Before too long, agencies might find themselves competing directly with publishers. How will they add value? According to Eyeblaster's North American GM, they'll need to invest in ad tools.
Ad agencies are already casting a suspicious eye toward Google and a few other companies that are building tools to help automate the process of creating, buying and running advertising. Eyeblaster's Yoav Arnstein wants to help agencies stay relevant.
Arnstein's solution is to help agencies acquire ad tools that simplify processes further, offer enhanced functionality, and serve as a differentiator for agencies looking to protect their business from those who might threaten it. And they can do that through tools that follow behavior, integrate channels and enable efficient scale.
"We need gadgets," he said during a Spotlight Presentation at the recent iMedia Agency Summit in La Quinta, Calif. "We don't need widgets."
By gadgets, he means tools that will help integrate campaign management across multiple digital platforms. During his presentation, Arnstein showed not only how audiences are fragmented across more channels than ever before, but also that these tiny channels themselves have sub-channels. For example, we see budgets and time spent with digital media increasing, but how does that media consumption break out across rich media advertising, in-game, streaming video and other formats that comprise digital media?
To illustrate his point, Arnstein showed a case study of a Sony Ericsson campaign that may have had more technological bells and whistles than the camera phones the campaign advertised. People who saw the ads saw different versions, depending on how they've interacted with the Sony Ericsson site in the past. Some of these ads were complex rich media executions that enabled data capture, some were personalized based on registration information, and others had photo upload functionality. Eyeblaster handled not only the segmentation of audiences based on three different levels of behavior on the Sony Ericsson site, but also took care of event tracking and enabled the ad functionality as well.
The ability to manage all of these moving parts could be a terrific differentiator for an agency, and Arnstein didn't stop there.
Another case study illuminated an in-depth look at online activity undertaken by an unnamed automotive advertiser. Looking at several hundred million ad impressions run in both rich and standard media, Eyeblaster studied the most popular paths to conversion across digital media as diverse as search, in-game advertising and web-based rich media. Knowing not only the value of specific publishers within those campaigns -- but also the sequence of actions that lead to a conversion -- can help agencies allocate and optimize their digital media mix.
Of course, as integrated online campaigns become more complex, there are more moving parts to break. To help agencies manage all the details, Arnstein also showed a dashboard Eyeblaster developed that helps digital planners take campaigns through setup to optimization, showing status on whether or not an ad buy is live, delivery rates, performance and ROI.
If Doug Weaver is right about online marketing companies separating into marketecture and transactional disciplines, then maybe Arnstein will be right about agencies competing directly with the likes of Google. If that's the case, Eyeblaster is positioned well to help agencies fend off behemoth media sellers with their own automation technology.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.