I was recently talking to the Chief Digital Officer of a large agency that does a lot of digital media buying. He has been working closely with a number of software providers to standardize his operations on a media management system. Apparently, half the battle at an agency is getting paid (getting paid in less than 120 days is the other half)!
We were talking about some of the upfront processes behind putting together a media plan, which were mostly manual: putting the actual plan together in Excel, trading e-mails back and forth with vendors in the RFP process, trafficking ad tags, collecting screenshots, etc. Wouldn't it be valuable if computers could streamline much of that work?
He agreed that it would truly transform his business, but accepted much of that manual work as part of the cost of doing business. The real way to transform his business, he said, was to answer the following questions:
1. How much should I buy?
"I basically know that I am going to have AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, and GDN on almost every plan. For my more vertical clients, in auto for example, I also know 95% of the sites and networks I am going to be on. Sure, I use research tools to validate those recommendations to my clients, but media discovery is not a huge pain point. Where we struggle is answering the question of media investment allocation. Should I spend 30% of my budget with Facebook? 40%? I really don't know, and often don't have the right mix until the campaign is nearly over."
2. What should I pay?
"I also have a pretty good idea what things cost, thanks to the RFP process. When you RFP 40 publishers in a vertical, you find out pretty quickly what your best pricing for guaranteed media is. Unfortunately, it feels like we go through this exercise every time on every RFP. We have the historical pricing data, but it's all over the place in spreadsheets—and often in the planner's heads."
3. Why am I recommending this?
"The biggest thing we struggle with is justifying our media choices to our clients. When we present a recommendation, often we are asking our client to invest hundreds of thousands or even millions in an individual vendor. My deck has to have more in it than basic audience information. The other obvious problem is employee turnover. My best planners, along with everything they've learned over two or three years walk out the door along with my data and relationships."
4. You need that when?
"The other thing a system can help with is speed to market. Publishers hate it when we ask them for huge, innovative proposals—in 24 hours. The reason we do that is because our clients ask us for amazing and innovative media recommendations in 48 hours. The pressure to deliver plans is huge, and you can easily lose large chunks of business by reacting to such requests too slowly."
Beyond Workflow Efficiency
Especially for larger agencies, programmatic direct technology has to be more than just workflow efficiency tools and automating the insertion order. The next generation of programmatic efficiency for guaranteed media has to include serious business intelligence tools that can solve the "how" while simultaneously answering "why."