If you haven’t yet seen Centro board member Andrew Swinand’s recent guest column in Advertising Age “Want to Win the Race to the Bottom? Don’t Invest in Tech” you’re missing out on one of the most prescient analyses of why agencies need to find new ways to raise their efficiencies and, in turn, their profitability.
Is the advertising industry willing to look at itself and acknowledge that it has a big problem? Can anything reverse what seems like a race to the bottom and allow a rainbow to emerge?
Read the Entire Story on Advertising Age
Time to introduce a new adage to the information age: If you want to know how best to layout an office space, talk to the window washer.
Maybe not the first choice, but when you consider the volume and variety of floor plans a window washer sees over the course of a day, week or month, you start to realize there is a sea of potential insights you might not be considering in your own design.
I recently read a great article on Digiday called The Ad Network Transparency Conspiracy that resonated with me – I felt it aligned perfectly with some industry challenges Centro has aimed to address.
If you ask any media planner or buyer to think back to when they studied media planning and were asked to create a “dream campaign,” they’d probably tell you that they hadn’t yet gained understanding of the challenges execution poses in reality. And I seriously doubt that anyone would have relied on networks to account for much of their plan.
Adding third-party digital media logistics experts to a service provider adds another layer to the evolution of the industry. According to Craig Montgomery, principal of marketing strategy firm CMG partners, “It can be done, but it will take time and there will be some carnage along the way.”
As marketing continues to evolve, we as an industry are being asked to assign value to the actions that our advertising campaigns are driving. As we log and analyze these actions, we begin to assign value to them based on their impact on our overall branding objectives. It is important to not only focus on macro conversions, but also look at the micro conversions – the day-to-day activity that takes place to move your customers through the purchase funnel.
Continue on to read a brief tutorial on conversion tracking for the brand marketer…
Rocky Gunderson, formerly a founder of digital place-based media company SeeSaw Networks, recently opened a consulting company called SierraRock, where his many projects include bringing an innovative new healthcare application to market; helping a content management company expand its U.S. presence; and working with a manufacturing applications company to more effectively define its business strategy.
The most exciting change in the world of outsourcing has been the increased focus on services that are based on expertise augmentation and a genuine return on investment (which is why so many people want to use a different terminology).
And when we get into areas right at the cutting edge of revenue generation for clients, such as marketing and media, where clients need access to capabilities they may not currently have to gain a competitive edge, we can see where the future lies for the business services industry. One of our most talented analysts, Reetika Joshi, has been investigating the world of digital media and its major potential for third party services…
