Is it a struggle to build digital agency relationships?

Derek Jones, managing director for MediaTel Group, asks if “the temptation in the digital world is more and more to play safe, save time (and cost) and use the middleman…?”

I write this on my way to the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, one of the television industry’s greatest networking occasions, hot on the heels of another couple of media “events” and a leaving do or two.

Our own events have also become networking occasions for owners and agencies to get together – it can be a very sociable industry as we all know!

Yet I have had three conversations in the last few days with senior sales guys bemoaning the greater difficulty now of building these sales-buyer relationships in the digital world as technology takes over.

Ad networks, demand side platforms, targeting systems – all very smart technology (see this DSP example for instance) handling growing levels of inventory, but still most associated with lower prices – sometimes unfairly – and gradually negating the need for traditional relationship building.

The key question in this is what works best for the client. There will be plenty of people lining up to argue either way – and some who would say you can get the best of both, working closely and innovatively with strong media brands, and getting good value, and managing to do this efficiently too.

But in the digital world, where the buying process seems to still be so work intensive, the temptation is more and more to play safe, save time (and cost) and use the middleman (middle technology), isn’t it?