Our series continues as AdExchanger reached out to several executives from the agency side of the ecosystem and asked the following question:
“Given the increasing complexity of ad technology needed to service clients – particularly in digital media buying -, and ad tech companies need to build a service layer to activate its tech, where does the agency of the future draw the line for its own services? Does the agency become a ‘sourcing master’, if you will?”
Scott Hagedorn, CEO, Annalect, (Omnicom) answered:
‘I see three things happening in the space. The first one is that – especially on my side of the business – we’ve had to get proactive on becoming the Consumer Reports, if you will, on all the various ad tech providers from those in data sourcing and strategic data transformation all the way through to reporting, visualization, buying, activation, planning – all of it. For some clients the concept of either having an IBM, Adobe or a Google stack starts with their web analytics product, and fuses all the way up through buying into planning and maybe some more other media oriented planning technologies. It is a very alluring proposition.
Those stacks, all don’t completely work right now on an automated basis. But in the future, I’ve see a lot of those things starting to come together.
The way we’re handling it is that, one, we publish a Consumer Reports like document in some of these different horizontal category areas on features, functionality and interoperability. Then concurrent with that, we are setting up a managed services arm that – in case a client wants to deploy and test an integrated vertical stack – we would be able to manage it on their behalf.
AdExchanger: Thoughts on ‘sourcing master’?
‘Sourcing master,’ systems integrator, ad tech integrator… ‘Sourcing master’ is an interesting way to look at it. Our personal point of view is still we should take a best of breed systems integration approach and help clients to source the tech and put multiple technologies together. Our goal is to drive a set of open standards to the marketplace, so everything will be interoperable.”
Read more:
- Anthony Rhind, co-CEO, Havas Digital
- John Montgomery, COO, GroupM North America (WPP)
- Scott Hagedorn, CEO, Annalect (Omnicom)
By John Ebbert
