25 Sep 65% of global businesses improve in-house media capabilities
A recent global survey of 35 multi-billion-dollar advertisers found that 65% of them have improved their internal media capabilities over the last 12 months. Improvements such as hiring programmatic experts & building ad inventory trading desks, investing in resource & systems to tackle ad fraud, instilling data protection measures and forming more direct relationships with media vendors.
The research was conducted by the World Federation of Advertisers and CEO Stephan Loerke said, “Advertisers are taking back control of something which is critically important for the company, which before they delegated without fully understanding. When you do that, one becomes complacent.”
This represents a significant shift. Major global organisations are taking back control of their media planning & buying. Gone are the days where agencies hold all the cards via their “digital language” (essentially designed to create the mystique of superior knowledge) and automated aggregation technologies (essentially designed to make them money).
Undoubtedly, the shift is borne out of concerns over data protection and agency transparency but the good news is that the move is actually manifesting a major education journey for marketers on how to plan & buy media in today’s digitised world. Having their CEOs holding them accountable for how and where they spend their marketing dollars, will result in a major overhaul of cosy legacy practices & systems. “We’ve always done it like this” will hopefully be relegated to the marketing graveyard and be replaced with far more open-minded rhetoric like “We are revolutionising how we connect with our customers”.
Let’s all embrace a world where every customer touchpoint is analysed for its impact, efficacy and efficiency in driving a sale, where data-driven targeting technologies add value to customers and there is an injection of honesty & fair trading into the media industry.