The Agency's Role in New Media

Questions abound regarding the role of the traditional agency in the new media landscape: Customization vs. Automation? Creativity vs. Standardization? Professional vs. User-Generated? What will become of an industry dedicated to planning, buying and creating media messaging as the medium and the methods shift to digital? The answer is in the technologies.

Google isn't the only one who wants to do create THE advertising OS. Microsoft is certainly concentrating pretty heavily on the area as well. It is clear why Microsoft feels the development of these advertising technologies is right in their sweet spot, since one can so readily describe the next generation of advertising technologies as an OS for a multibillion-dollar industry. Beyond the big players, start-ups are popping up everywhere, trying to enable the next generation of online advertising. Most of these start-ups want to be bolted onto (by acquisition) Microsoft's, Google's, or Yahoo's own OS solution for advertisers.

The most common misnomer is that these advancements in advertising technologies will do the job of the agency but these technologies are tools, not solutions. The human element is necessary to use these tools to find innovative solutions. This will continue to be the role of the agency.

Search Engine Marketing is a perfect example of this. Search Engine Marketing technologies spawned an entire industry of professionals. Sure, since it's easy to use the Ad Words OS, some businesses are able to create and manage their own SEM efforts but the value of the agency is in its ability to professionally and artfully wield SEM tools. If anything, because emerging advertising technologies democratize the ability for small advertisers to compete with larger advertisers, there is even a greater premium placed on having professionals executing on your behalf to separate your message from the crowd.

And since SEM, in unison with other areas of expertise, helps agencies to provide higher return through integrated marketing efforts, this makes SEM a perfect fit as a service offering for the complete 21^st century agency. So the questions become: What technologies/tools will agencies have to master to continue to deliver value to their clients? What new service industries will result from emerging advertising platforms? As with the SEM industry, will we see:

UGVM (User-Generated Video Marketing): Agencies develop divisions dedicated to optimizing platforms that allow any advertiser to slice UGV advertising opportunities by content, genre and audience demographics and bid for placement. One aspect of this service entails creating the proper creative inventory of video content, perhaps bowed by other technologies using modular video content creation to create volumes of content in real time.

DPPM (Digital Product Placement Marketing): Given the increased importance of product placement, due to the decreased effectiveness of traditional 30 second spots, digital product placement technologies, in combination with market-making technologies for product placement, will necessitate entire divisions of 2.0 agencies dedicating themselves to the optimization of client product placement within a world of highly fragmented content.

Regardless of the specific outcomes, there is one fact that will be true for any new technology offered; it will be up to the agencies to create the theories that will drive the market. It will be agencies that will build the theories that allow a scalable bid market to work outside of the comfortable world of direct and performance based online marketing (where measurable ROI determines a bid price).

The agency will be the market maker looking for the arbitrage opportunities. Agencies will use their advertising OS to find opportunities where the price of attention is below the value their theories dictate they can extract with creative and integrated marketing approaches for their clients.

Seeing the opportunity will only be the first step. It will take unprecedented collaboration and execution to gain any advantage for the client in a world where anyone can play with knobs on a Google advertising OS.

Source: MediaPost