The first was a report from Forrester projecting interactive marketing spend in 2016, which they estimate will reach $77 billion. While the headline focused on the fact that interactive media will catch-up to television media spend by that date, an equally interesting set of figures provide a glimpse into a very different digital media world in 4 years. The report predicts that search’s share of digital media spend will shrink, as marketers disproportionately increase their investments in more sophisticated display media and really rev up their mobile media spend.

The second was an AdAge Digital piece on how veteran digital shops (most of which started in the late 90′s) were changing (and expanding) their business models. The article focused on the big search agencies – iCrossing, 360i, and iProspect – and how they’re diversifying into other areas of digital advertising. Obviously they’re looking at the same data as Forrester, and as they look to grow, they are seeing greener pastures in areas such as digital content, display advertising, and online video.

The article also talks about how shops like AKQA are expanding their focus from digital design and development into digital media (search, display, etc).

Two trends I see for the future:

• Less room for and a resulting fewer number of specialist digital shops (i.e. the search marketing agencies, or the digital content shops)
• The growing prominence of a new breed of large, integrated digital agencies, accentuated by an increased difficulty for big traditional agencies to keep up with the pace of change in digital

FastCompany.com has a nice story on the new platform coming out next week called Online Campaign Ratings, or OCR for short.

In one sense, OCR sounds like a major improvement over the Nielsen box, a measurement tool I have always questioned (BTW, how many people do you know with a Nielsen box? How about people using Facebook?). There is no doubt that adding demographic data to digital media planning and tracking tools will be extremely valuable. And yes, translating the Web measurement into a metric that “old school” media planners understand will likely help move some small amount of large branding media budgets from TV to the Web (specifically digital video).

However, the folks over at Digiday are asking if applying a traditional media measurement tool is actually a good thing for the world of digital media? This is a very valid question, and one I think about a lot. Specifically, is the GRP the best way to measure media reach, or the best available tool to measure traditional media at the time it was developed?

The question we need to be asking is whether the online GRP, or OCR in this case, will make digital media planning more effective for advertisers and improve the business of digital publishing?

In the article, Shar refers to another recent Forrester report that boldly recommends that companies should reduce their paid ad budgets by 10%, investing those resources in customer engagement – in the form of owned media like content, apps and earned media such as social media programs / outreach.

I think this is right on and a great starting point for companies and marketers looking to evolve with the changing media and consumer landscape. I firmly believe that companies should be moving away from an emphasis on paid media (which is generally “one-way” in nature) to owned and earned media. However, I am not naive and realize that it will take time to shift organizations used to doing things a certain way for a long time (i.e. focusing on big paid ad campaigns) to shift to a more balanced model where owned and earned media are equals at the table.

In many ways, for this to happen, companies need to begin evolving their marketing departments and those working in them. As I regularly tell our clients who work in marketing, they are increasingly in the content business. Creating content (and managing communities, etc.) requires very different skillsets than writing marketing briefs, reviewing ad copy and approving media plans.

Revolutionary change doesn’t happen overnight, particularly at large corporations. But change in 10% increments is a great starting point for the type of evolution that is necessary within marketing organizations.

More specifically, the conference is centered around the idea of a new discipline and role at advertising agencies –  the “Creative Technologist.” The Creative Technologist appears to be a hybrid of a developer/programmer/CTO and a designer/Creative Director.

Is the 4A’s ahead of a trend coming to the ad business? Or is this a futile path towards creating more silos within ad agencies? Maybe this is just a lot of hype from big agencies and their trade group trying to “catch up” and stay relevant in a quickly changing digital world?

What do you think?

##

THE 4A’S TO HOST ADVERTISING INDUSTRY’S FIRST CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY (“CREATETECH”) CONFERENCE

The advertising industry is no longer solely devoted to making advertising. Transformative ideas—with technology as an integral component—are changing the way to do business. And a broad group of minds—the creative technologists—are facilitating these changes. The 4A’s, in launching the industry’s first creative technology conference, “CreateTech,” is acknowledging the confluence of creative and technology, and the critical role played by creative technologists in the current advertising landscape.

