Seventy-four percent of marketers surveyed for a forthcoming report said tech is either a critical or high-importance factor when deciding whether to hire or retain an agency partner. But what exactly do they want from agencies’ tech stacks, and are they getting it?
Star Global has been doing its bit to find out. The tech consultancy has worked or spoken with all of the holding companies in relation to AI, and it recently polled more than 300 marketing leaders from $1bn+ companies about their AI needs, which is where the above stat comes from.
The good news for agencies, says Star’s head of strategic accounts for media and advertising, Lolly Mason, is that ‘just over half of marketing leaders say [holding company] platforms are not easily interchangeable’, and over 61% disagree that they are commoditised or undifferentiated.
But if you really wanted to sort the holding companies into camps based on their tech tools, you could do it along one major fault line.
Omnicom, WPP and, to some extent, Publicis Groupe started with a full-stack mentality, says Mason, and are building their platforms like an operating system, from a foundational layer. Havas, Dentsu and Interpublic Group, on the other hand, have adopted a modular approach, building discrete tools for specific use cases or agencies.
Choosing one approach over another is largely horses for courses. The operating systems are easier to scale and tend to offer more control, while the modular platforms can excel at narrower tasks, and they’re a little easier to get to grips with.
Maturity is also a factor, although it’s a relative concept here. None of the holding companies has been in the AI game long enough to be able to offer both scale (across channels, markets, devices, etc) and depth (handling complexity, etc) in equal measures, says Mason.
Still, there is at least some daylight between their capabilities, and when it comes to providing a full service to large clients, Publicis Groupe and WPP are ‘probably a little bit ahead’ of the other holding companies, says Mason. Although that might not be the case for much longer. The proposed merger between IPG and Omnicom presents an opportunity to combine the former’s depth with the latter’s scale, which could upset the order.
Of course, scale and depth only matter if they’re embedded into tools that clients value. And ascertaining what clients want from tech platforms isn’t straightforward.
When Star surveyed the 300+ marketing leaders for its report — which was written in conjunction with Forrester and will be published next month — it discerned what appeared to be conflicting priorities.
On the one hand, marketers said that their top priorities over the next 12 months were — in addition to increasing revenue — improving the customer experience and their own ability to innovate, and differentiating themselves from competitors.
And yet, when asked to rank the most important strategies for success, they alighted on things like ‘continuously measuring impact’ and ‘aligning on business objectives’. Similarly, when marketers were asked where agency tech is falling short, they talked about wanting more AI-driven automation and optimisation, and better performance tracking.
Rather than racing to add new tools or improve existing ones, Mason thinks time and energy would be better spent getting everyone — within both brands and agencies — up to speed on the technology that already exists. Fifty-five percent of CMOs said agencies did not sufficiently educate them on new tech and tools.
‘Even if you paused all further development and just put a massive resource into helping everyone to work with the tools that are available, I think you’d see a huge increase in productivity,’ she says.
Eventually, though, Mason says she’d like to see more emphasis on using AI to ensure the quality of ads, instead of focusing on managing bids and optimising campaigns.
‘It could be that AI helps to undo some of the wrongs of programmatic scaling,’ she says. ‘We could start to use AI to do the boring parts of quality, such as checking brand guidelines and then, beyond that, start to say, “Right. What are we showing here? Are there too many ads on the page at any one time? What’s the messaging around this? Are people just clicking because they’re trying to switch off this annoying video that’s covering the content?”
‘I think that’s the further stage that we can get to which, over time, should also drastically improve the important measures, like recall, footfall and brand favourability.’
Main image by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash