3 Things the Most Advanced Marketers and Their Agencies Are Doing Today

When something is overwhelming and complex, people gravitate to simple solutions. For example, free trade and immigration are messy issues at the forefront of this year's presidential race. Yet 'build a wall' has emerged the fix-all campaign promise from a leading candidate.

Knee-jerk answers to nuanced problems are easy to mock, but a similar thing happens in marketing all the time. 'Which part of the media campaign worked best? Well, the empirical multi-touch attribution model is pretty complicated, so what's the last ad someone saw or clicked?'

Google, among others, has built an empire based on being the last click before a sale. It's easy to justify pouring money into the marketing channel that has the clearest direct link to revenue, even if a TV ad drove that search query in the first place.

What Advertising Agencies And Clients Must Do Differently To Succeed

The shift to analytics-driven marketing and technology-enabled business growth has changed the nature of advertising agencies. The era of “Mad Men,” where advertisers primarily focused on TV, radio, and print advertising is gone. In its place are specialists who focus on social media, digital media, and traditional media. And, there are behemoths who attempt to pull all disciplines into a single house.

On top of it, the traditional agency model was built on a revenue generation approach that included media placement; while there were different models, the most common one was based on a percentage of the media placed (e.g., 15% of the value of media placed). That model is being disrupted as programmatic media buying takes hold and clients push for changes in the agency compensation model.