Creative and media teams sitting within the same team, or within the same agency, will likely become the de facto model for brands as they increase their digital spend and put more brand dollars through trading desks.
TubeMogul global boss Brett Wilson said the model employed by Telstra, with its creative and media agency teams sitting together within a performance hub, is the tip of the iceberg.
“Yes, it will become more prevalent. Programmatic automates lots of disparate functions into a single platform. As that happens we will see lots of silos like creative versus media, planning versus buying, like TV versus digital, and measurement versus execution, begin to fade within organisations.”
The company recently struck a deal with Mondelez, where the snack food giant will do all of its video buys via the platform with Starcom Mediavest putting together a team to handle buying and strategy, but with Mondelez making its own technology decisions and retaining its data.
Wilson says that the unified creative and media team discussion is something brands are interested in, alongside the programmatic model more broadly. Twenty two brands will this week attend the firm's event in Bowral, the reason Wilson is in Australia. Last year only a handful of brands showed up at an event dominated by agencies.
“We do have those conversations [with the Mondelez-type groups of this world]. I can tell you the organisations that are integrated are able to utilise the power of the software because they can constantly test, learn, iterate and evolve away from this archaic multi-month planning and measurement campaign cycle to a more flexible marketing approach where we can results more quickly and change. And creative and media teams need to merge so we can take advantage of that.”
So is that merging creative and agency teams like the Telstra performance hub, or bringing creative and media units back under one agency roof?
“I think it's just that those teams will work much more closely together because we can much more quickly see what creative is driving the business outcomes that we desire. So are they different teams that sit closer together or truly the same teams? I don't know. But I think some of the distinctions will fade away.”
Wilson says the software platforms and ad tech companies are neglecting creative agencies. But suggests that could soon change.
“Unfortunately we don't speak with creatives and creative agencies enough. I think they would be blown away by how much we could tell them about the effectiveness of individual creatives. We could help them reshape how they think about creative, where we don't have to water it down for a national audience. We can tell different messages much more easily to different people. We are not having enough of those questions. But I think that we will in the future.”
Why not now?
“I think [creative agencies] will be customers. I think we will build products for creative agencies so they can quickly test different types of creative. It would make marketing better for brands and consumers.”
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