If GroupM traded digital media the way it trades TV, it would need “a trillion people globally”. A few million of those people would be needed in Australia to handle the 19 billion programmatic digital transactions taking place in the local market each month.
So said Xaxis general manager Esther Carlsen.
Speaking at the DNA 14 conference last week, Carlsen warned against letting the machines take over entirely. She cited the Wall Street 'Flash Crash', the “fastest and deepest ever plunge of the stock market ever,” which started on 6 May, 2010 at 2.42pm.
“$862bn went up in smoke. Shares in Accenture, Procter & Gamble and Apple were selling at a fraction of value. That is what can happen when technology gets it wrong. But a few minutes later, it was back. It didn't make sense, so it was obviously the machines doing the trade, not people.”
Nobody has really come up with a full explanation of what went wrong. But one of the conclusions was that it was the “dumb machines” running wild, whereas the smarter “black boxes” had realised something was badly wrong and stopped trading.
While the shift to programmatic trading in media mirrors the automation of the stock market, Carlsen said that media was “a million miles away” from the volumes and sophistication of Wall Street. But she said that the “challenges that have impacted the financial market will effect our world” and there were lessons to be learned, one of which was the importance of human interaction and intelligence.
“You can't allow machines to make all of the decisions. You still need human interaction, touch, experience and understanding of intelligence. Ultimately you need a high level of EQ as well as IQ.”
The takeouts for marketers and agencies were three-fold, she said: “Do our businesses have the right infrastructure in place? Do we have the intelligence, data systems and processes in place? And most importantly, do we have the right talent? If you don't have the people to understand it all, the first two are null and void.”
Agency trading desks, publishers and advertising platforms are all fighting for the same talent within a very small pool and the skills crunch is only getting tighter as more and more advertising platforms set up shop in Australia. That has resulted in agencies looking outside of media for the next generation of trading staff, financial traders, data scientists, and in one case, according to Group M chief revenue and investment officer Danny Bass, a rocket scientist, "just so we can tell her it's not rocket science... but she doesn't laugh any more."
But the crunch means that those with experience can now virtually name their price in a market some predict will triple in size by the end of next year. On a “null and void” front, that means not every firm will have the people to understand the systems and market dynamics now in place.
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