Gaining Digital Media Control And Transparency

Even with all the right strategies, data, and processes in place, managing media platforms and tools (e.g., ad serving platforms, programmatic trading desks, ad operation tools) is challenging — especially for companies who have long relied on partners for that work. When asked how confident marketers would be in managing ad serving platforms in-house versus using an agency, 60% of respondents from advanced-readiness companies said they’d only feel confident managing about half of the media platforms they use. It was the same for developing-readiness companies. This suggests that there are certain tasks that marketers aren’t prepared to manage on their own. Keeping the door open to current or new partners, who can support new business models, is critical for getting the needed support. Interestingly, it isn’t the same for every task. Respondents from advanced companies were substantially more confident than those from planning companies in their ability to manage most of their trading desks and operations platforms in-house.

Marketers are intent on managing more media capabilities in-house but that doesn’t mean they want to do everything. They expect to get some help and support along the way. For example:

• Nearly half of marketers would like agencies to share a significant responsibility for key media tasks.

  In their ideal scenario, 46% of marketers wanted to handle media strategy mostly in-house with the remainder wanting equal responsibilities or heavier reliance on agencies and similar preferences for analytics and media execution. Marketers prefer insourcing the bulk of media/marketing technology as a mechanism to own their customer data, manage privacy compliance, and power loyalty and email marketing.

• Less than a third of marketers want to completely manage media channels on their own.

  For media channels like social, search, affiliate, and connected TV (CTV), the majority of surveyed marketers intend to manage these channels mostly in-house, but only a small percentage want to manage them entirely in-house. The expectation is that these channels are managed with some level of agency support. For other channels, such as programmatic, marketplace, and performance channels, roughly 30% of marketers plan to manage completely in-house in the long term. Marketers choose to take programmatic channels in-house because direct control of their data drives better business results.

• Companies with higher readiness see a more critical role for their agencies to support bringing capabilities in-house.

  Traditional thinking would expect advanced-readiness companies to be more capable of managing things on their own, and thus use less external support. However, emerging- and advanced-readiness companies consider agencies’ roles more important than those with low-readiness (see Figure 5). The support of agencies and other external partners is particularly important for companies in the emerging-readiness tier, as they are done setting the groundwork with the right strategies, processes, data, and tools, but need greater guidance in taking on some of the more substantial media tasks.