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.
At the OMMA RTB event, 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 executions work and don't just leave it to a separate ad operations team. Ad ops issues will be dealt with more at the strategy level.
The panelists -- including
Adam Kleinberg, CEO of Traction -- also agreed that 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, however, 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.