Paul Vassallo is the Head of Online Trading / Display at Media Contacts. Here Vasallo discusses the case for the agency in the new eco-system, and why the agency model must evolve to remain relevant to clients.

The industry is moving faster than it has at any point in the last five years, and as this pace accelerates. The lines between the different protagonists are beginning to blur within the digital media value chain. Select clients are building large teams to manage digital marketing in house (ironically investing more than they would have ever invested into an agency relationship), agencies are building their own technologies to reduce the need for certain suppliers, and media owners are diversifying how they work to increase their share of the pie.

For this piece I will give my perspective on the role of the media agency going forward and the other potential implications this raises.

The broad role of the agency for a client remains relatively unchanged – namely to build and execute effective consumer communications’ plans which drive brand awareness and sales. However, the way this is achieved has changed significantly, given the options are now vast. Smart agencies have more opportunities to deliver for clients. This is assuming that the agency has made sufficient investment in to products, services, tools and, most critically, talent.
Nine times out of ten, the agency is in the best position to give a holistic view of a client’s media - and increasingly, their customers’ – activity along with their overall strategic needs. The agency has the greatest volume of client data outside of the client themselves but also the tools to begin to decipher this data. For example our proprietary tool Artemis™ has been collecting media campaign and customer sales data for over a decade, so we have a vast database from which to generate unique insight.

In today’s world, agencies need to be able to operate as business partners, not just suppliers. Digital is the catalyst for this. More clients are asking to see how a consolidated view of the consumer with ATL, digital, sales and CRM pieced together, regardless of how many different agencies are involved in each part of the process. Agencies must be able to connect the dots between paid, earned and owned channels or else they face becoming irrelevant. The paid aspect is diminishing but plays a critical role in ensuring the success of earned and owned.

One of the biggest changes is the desire of certain advertisers to take certain agency ‘services’ in house, e.g. web analytics or CRM, whilst agencies will start to take responsibility for new areas previously run by other businesses, such as real time bidding (slightly moving away from media owners) and low specification digital production (previously the creative agency remit) for example.

Instead of dealing with a single supplier, the agency has a view of the entire market place is not blinkered by one set of inventory or one technology. Agencies also have a more rounded view of what is happening above the line and can therefore create campaigns that work in synergy with this.

Agencies also benefit from broad experience from many different clients and verticals, so will have greater knowledge of what is and isn’t likely to work. This can be countered slightly by bringing agency people in, but it is impossible for an internal client team to replicate the agency model and often retention of talent becomes problematic.

Therefore I believe that the agency will remain at the heart of the process, as data custodians and holistic planners. Agencies are still in the best position to exploit the opportunities that media technologies continue to bring. This is no more evident than in digital planning and buying where advertisers can now reach and buy audiences on a fully addressable, 1-to-1 basis. It is agencies who are driving change in the planning and buying processes themselves through innovation and efficiency.

But to be able to maintain this position of strength in a changing market place, agencies must invest in both specialists and technology to ensure that they maintain this advantage. Those that don’t do this will see their role begin to shrink and deservedly so. It is incumbent on agencies to be agile and adapt to the changing communications landscape and to clients’ adapting needs.

At Media Contacts, we invested early in to the fields of data and technology and have the most established data management platform in the market in Artemis™. We then made the decision to recruit best in class data and technology specialists at both group and agency level to ensure that we remain ahead of the curve, by understanding the latest technologies and ensuring that they are implemented in a way that gives us the greatest scope for innovation and effectiveness and maximum benefit for our clients. This won’t be the last investment we need to make (even this year) but it certainly ensures that we are future proofed and can offer our clients a truly modern agency solution.