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.

Read more: DIGIDAY

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.

Read more: ClickZ

Powerful though it may be, for marketers, big data can be a big headache.

For brands that want to reach audiences across the growing landscape of social platforms, executing effective campaigns can mean managing different strategies, different planning and buying processes, and different analytics tools. Crunching data across multiple social platforms and reporting performance can become a labor-intensive operation for a lucky (or not so lucky) few.

Unified, which launches today, aims to streamline the entire cycle of marketing across major social ecosystems with technolog intended for enterprise clients. Calling it the industry’s first “Social Operating Platform,” the company says it will help global brands and agencies simultaneously execute campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and other social services with a patent-pending tool that manages each step of the process, from planning, buying and optimizing campaigns to analyzing earned media and determining returns on the investment.

“There’s a definite shift happening from traditional buying to real enterprise-class, big data management in the advertising space,” Unified CEO Sheldon Owen told Adweek.

Read more: ADWEEK

Break Media, the big digital video advertising network, says it has started a new video technology designed around the growing cost-per-view ad-buying metric.

The new technology, called Social Video Accelerator, combines guaranteed video distribution including pass-along advertiser content. It will run across the Break network — including Break.com, the Web’s big comedy video site, which now reaches more than 120 million unique viewers each month.

While cost per view (CPV) ad models are growing, less than half of video publishers are offering it, says Break Media.

Read more: MediaPost