• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 6, 2008

The most startling epiphany I took from Don Epperson’s keynote this morning wasn’t that audience targeting is being decoupled from media content. I’ve known that for a while now. It’s basically the trend being facilitated by behavioral targeting, and what shops like Havas Digital are doing is only accelerating that.

The real light bulb moment for me, is how Epperson described the affect it is having on the role of agencies.

“We’re starting to think of our job at agencies almost as audience aggregators vs. media planners,” Epperson disclosed.

Wow! That’s big, and Epperson says it’s a shift that’s transforming not just Havas Digital, but Madison Avenue overall.

Given that he’d already said that the agency business will remain a mixture of art and science, Epperson tempered that epiphany with the fact that it’s not simply a numbers aggregation, but an aggregation if unique insights about individual consumers that is leading to a more powerful and far more scientific form of media planning.

So what differentiates the role of agency audience aggregators vs. those of the rest of the supply chain â€" individual publishers, networks, and even third-party data suppliers? Well, Epperson says it mainly has to do with the agency’s unique role between those parties and the most important stakeholder in the mix: advertisers.

“We still have that special relationship with the client, The client still shares with us, all that information about the long-term value of their clients,” he explained, adding, “We still have a lot to learn.”