LOS ANGELES — The agency of the future will need to be structured to serve both programmatic advertising and big tentpole events too, says Phil Cowdell, President of Client Services at Group M, during an interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s conference in Los Angeles. “What I believe will happen is this curve that shows average distribution of ad units will look like this — one side will show Super Bowl type units, and one will show programmatic,” he says. That means agencies need to be as nimble in executing on high-value tentpole events as they are on programmatic buys. “It’s one to one and a scale of a billion,” he says.
Already, real-time bidding is on track to account for nearly 25% of online video dollars this year, the IAB said. That’s why agencies need to pivot and integrate automation into their planning, but also weave it into the big episodic events that drive brand awareness too. “We need strategy and we need execution with high levels of automation,” he says.
Brands are becoming less differentiated, he adds, citing that even though 80% of CEOs believe their brands will stand out, only 8% of consumers do, he says. The net result is agencies must reinvent themselves quickly in order to serve these two changing faces of ads, he says.
