Looks like agencies are needed in the programmatic advertising future after all.
Procter & Gamble’s recent move to Omnicom, with its $2 billion a year in marketing, shows that media holding companies are still needed intermediaries even as more online ad-buying becomes automated.
Procter & Gamble was one of the more prominent advertisers to invest inprogrammatic ad technology over the past two years, threatening to bypass traditional media holding companies. However, its latest media review was very much about how Omnicom and rival bidders could help it with that programmatic strategy, not about how it could go it alone.
It shows that brands are starting to reconsider how much ad technology they can bring in house and where their expertise lies.
“Bringing programmatic in-house is a complicated and difficult ambition, and should be the exception, not the rule,” said a top digital agency executive, speaking on condition of anonymity because of ties to P&G. “From hiring, to evaluation of technology to support to data-storage, this is all so foreign to their core business of things like selling cars, snacks, soda or T-shirts.”