Agency Reality Check

There is no contesting the fact that there is more evolution occurring before our eyes than ever before. Agencies who are still working on catching up to the curve need to start with the fundamentals, rather than skip to the head of the line, which will never compensate for a lack of general digital capabilities. Offering clients a social media program or talking about locations based services (LBS), or optimizing a website for the iPad might prove that you know what the newest trends are. You might even get several small projects out of it. But that route will not help you drive your clients' businesses forward in an impactful and holistic way, nor will it help secure a longer-term digital relationship.

Mastering the ability to plan, execute and manage "traditional" digital media and marketing programs based on clearly defined objectives is a prerequisite to venturing into the emerging media world. Granted, today social and mobile programs are leaving emerging status and becoming a standard part of the mix, but without a proficiency rooted in best practices surrounding reaching, engaging and influencing consumers, optimizing search engine discoverability, and measuring and optimizing these activities, any efforts into the emerging media world will inevitably be shallow and incomplete.

Emerging media is not a replacement of traditional media, but a complement. This is as true for TV as it is for the internet and all of its evolving sub-channels. We'll leave newspapers out of this conversation for now. Most digital and integrated agencies make their bread and butter from "traditional digital services" - digital strategy, media planning, buying & management, search engine marketing (SEM) & search engine optimization (SEO), web development, creative, and analytics. Only then can you truly maximize the impact of emerging platforms on consumer engagement as well as agency profitability.

Successful agencies have established specific processes to combat the labor intensity and lower margins associated with certain aspects of providing digital services. With proficiency across the board, agencies can determine where the margins exist and how to focus on making money in a cutthroat and fast paced competitive ecosystem. As clients' digital spending increases, the ability to generate significant revenues and profit will increase accordingly. Many technologies exist to help automate and centralize specific tasks, such as ad servers for centralized ad delivery, measurement, and reporting; bid management systems for bidding and optimizing search marketing programs; social media monitoring tools for aggregating buzz, sentiment and trends within the social sphere; DSP's and data exchanges for second channel audience buying; dynamic creative optimizers for multivariate testing of creative attributes, just to name a handful. But keep in mind that technology is merely a tool to automate mundane and inefficient tasks and facilitate human-based insight generation. Technology requires management. There is no plug and play solution - no silver bullet to replace talent and knowledge.

Challenge yourself and your team regularly. Times have changed. There is a lot to learn, and it may be the time to pay your dues all over again. Embrace pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone. It's all worth it. As the saying goes, knowledge is power.

A lack of knowledge is not a problem. However, not developing a plan to develop the knowledge, and focusing on bright shiny objects can be your downfall.

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