COLOGNE – Brand marketers’ desire to bring functions in-house isn’t necessarily new for advertising or media agencies, but one of the more challenging ramifications of clients’ quest for brand safety is in-housing activities the agencies used to handle.
“Transparency still is a huge, huge issue,” OMD Global CEO Florian Adamski says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.
“Whereas I believe that a lot of things happened and a lot of it improved, and a lot of new adtech providers helped to clean up the supply chain, clients still have an eerie feeling that they don’t have total control over it,” he says.
This leads to a second trend: clients taking control. “Basically they want to own their own data, they want to own their own contracts, they want to own their own adtech.”
Which leads to a third trend, the problem of talent. “Clients can recruit and hire, buy the adtech and the licensing. The problem is how long can they retain and nurture talent to, in the long run, do what in the past agencies used to do,” says Adamski. “Do I believe there is a place in the supply chain in the industry for media agencies still today? Absolutely, because we will be all about recruiting, identifying, nurturing, training those talents that actually need inspiration working across different client industries.”
About a year into his global role, Adamski finds it fascinating to track distinct differences between different marketplaces. He notes that many people might assume that everything in adtech and publishing is fully globalized.
“My verdict is it is absolutely not. And I don’t even have to start talking about China and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) over there or a totally different landscape in Japan or South Korea.”
But more frustrating is working with clients to take the best possible approach to measuring the performance of the money they spend on advertising.
“I still believe in the value of building and creating and fostering a brand that at some point then will deliver sales, downloads, interactions, whatever you define as the key KPI,” says Adamski. “To understand the relationship between this rent-building effort and how it pays off in performance. Only if we tie that together we can see that full picture.”
He adds that it’s “daunting” to encounter marketers that have walled off brand and performance issues. “I think that’s a big problem. It needs to stop. It needs to be reintegrated.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
