As media agencies strive to become much more to clients than ad buyers, some are making technology consulting services an increasingly visible part of their offering.
Maxus’s global CEO Lindsay Pattison observes that her agency is applying the same principles to technology solutions that it does to the traditional discipline of media buying, and it comes down to agnosticism.
“Bringing together a clear tech stack is a bit like putting together a brilliant agnostic — and I use that word really carefully — media plan,” she says in an interview with Beet.TV. In other words, an agency would never develop a media plan that was 100-percent Google or 100-percent Rupert Murdoch-owned properties, and it shouldn’t go all-in with a single technology vendor either.
“We’d never invest all our money in one area, so why would you invest all your tech money with one provider,” Pattison says. “We believe that for every single client, we should craft a bespoke tech stack — look at the ads server, look at the DSP, look at the DMP — and work out what’s going to work for that particular advertiser.”
Agencies are currently being challenged to prove they can consult on technology services just as ably as they can on media, and in one key respect, they have a leg up on consulting firms with technology offerings: insight into potential impacts on media spend.
“We’re adding on a layer that those other competitors can’t possibly add,” she says.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
