Digital advertising requires a hacker mentality.
That’s truer than ever today, as the COVID-19 pandemic changes consumer habits, and marketers prepare for the end of third-party cookies in Chrome and the IDFA on iPhones.
“The very substrate of how digital marketing has worked … is radically changing,” said Scott Hagedorn, CEO of Omnicom Media Group (OMG).
Agencies can prove their value by building out the middle wear that allows digital advertising to continue to be effective. “You have to have a bit of a hacker mentality to think your way through: How is it all going to work?” Hagedorn said.
Advertisers will also have to reset their behavioral data stockpiles as a result of the pandemic, because a lot of what they knew about their customers before COVID-19 isn’t relevant today. OMG’s opportunity is to tie research back to identity for the first time.
“Comms planning and qualitative research haven’t been grounded back to a data-driven approach,” Hagedorn said. “Quantitative planning needs to tie what people are doing and feeling back to persistent identities.”
As for the future of agencies in this new world, there’s an opportunity to clean up overlap and inefficiencies in teams and systems and reinvest that in future growth areas.
“You can build up quite a bit of scar tissue around a nonfunctional joint and still be waking,” Hagedorn said.
