• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, March 18, 2013

What impact is programmatic buying having on agency culture? Among other things, it’s placing a premium on people with more knowledge of ad technology. Nicole Rawski, manager of analytics at JWT’s Digitaria unit, pointed out that the agency used to hire people for its analyst team directly from college and train them from the ground up. Now it sees applicants with more experience and background in search and social analytics, which is a benefit to Digitaria.

Likewise, Marcus Pratt, director of Insights & Technologies, at Mediasmith, noted the rising importance of the media technology planner that understands the right types of targeting and analytic technology to apply to campaigns for audience-based buying. That means people who have a better grasp of how ad execution works and doesn’t just leave that to a separate ad operations team. Those ad ops issues will be dealt with more and more at the strategy level.

The panelists, including Adam Kleinberg, CEO of Traction, also agreed agency culture will become more characterized by responding to queries and events in real-time through social media, with the now obligatory reference to Oreo’s Super Bowl tweet capitalizing on the blackout. Kleinberg warned, though, that agencies can’t simply repeat the same tricks, but have to come up with their own marketing breakthroughs akin to 360i's Oreo tweet and Wieden & Kennedy's Old Spice campaign.