As brands begin to take more ownership of their data and better understand consumer journeys, arguably, media agencies still have a better view of the overall media landscape. At The Drum Programmatic Punch last month, industry experts from Ctrl Shift, Infectious Media and Beamly debated the pros and cons of taking programmatic data in-house. Read the original article here.
In-housing is nothing new. Smaller and local advertisers have been doing it for some time, explained Andy Cocker, chief operating officer and co-founder of international programmatic agency, Infectious Media. However, he explained, what’s changed over the past decade is the increase of new, bigger Fortune 500 companies who are starting to look at which parts of the advertising process they can take control off.
“It's such a fascinating subject area, it transcends programmatic itself,” he insisted. “There are these disruptive changes that are taking place across all industry sectors and it's not just what's happening within our own.
“Look at everything else. It's all about digital transformation and technology driven disruption. It's forcing advertisers and businesses across the globe to organise in new ways and focus around data more.”
What is in-housing?
Where once it may have been a binary decision to hire an agency or work in-house, it's really not like that anymore, suggested Cocker.
“There are infinite shades of grey in between. The shade that works for your business, if some form of in-housing is right for you, is going to be based on your unique circumstances that can be based on how you are organised internally. How do you allocate and set marketing budgets centrally or do you have local marketing teams, do you have digital marketing teams? Are you a digitally native business, are you a more traditional business that's going through a digital transformation and reorganising?
“With any of those things, you might need support on certain aspects. Or you might do it all yourself if you are a digitally native.”
Understanding the delivery costs
Dominic Powers, chief executive officer of Ctrl Shift...asked: “Do brands understand what it costs to deliver what they want?”
Andy Cocker answered that some do, and some don’t. And then there are some that don't want to acknowledge the cost of a transparent operating model. “That's a problem we face a lot in competing against the businesses where it’s apparent that they do have a less transparent operating model than we do,” he said.
“Transparency comes at a price. There is starting to be a distinction between different pricing models for different types of services.”