“CreateTech,” a one-day conference to be held Friday, May 20 (8:30am-5:30pm), at the Sentry Midtown Conference Center (730 Third Avenue, New York), will explore the challenges facing creative technologists, bring together prominent practitioners currently working in the agency world, and establish an ongoing community of engagement in these issues. The inaugural conference will highlight client/agency collaboration from a technology perspective, explore some emerging marketing technologies and celebrate an increasingly important community in advertising.

The 4A’s is also establishing a new Creative Technology Committee to further the work of the conference with agencies and clients. The committee will be co-chaired by Scott Prindle, SVP, Executive Technology Director, CP+B and Trevor O’Brien, Creative Technology Director, McKinney.

Featured speakers include, J. P. Rangaswammi, Chief Scientist, Salesforce.com; Scott Roen, Vice President, Marketing, American Express; Glen Fellman, Group Creative Director and Trevor O’Brien, McKinney; Gary Koelling, Director of Emerging Platforms at Best Buy; Marcel Kornblum, Creative Technologist,  Stink Digital; Brian Skahan, VP/Creative Technology Director, Crispin Porter + Bogusky; Nick Parish, North American Editor at Contagious Magazine and Nancy Hill, President-CEO, 4A’s.

Select session topics include: “Agency Technology/Creative Methodologies and Technique”; “Technology/Creative Collaboration and Team Organization”; “Technology, Common Ground: Brands, Agencies, Specialists, Entrepreneurs”, “Digital Retail” and “Emerging Capabilities: APIs, Augmented Reality and more.”

“Establishing a conference like ‘CreateTech’ will bring together the senior managing digital technology community in one place,” said Chick Foxgrover, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer.   “There are brilliant innovative thinkers in agencies today and we are eager for them to participate, contribute and connect.’”

Thanks to Facebook, I’m now like that friend that everyone has – the one that remembers everyone’s birthdays. Whenever I log into Facebook I get those oh-so-handy reminders of my xxx friends current and upcoming birthdays.

Even better, I can just write “Happy Birthday” on their wall and be done with this. No more feeling guilty about not buying a birthday card at the supermarket (not that I ever did that before, again, except for my significant other, mom, etc.).

But again, I know a lot of people who would send birthday cards to everyone (especially to all the kids in the family). Will there be any people like this in the future when millennials grow up?

That’s a fascinating question – one that will determine the future of an entire industry. While thinking about this, I did a search and came across an article about Hallmark and their bullishness in light of these big social media-driven changes. The article mentions that Hallmark is definitely incorporating technology into their business model, but paper greeting cards sales continue to be the biggest source of revenue for the company.

My take is two-fold:

1) the people who remember everyone’s birthdays and send cards to everyone will not go away (if anything, they’ll grow with tools like Facebook to help remind them of all their friends’ birthday) – their behavior simply evolve based on technology.

2) the greeting card “product” will need to evolve to remain relevant to new consumer behavior and modes of communication

Seems like a perfect opening for a new disruptive product/service to address the core value proposition / benefit derived from paper greeting cards.

I think Adam is spot-on in his vision of the agency of the future, writing “Interactive, obviously. But more so, I think agencies are going to need to move up the value chain and become true strategic partners for their clients.”

I could not agree more!

Adam also brings up some interesting issues regarding business development. Particularly, the debate on doing spec creative. Adam noted that “[he] just emailed a potential client a half hour ago to tell them [they] wouldn’t do spec work.”

I have conflicting thoughts on that one. One side, doing spec creative cheapens your creative product and is done in a vacuum without actually colloborating with the client (which you would never do in a client working relationship.) On the other side of the argument, spec creative can help communicate a strategic concept in a way that even the smartest strategy or “insights” would miss. We are in the midst of a review where if we had not done spec creative, we would never had made the final round.

I’ll leave you with what I think was Adam’s most salient statement:

“What [agencies] can offer that is unique and invaluable [is] the abilities to uncover insights, to translate them into strategically relevant creative expressions of a brand, and to uncover opportunities to get those messages in front of the right audiences at the right time with the right vehicle.”

Jose Villa

President