A dynamic trend is sweeping the digital agency landscape and it involves people, processes and technology. Clients and brands are increasingly turning to their agencies for staff “in-sourcing”, creative and innovative experiences, and technology innovation. And the industry is responding. The 2013 SoDA’s Digital Marketing Outlook (DMO) survey results have been released and the findings are exciting for digital agencies. In today’s blog, we take a look at these newly released digital agency trends and find out what impact they’ll have in the coming year.
Experiential Data
Agencies are noticing that clients are bypassing traditional marketing for highly personalized marketing experiences. It’s not enough to know the prospect’s name, todays savvy brands are requiring personalized and aggregated experiential data to provide feedback, messaging, and content, that is über targeted at that individual directly. This growing sophistication of client-side digital marketing is requiring deeper levels of participation from agencies. Agencies are ramping up their technical capabilities, education initiatives and internal innovation activities. This trend is expected to create a significant shift in client agency engagement paradigms for 2013 and beyond.
In-Sourcing
Digital Agencies are also being tapped to help their clients do more with less by providing them with high value “in-sourced” expertise. An in-sourced expert is the client’s go to, on-site, resource who is backed by indigenous knowledge, agency asset repositories and the extensibility that comes with a repeatable process. Agencies are finding themselves in the unique position to provide staff members to their clients that become part of the client fabric (and a trusted advisor) and are dramatically revising the retainer model. Agency In-sourcing and staff augmentation that is backed by the promise and capability of the agency brand is emerging as a growing trend for 2013.
Technical Hand-Off
Marketing continues to become an increasingly complex and technical endeavor. There’s not a campaign that is run today that does not involve several highly technical capabilities and toolsets beginning from asset creation, to delivery, to analysis, to relationship management. Each of these steps require a level of sophistication that is not only difficult to define, but difficult to staff. In 2013, brands and companies are beginning to shift strategy and tool management away from internal resources, and are increasingly relying upon their agencies to fulfill this responsibility.
Marketing Agencies that can provide strategy, technology and people resources to their clients and brands are at a unique turning point. Agencies are emerging as the source for clients and brands to provide experiential interactions with their targets with data, resources and capabilities that are highly complex. Marketing managers continue to demand more from their tools, just as their clients are demanding more measurability from their content and campaigns.
The landscape is changing and innovation is front and center for agencies, brands and consumers in 2013.
