This post is by Boudewijn van Ewjik, co-founder of MediaScience, a digital marketing agency that is a MediaMath Platinum Certified Buyer and uses MediaMath’s TerminalOne Marketing Operating System on top of it’s proprietary marketing technology called Vision.
Media buying as we know it is inherently different than it was even just 5 years ago, and I’m certain that it will be even more different in 5 years time. The point is, technological change is afoot, and this change is never static. Additionally, every individual involved in the buying and selling of media is affected by the evolution of advertising and marketing technology, but it is the agency, as an organization, that is most adept in monitoring and acting on this change for the purpose of delivering marketing performance on behalf of the client.
When it comes to the agency serving as an effective layer between myriad of marketing technologies and their brand clients, the agency must be:
Platform agnostic; when you are the expert of multiple technologies you are able to step back, identify the technologies needed, and then customize them to meet and exceed your client’s goals.
Masters of data aggregation and activation; granular, actionable data lends itself to making strategic decisions on behalf of the client.
Able and ready to make system integrations; the agency should ensure transparency and data protection when integrating systems on behalf of the client.
When clients reach out to MediaScience to learn how they can derive ROI from their data via programmatic channels we always follow the same process of:
- Identifying & collecting data sources
- Segmenting & enriching data
- Making the data actionable & measurable
Agencies that follow this sort of process can effectively create a “data map” that identifies the first-party data (offline, online, website, CRM) most important to the advertiser, and subsequently onboard that data to create segmented pixel pools that the agency can bid against. Only once the agency and client have identified the process needed to make the data actionable can the agency move forward with creating, managing, and optimizing campaigns on behalf of the brand with a marketing operating system like TerminalOne. This new type of agency is first and foremost a service company with a digital DNA and technology expertise. The market is moving quicker than the advertiser can keep up; agencies are poised, now more than ever, to leverage their deep understanding of marketing technologies, and the extensibility of marketing operating systems to achieve the digital ambitions of their clients.