ABCe Interaction: Still room for agencies to improve

Giving an agency perspective on online audience measurement at yesterday’s ABCe Interaction event, Pete Robins, deputy chair, IPA Digital and founding partner of Agenda 21, said that although agencies have become better at handling online data, they still have a long way to go.

“Data is the thing that will drive our industry – agencies are starting to catch up where media owners went first,” he said, adding that the “idea of dealing with data is a big problem for agencies”.

As data becomes increasingly important, said Robins, agencies have to have confidence in it so they can give the right advice to advertisers.

“We need confidence that the data is right or close to where we need it to be,” he said.

Talking about what he termed the ‘elastic efficiency’ of online, Robins said that digital is one of the most inefficient parts of the marketing industry, with around half of agencies’ time taken up by admin. “It is what we have to do,” he said.

Diagnosing part of the problem as being caused by too strong a focus on the “small detail”, he said that it was important not to get distracted by this and to have an idea of what is going on at a macro level.

Looking to the future, Robins said that digital’s potential is great. “I don’t think the energy in digital is going away, in fact, I think it’s going to increase,” he said, adding that at the moment, “digital is probably only taking 20% of the opportunities that currently exist”.