• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 6, 2011

Now that marketers have reinvented marketing, what does the agency of the future look like? Technology and data will play a major role, according to Dave Tan, who heads search engine marketing (SEM) development at Google. There's a ton of data we need to leverage. Marketers continue to move from unified and standard media consumption to fragmented -- all leaving trails. It's technology's job to make sense of the data. Think of it as a digital platform, not a channel.

Enter the high-definition (HD) advertising world. Reaching these consumers means knowing the data, mainly because impulse buys have been left in the past. Tan said 83% of shoppers decide what they want before they enter a store.

True attribution is around the corner, but the industry has not arrived yet. Citing Google economist Hal Varian, Tan said in the next decade, a hugely important skill will become understanding, processing, and extracting meaning from data.

How can agencies transform? Search marketers are in a position to step up and lead the transformation. More often, search data gets layered into support display advertising and other media channels.

Lucinda Holt, ClickEquations CEO, agrees that technology continues to quickly become a "fundamental competence" that agencies must develop. A deep channel expertise is critical, and quantifying results is everything, she said. The implications will give agencies a jolt, but they must reinvent themselves.

While advertisers need "pilots" who can manage the dashboards, the industry also needs tools, Holt said. "We see dozens of companies organized around channels," she said. "The structure is typically an afterthought. It must shift 90%."

Holt describes the new agency as "client performance-centric and technology-enabled." People are organized in cross-functional teams focused on one client, sharing accountability for client performance. A relationship manager drives each client team and ensures optimal client performance.

Her vision puts agency employees on more than one client team, and each one has a secondary association with disciplines known as "centers of excellence" that foster relationships across channels such as paid-search, organic search, and display advertising, as well as analytics, creative and technology. Teams are supported by a technology infrastructure that brings together all the data required for each channel and -- most importantly -- provides intelligence that helps practitioners decide what to do, as well as enable them to do it.