TMW #013 | Why we pay agencies in time spent, emerging problems with Advertising technology and Martech's next decade of big operations and no-code

Welcome to The Martech Weekly, where every week I review some of the most interesting ideas, research, and latest news. I try to look to where the industry is going and make sense of it all.

👋 A Quick Note

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😁 Cheeky Plug

I'll be helping out with an interesting event next week on how customer experiences can be improved through the practice of experimentation. It should be fun, will heaps of QA time and some very mature (read: not old, but good at what they do) heads of testing programs represented. Link

👌Top #3

💰 How we pay agencies. An interesting story from Marketing week touches on the slowly shifting attitudes towards marketing agencies. The shift has been mainly away from agencies selling their time to selling their expertise to solve problems for brands by focusing on specific outputs. It's a hard ask when you sit down with a client, pull up the timesheets and say "we need more time" when the client is thinking, what am I getting out of that time? In a lot of ways agencies who do their job well severely under leverage the price they are asking brands to pay, because in a world where attribution is more accessible than ever brands can now understand where they are achieving scale with their marketing and tech investments. A good use case, marketing campaign or TVC has the potentially to generate 10 to 100 times the value that brands pay for the engagement with an agency. So in some ways paying for time makes sense for brands, but also leaders in procurement and relationship management need to be comfortable with some loss, not every agency output will drive business value, intended or otherwise. In some ways there's a strong argument for paying an office (or a bunch of people sitting in their bedrooms during a global pandemic) to think about your customers for you, yet what sets agencies apart is the ability to clearly articulate how they intend to be delivering value for brands in a way that can exceed their rate cards. Link

🙈 Ad Tech on the way out. There's increasing evidence to suggest that advertising technology such as programmatic, display, social and search engine advertising are declining in popularity among marketers. Facebook and Google obtain more than 80% of their revenue from advertising, with the market for digital advertising growing to $525 billion over last year. Yet there's an increasing reluctance to be involved with programmatic advertising as it can be tied to challenges with where advertising is placed. We all know that social media is becoming an increasingly toxic media environment (do you really want your ad to pre roll for white supremist video?) and that there are surges in deceptive practices associated with spend attribution in these environment. Also a growing concern is the effectiveness of ad tech solutions to drive business outcomes, which is driving down to a zero sum game for advertisers and the marketers. Along with this shift there is an emerging trend moving toward decentralised media where micropayments and subscriptions are forming communities of people that increasingly spend their time in such communities and away from most places where ads are displayed. Expect big changes to the industry and how brands are preparing to spend their capital on advertising. Will we see the advertising bubble burst? I think big tech are still too big to lose. Link

👨‍💻 The net decade in marketing tech is no-code and big ops. I review Scott Brinker's view that the future of Martech will mostly involve no-code solutions and "big ops" to wrangle "big data." This one is in the subscriber version of TMW. Sign up here to get a link to the full version.

📈Chart Of The Week

This week I look at a unique study into over 4 billion web sessions and how the restaurant industry is driving some of the best experiences for consumers on the web. Sign up here to get a link to the full version and the chart.

📚 Everything Else

CX Day. Every year there's a special "customer experience" day. It's a global phenomenon that highlights great customer experiences all around the world. Link

CX Research. On this note some great research on how brands prioritise and plan for customer experience initiatives came out from the Ascend 2 group. Some surprising findings. Link

Latin America's digital transformation report. Really eye opening analysis into how software is also eating the Americas. Some of Brazil's largest companies are now tech companies. Link

Blogging stats. A really fascinating study on how blogging behaviours have changed online. People are writing more in 2020 than in the history of the internet, and earning more revenue too. Link

Too early for AI. Only about 9% of an IBM global study responded with a yes to the question of if data creates real value for their company. This article make a great point that a mainstream and retail adoption of AI in marketing is still a little while away. Link

Facebook's and the Social Dilemma. A very interesting response from Facebook, refuting almost all claims from the popular documentary on Netflix. Link

Product analytics. An interesting breakdown on how Segment is used in a modern product business tech stack. Link

Insurance and New Relic. One of Australia's largest general insurance brands has jumped on board with new Relic, stating that the observability software helped them isolate a critical payments issues in minutes. Link

Stay Curious,

Make sense of marketing technology.

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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.