akamai president and CEO Paul Sagan in a statement.
“Cotendo’s technology, partnerships and people are a strong complement to Akamai. Together, we believe there is tremendous opportunity for our combined technologies as enterprises embrace the move to the cloud and seek solutions for an increasingly mobile world.”
Read More: VentureBeat
Efficient Frontier Buys Leading Australian Digital Marketing Firm
Seeking Deals to Expand Product Offerings, Geographic Footprint
Efficient Frontier, one of the larger remaining independent digital marketing firms, is getting a little bigger. The company is buying one of the largest digital agencies in Australia, Downstream Marketing, for an undisclosed sum.
The deal gives Efficient Frontier immediate scale in Australia and the opportunity to expand in Asia as the company seeks to tap faster-growing international markets. Downstream Marketing’s clients include American Express, Avis, Vodafone and Weight Watchers. The 30-employee company is run by CEO Steve Knowles, former head of marketing for eBay in Australia.
It’s the second big deal in a year for Efficient Frontier, which acquired social-agency Context Optional in May for a reported $50 million.
Like a lot of foreign markets, digital ad spending is small but growing fast. Online advertising spending in Australia reached $2.45 billion in the 12 months ending June 30, 2011, up 20% from a year ago, and is on track to surpass $3 billion in 2012, according to the Australian Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Those aren’t small numbers and it’s another extension of our business,” said CEO David Karnstedt.
Like a lot of firms born in search, Efficient Frontier is attempting to expand beyond its original purpose into all areas of marketing where automated auctions are transforming media buying. Originally that was search and then display advertising, but has since expanded to ads on social networks such as Facebook, video and mobile.
Read More: AdAge
5 Ways to Reinvent the AOR for the Digital Age
I had a lively conversation over lunch last week with an agency head and his largest client. We were talking about digital media, connected consumers, and how they’re shaking up the advertising business as we’ve known it. We each saw things a bit differently, but we all agreed that the traditional ad agency business model is fatally broken and needs to change.
The client chided the agency head: “We need you to do more with less, especially when it comes to execution tasks like media planning and buying. I don’t want to pay by the head for monkey work.” Ouch. More generously, she said she valued the agency’s strategic message and program development work and hoped they could make better use of analytics to connect total client investment to results.
The agency head noted that the client’s procurement department had squeezed the AOR (agency of record) fees so tightly that it made it difficult for the agency to invest in innovation efforts – like analytics – that would enable it to become more strategic. “Procurement has drained the life blood out of agency-client relationships.” The client nodded sympathetically.
I had to chime in with, “Isn’t this why programmatic buying was invented?” I qualified my question by explaining that tech geeks like me are excited about the rise of ad exchanges, demand-side platforms (DSPs), real-time bidding (RTB), etc., but the reason these things are being adopted so quickly is that they solve a fundamental business problem for both the agency and the client. Using smart software to help do “monkey work” means – at least in theory – that the agency can reallocate staff and resources to focus on more strategic messaging and communication work that moves the brand forward.
Read More: ClickZ
Media6Degrees Becomes Ad Matchmaker Via RTB, Data
Media6Degrees will officially roll out a tool dubbed Planner next week that gives advertisers and publishers access to targeting data.
For advertisers, the report provides a list of the best publisher sites. For publishers, the report provides the same for advertisers. The tool relies on technology that creates matches based on data collected from Web page tags, or code, placed on advertisers’ and publishers’ Web sites. The data represents clusters of consumers with similar likes.
Calling the data that creates this “fingerprint” unique to a specific customer base, Andrew Pancer, COO at Media6Degrees, describes the code as a targeting pixel that gathers information. He believes the data can help publishers generate premium sales from real-time bidding insights, along with revenue generated from putting remnant into exchanges.
Publishers have been looking for ways to take advantage of RTB, but most don’t like the idea that inventory gets sold without the support of their direct sales force. These days it’s about adding “value” and “efficiencies” to inventory, which RTB allies suggest will bring to the process.
Read More: MediaPost
