AOP Summit: Publishers encouraged to “Step out of the arms race”
How can publishers take control and get more value online? This was a central theme of the AOP Digital Summit’s Ask The Agencies session on Friday. The answers:
“I urge you to prove value; append richer data in this automated trading world and work harder at more creative opportunities for agencies and advertisers,” said Profero’s UK CEO, Dale Gall, summing up quite succintly. “You can step out of the arms race by creating rich content.”
Jakob Nielsen, managing director Interaction, said that at GroupM they had halved ad networks used from 47 last year and would cut further – in favour of dealing direct with publishers it was implied. But he was highly critical of publishers hold over their inventory – “some publishers don’t know the value of their inventory at any one time. Ikea knows exactly how many sofas it has minute to minute.”
Havas Digital’s co-CEO Anthony Rhind, said that agencies have “a clear understanding of value,” but added that this is not shared with publishers and that “the market remains over-supplied.”
Pete Robins, co-founder of agenda21, felt that publishers were still let down by technology. He admitted that some creative ideas fell flat at the agency because of shorter and shorter lead times, but others because the publisher does not have the technology to make it happen. “So we go through a network instead.”
In answer to a question from the floor, the panel did not feel that publishers could build their own media buying businesses and threaten the agency model. “But Google is a threat (to us),” said Nielsen. “That is why we built Xaxis.”
Having critiqued others’ technology there was a reality check to come when the age old agency dilemma of media workflow process got a brief airing too – “workflow doesn’t exist in digital; its one of the worst things. People do a lot in Excel and make mistakes,” said Rhind. Nielsen was perhaps a step ahead – excited by technology “removing commodity tasks.” Gall cheekily threw in that it could remove media buyers too at GroupM one day soon.