Ad exchanges bring a new breed of media planners

The advertising sector has traditionally been very labour intensive when it comes to completing any sort of transaction. Yet despite this, the industry at large has been working hard at streamlining the processes that it can. And thanks to the recent developments in ad exchanges, an area that has become significantly more streamlined is the media buying/selling landscape. However, with this happening it also means that media planners need to acquire a new set of skills to remain competent. So what should they be doing to evolve with the new efficiencies that ad exchanges bring? Ad exchanges have no need for middlemen
To truly understand what is happening, it's crucial that the industry realises traditional media matchmakers and agencies will find themselves disintermediated if they stick to their old ways. This means realising that ad exchanges will put buyers and sellers in direct contact with each other, therefore reducing the need for a middleman. Publishers will be able to achieve maximum yield -- selling the highest price per impression -- and advertisers will be able to buy each impression with transparency based on their own buying requirements.
 
Survival of the fittest
While this could spark fear for traditional media planners and buyers, what the smart agencies are doing is evaluating how the landscape is changing and adapting their skills accordingly. Ad exchanges are not going to go away, so it's probably best to figure out how to evolve with them and identify the skills needed to manage them. But before media buyers can do this they need to change the way they think about their workflows. In the traditional world, planning, buying and optimisation is a linear course of events. But in an auction-based display environment, like DoubleClick's Ad Exchange 2.0, it happens in real-time and is applied to each impression purchased.  The media buyer's new skills
Auction-based media will force media buyers to become even more analytical. They will need to be able to manage massive amounts of custom data in real time and be comfortable with data management and modelling. Planners/buyers will also need highly automated analytical and optimisation capabilities. As they will spend their days digging deep into data, they will need to be able to create business rules that match their advertiser's goal, and then be able to apply these rules to a bid management and optimisation technology system of choice.
 
Beyond this they need a deep understanding of how to integrate and leverage marketing technology, and be able to review and adapt their strategies to extract the most value from their budgets. So it goes without saying that this new role is remarkably different from the average media buyer we see today. The role will become technically more complex, challenging, and rely on managing automation to be successful. Conclusion
Planners will become analysts who must be able to make good decisions in real time. They will be competent at looking after deep level technology integrations with multiple data sources, and also be adept at managing and building complex rule sets to make sense of data so that they can manage advertising bids efficiently.  The value they bring to the table is in understanding data, managing technology, being able to build smart rule sets and decision engines that are capable of real time calculations and then, of course, being able to continually optimise this.
 
There is the danger that traditional agencies will lag behind in providing these kinds of services because managing complex technology is not at their core. This will, in turn, open a door for a new kind of media management specialist to emerge. Grant Keller is managing director, Europe at Acceleration.