In the age of digital marketing advertising agencies must compete in a multimedia cross-channel ecosystem for client marketing budget. In order to be successful the agency must not only come up with creative strategies to capture consumer awareness, they must also cope with their client’s need to track consumer information that is uncoordinated, fragmented, and comes in a wide variety of formats.
In addition to the strategic and creative services that an agency must offer to win accounts, they must also offer the technical infrastructure and expertise required for coordinated cross-channel campaigns that use customer profile data.
The result is that cross-channel advertising agencies must devote a growing portion of the project budget to IT services rather than creative talent and market coverage. There is a delicate balance to be maintained between hiring creative talent, maintaining a competent IT infrastructure team to execute relationship marketing strategies and campaigns, and the number of people you can reach with any budget that is left over.
The reality is that with the emergence of digital technologies the landscape is in a state of constant evolution and reinvention, and IT infrastructures is not easily adaptable to changing client needs and client advertising portfolios. IT works with square corners, so to speak, whereas advertising works in color. IT is a different discipline and set of rules. Making changes once the IT development machine is put in gear is costly. This slows an agency’s speed to market, resulting in missed opportunities to deliver relevant and timely communications, because the IT specifications process is long and detailed.
Existing agencies and start-ups need a way to eliminate, or at least greatly simplify dealing with IT. This would free a tremendous amount of interactive budget that could now be spent on creative talent and cross-channel market coverage.
Cloud computing removes the barriers to entry into the digital marketing world! It is now possible for two guys, one very creative talent, and one digitally competent marketer, to combine forces and build custom-made relationship marketing strategies and interactive cross-channel marketing campaigns.
Rather than spend 9 months building a centralized database and only then starting your marketing campaigns, you could start building a customer state marketing database in a few weeks’ time. You would then be acquiring valuable customer profile and behavior information immediately. Think of how much data you would have access to in 9 months’ time and what you could be doing then. It’s a new world for advertising agencies!
