Digital advertising may be on the road to a fully-automated future, but it seems that not everyone has jumped aboard the programmatic train – or at least been offered a ticket.
Speaking at the Automated Trading Debate on Tuesday (4 October), M/SIX’s chief strategy officer, David Grainger, lamented that creative agencies have been left behind – and blamed media agencies for not doing enough to secure both client and creative buy-in for a programmatic future.
“We’re definitely not where we should be,” Grainger said. “I think there are good examples [of programmatic creative] but those are few and far between.
“We, the agencies and suppliers, have done a terrible job of bringing creative agencies with us…they’re behind the game.”
Grainger said it was “devastating” how M/SIX – which houses both a creative and media agency in the same building – had managed to bring so few walls down between the two since it was founded in 2008.
One of the challenges, Grainger said, is that creative agencies are unlikely to get on board without the client involved; therefore there is a strong onus on the media agency to make sure clients are brought along on the programmatic journey.
Steve Hobbs, global head of media at mobile agency Fetch, which trades 100% programmatically, said one of the overarching problems is that digital is still seen as a performance-based medium.
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“Creative content is too often developed to be functional rather than anything else,” he said.
“There’s an awful lot that needs to change. Clients are responsible for sitting down with their media, planning and creative agencies to say what it is they’re trying to achieve.”
However, while progress has been arguably slow so far, things do seem to be changing – with all parties getting round the table in some instances.
Agenda21 Digital’s new head of media, Volker Ballueder, said that in the three months since he joined the agency, it has been clear to see how much clients value creative input.
“I can already see from some of the clients we’re working with that it’s very important to bring the creative agencies on board and talk through the media plans and the possibilities there are in digital,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s a blame game between creative and media agency…it can be done.”
The possibility of a successful union between programmatic and creative was also a key talking point at this year’s Dmexco.
During a breakfast debate hosted by Mediatel last month, Nicholas Bidon, CEO of Xasis, said creative programmatic still remains a goal rather than a reality for most of its clients, “but I feel it has really risen to the top of their agenda as they continue to see more budgets going to digital, and more digital budgets going to programmatic.”
One of the main barriers to making programmatic a creative reality, Bidon said, is largely linked to scaling the opportunity.
He argued that while the industry now has the technologies to pull it off, a new approach is needed to tailor the message in the rendering, based on data that will make the creative more relevant and give it cut-through.
