As a former fellow digital media manager who worked for a WPP agency - you're right.
I would just add that, agencies have clients that are nice to have in their portfolio but they give more work than they invest.
So you have a business model built on % of investment - something that worked very well for massive TV Campaigns budgets (plus the rappel you'd get from TV Networks) - applied to time consuming campaigns that required a lot of FTAs.
I just don't agree much on the "ease of use" - the digital media landscape is quite complex.
A proper digital media campaign (part of a media campaign) has media managers, digital media managers, PPC Managers (let's say they manage FB and Google advertising for the sake of simplicity), AdOps, and Programmatic Teams - you can add on top of this SEO teams, Social Media teams, etc.
Yet advertisers don't want to move one inch on this business model - let me tell you i've seen them criticizing how many hours a proper Search campaign takes, with no knowledge of the matter. Some, like you've said, are bringing in people for digital media management, campaign management ... hell some are building their own PBUs!
I don't think it will work. It's not something new: it was done in the past with TV, and they come to realize the cost of the know how being stuck on their end it's too expensive.
Oh and P&G, and many other advertisers are to blame here as well - the marketing/brand managers don't want cuts on their budgets, so they make reckless decisions, wasting money just to claim they invested it and will require more budget in the next fiscal year.
Media owners are also suspects, the greed made them dependent on Google and Facebook... now their brands are diluted.
Unfortunately agencies failed with the golden egg goose - attribution modeling... attempts were made but it's not something trivial.
I would just add that, agencies have clients that are nice to have in their portfolio but they give more work than they invest.
So you have a business model built on % of investment - something that worked very well for massive TV Campaigns budgets (plus the rappel you'd get from TV Networks) - applied to time consuming campaigns that required a lot of FTAs.
I just don't agree much on the "ease of use" - the digital media landscape is quite complex.
A proper digital media campaign (part of a media campaign) has media managers, digital media managers, PPC Managers (let's say they manage FB and Google advertising for the sake of simplicity), AdOps, and Programmatic Teams - you can add on top of this SEO teams, Social Media teams, etc.
Yet advertisers don't want to move one inch on this business model - let me tell you i've seen them criticizing how many hours a proper Search campaign takes, with no knowledge of the matter. Some, like you've said, are bringing in people for digital media management, campaign management ... hell some are building their own PBUs!
I don't think it will work. It's not something new: it was done in the past with TV, and they come to realize the cost of the know how being stuck on their end it's too expensive.
Oh and P&G, and many other advertisers are to blame here as well - the marketing/brand managers don't want cuts on their budgets, so they make reckless decisions, wasting money just to claim they invested it and will require more budget in the next fiscal year.
Media owners are also suspects, the greed made them dependent on Google and Facebook... now their brands are diluted.
Unfortunately agencies failed with the golden egg goose - attribution modeling... attempts were made but it's not something trivial.