Here's an industry-insider look at what the coming data economy means for the future of advertising agencies.

Last week's iMedia Agency Summit turned out to be a forum for a lot of talk about data -- how to use it, how to extract greater value from it, who owns it, what kind of contribution it makes to a publisher's value proposition and what kind of contribution it will make to the value proposition of the agency of the future.

There were no shortage of speeches, sessions, roundtables and panels that covered the uses and abuses of data in all its forms.

Nothing got attendees' attention quite like Don Epperson's keynote address (Epperson is CEO of Havas Digital), or the panel on which he sat – as did yours truly – after his speech.

Epperson pointed out that at the core, agencies are going to have to buy and value media using the techniques typically employed by publishers and ad networks. Agencies need to start evaluating and executing media according to the protocols of optimization, algorithms and managing databases. Even creative assignment to a medium and its vehicle will be a data-driven assignment.

Others made the point that their improving technologies will help get more data and provide clients with more insight that will constantly improve the effectiveness of advertising.

The image of the agency of the future that started to emerge after the first day of the summit was not just specific to agencies, but all aspects of the advertising business.

Ad networks, behavioral targeting concerns and businesses specializing in data aggregation all seem poised to represent the future of advertising.

There is no doubt that the collection, management and interpretation of data is going to be essential to the success of any agency, publisher or company associated with the business of advertising and marketing.

But the unrelenting emphasis on technology, automation and data starts to conjure up the image of -- as I said on the panel last Monday morning -- a dystopian vision where there is one giant, a Cyberdyne Systems-like company, in whose warehouse there is a man, a machine and a dog. The man's job is to feed the dog, and the dog's job is to keep the man away from the machine.

The problem with all this emphasis on data and technology is that it possesses a hubris, a near-zealous faith in the powers of our non-human creations. To assign to our technology the ability to extract insight from data is to A) believe that the secret motives of human behavior can be rendered into machine-readable form and B) believe that the machines we make are somehow capable of advancing beyond our own capabilities.

There's no doubt that our technologies can count faster than we can. But that's really all they can do. They are "processors of quantities." That's it. 

Machines can collect a great deal of data, and some more sophisticated ones might be able to collate that data into some form of information. But only humans can turn information into knowledge. Technology is great in the application of putting together puzzles, but it is terrible at solving mysteries. And the practice of marketing, in its most successful form, is the solution of a mystery -- the mystery of what moves a human being to action. The collection and provision of data might become a commodity, but helping our clients think is something that is unique to each one of us.

At one point in his keynote, it seemed as if Epperson was suggesting that once an agency has collected the data it needs to define and identify its audience, the agency would no longer need to waste time working with the publisher or ad network; the agency would now have the foundation for acting as its own ad network.

Will publishers allow agencies to collect data in such a way that would allow for this? Whose data is it? The client, agency or publisher? What about the user?

And what about determining which data is valuable and which isn't? Data for its own sake is a resource hog. The collection and analysis of data that concludes that people wearing blue underwear buy more eggs expends resources that are likely better used elsewhere. 

The agency of the future will certainly have to focus on its collection, use, and analysis of data. But human capital is going to be far more important in extracting the kinds of insights from that data that differentiate one agency from another and allow that agency to earn against the value of that differentiation.

Media strategies editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International, Inc., an Omnicom Company.