Xaxis boss discusses programmatic’s impact on agencies

As programmatic trading picks up speed, it’s sink or swim for a number of agencies; so which will come out on top in an industry that is evolving at an ever-increasing rate?

Speaking at MediaTel’s Automated Trading Debate on Monday, Xaxis’ CEO EMEA, Caspar Schlickum, said that many agencies are already adopting new strategies to keep up, and the most successful are those that are realising that they need to engage with their clients on a completely different level.

“Agencies are already changing,” he said. “If I look at the agency that I left versus the agencies that I see today, they’re already unrecognisable. That ship has sailed.”

Schlickum said that even the questions being asked now by clients and auditors are fundamentally different to the questions that were being asked five to 10 years ago, which is forcing a number of changes across the industry – from agencies hiring new talent to building their own technologies.

Watch the short video interview, above, in which we speak with Schlickum about the ways in which agencies are changing, current trading models and whether everything will be traded programmatically in the end.