GroupM: Balkanization Makes Media Shops Even More Relevant

The media marketplace is growing increasingly fragmented and exponentially complex due to the “balkanization” of data necessary to effectively manage media and to accurately attribute its results.

That’s the conclusion of a just-published 36-page report co-authored by GroupM Business Intelligence Global President Brian Wieser and former GroupM Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman, which goes on to make the case that it also happens to be the very dynamic ensuring media agencies stay relevant.

“The challenge for everyone is that attribution across media types is of far less interest to the seller than to the buyer,” the co-authors write, noting that there is little incentive for individual media owners to work collectively in order to create an accurate meta view on media effectiveness when they are competing for share of an increasingly fragmented marketplace.

The report also casts a sideway look at marketers, noting that they also have “an uneven and inconsistent relationship with data and marketing technology,” for a variety of organizational and marketplace reasons, and that the best and most neutral resource for pulling it all together are large scale media agencies like GroupM that have the knowledge, expertise, resources -- and perhaps most importantly, the visibility -- to make sense of it.

“By their nature, large agencies have visibility across the supply chain and of switching and on-boarding processes and implications,” they opine, adding, “Data presents challenges of its own: cost of acquisition, regulatory compliance, respect for the consumer, and risks related to data being used by sellers of media to the benefit of others in the category as a result of pervasive pixels placed on advertiser digital properties. Media agencies have particular expertise concerning the prioritization and safekeeping of the data sets that thread the needle between relevance and compliance, which can also be applied to audience segmentation and directly to the purchase of media inventory. They also have a record of high standards of data security.”

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