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Three New Buying Criteria For The Agency Of The Future: Carat’s Ray

March 11, 2016 — by MediaMath    

As the rise of technology and data-driven marketing continues to grow, its impact on the industry does not go unnoticed as ad agencies are waking up to the fact that they too have to undergo profound change.

During the “Beet Retreat 2016” in Puerto Rico — a networking event for executives — our CMO Joanna O’Connell sat down with Doug Ray, CEO of Carat USA, to talk about agencies of the future.

As an agency veteran, Ray says “I think we are in a point of inflection, and I think we’ll continue to be in that point…at least for the next five, potentially 10 years.” So what does this mean to the ad agency business and how should they update their buying criteria?

Ray shares his insight on what the ‘new’ agency business should look like.

“What I’m now seeing is that the ability to be clever and smart and to leverage data in a way that brings value, less about extracting costs, but more about creating better performance, is where we’re going,” he says. “It’s more about now having a very strong point of view about where that client needs to go.”

According to Ray, brands will make agency decisions in the future based on three criteria other than pricing:

  1. “It comes down to the talent. Do they buy the people, do they like the people? Chemistry’s really important when you’re in a service business.”
  2. “How clever?, How smart? The tools, the capabilities that we can bring, are we enabling competitive advantage?”
  3. “The commercials. Are we actually delivering value to them in a way that actually is going to help them with their commercials and their business?”

Click here to watch the full session from Beet.TV