Topics discussed hit a few pain points across the industry: programmatic’s opportunity but logistical potholes, the challenges of generating new business with existing clients, and balancing commissions vs. fees. 

Here’s a sampling of their thoughts:  

Programmatic

“Everything in media today is test and learn. One of the keys of our success is that our clients trust us to give us their sales data. So if you are able to see immediate results layering different programmatic partners with the client’s data, then I think you’re one step ahead of knowing what works and what doesn’t. With so many [vendors] out there today, choose one that will go to bat with you and say, ‘OK, if this doesn’t work, what are we doing?’ Don’t just move on to the next one — try and figure it out, because at the first run, it’s probably not always a hit.”

“With all of our DSP partners, a requirement to work with us is we need to see exactly how the CPM is calculated, what is rolling into this? How much are you paying for data? What’s the fees that you’re putting on that to truly get to the cost of the media. And then we can do a better apples to apples comparison across the DSPs. Now we want the data to also include where is this audience coming from? Where are the SSPs that we’re working with? Where are the sites that it’s coming from?”

“You have to look at it holistically. It’s not just cost, it’s inventory, it’s reporting, transparency, all of it.”

“Hold your vendors accountable as well. We work with different DSPs, and if they aren’t coming to us consistently with new ideas or any kind of transparency, then they’re out. We need that information, and we need them to be challenging us as well as we challenge them, because otherwise we’re not going to see success.”

“Curation has become the new buzz word. You have to explain to clients that curation is really great, and you’re going to get higher quality inventory, you’re going to run site lists, and you’re going to feel good that you’ve heard of all these sites before, vs. your open auction list that’s scary. (No matter how much brand safety you put on it, the list is still scary.) But my challenge is explaining that to clients. ‘Yes, the CPMs are higher, but I want them to be higher. I want to be in these places that fit the brand better, that align with all the things for the brand, vs. just matching the audience and buying it as cheap as I can.’”

“Work closely with your SSP partners, work closely with the publishers, [and] create the right PMPs. The SSPs are super important because they can help you really curate inventory across multiple elements … Consider the role of traffic quality to your site, to drive whatever sort of engagement [you’re looking for]. That’s challenging with some mediums. So maybe consider moving up the funnel with programmatic, thinking about awareness and looking at long tail measurement that might be effective down the road — vs. just trying to drive really [intentional] traffic where search and social might be better at doing that.”

“What’s been successful is picking partners that are very, very transparent with their data. It’s very helpful if these partners would give us access to their dashboards where we can look into audience insights.”

“We tried building it internally, and that went nowhere. So don’t do that — it just requires a whole team, it’s really complicated and it’s not always impactful. When we’ve been working with it with our clients, we’ve tried to test a bunch of vendors, because it really depends on the model the client needs.”

Generating new business

“You’d be surprised to learn how little your clients know about what your agency does. It’s brutal. We work for some very large clients, and it is heartbreaking to me when I’m having a conversation and they say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know you guys did that.’ I want to put my head through the wall. Talk to your current clients about all the things that you do now. You don’t want to make it a perpetual sales pitch, but there is wisdom to sharing what you do. They already trust you.”

“You’d also be surprised at how little your clients care about competitiveness, meaning if you work for company A in a particular industry, they’re not so bent out of shape if you want to go work with Company B or C.”

“On the competitive side, a lot of brands see that as an advantage, because you understand their industry better. Sometimes it’s about just really understanding who is a true competitor vs. who’s like analogous to it.”

“Make sure that you have someone who can establish themselves as the subject matter expert that the client immediately trusts. I’ve had instances where we’ve taken over clients from other agencies, and then we talked to the agency and we realized they were actually really good. Why did the clients leave them? Then I realized it’s because one, they didn’t have an executive presence to kind of align with the CMO of the client. But they also really weren’t able to communicate how successful they were. They were so focused on the tactical details that they couldn’t win any new business.”

“One of the big challenges we’ve had in winning new businesses as a small independent agency, is finding the right pricing. We’ve seen media commissions continue to get driven down and down and down. So we’re having a hard time finding that happy medium where it’s profitable for us but still competitive.”

Commission and fees 

“I helped stand up a digital marketing agency with a unique pricing model, where it started off with a retainer and everything else is an upsell. We were projecting a certain average per client with that model, and it actually turned out that our averages were way off. We were getting way more per client based on doing it just on a pure upsell scale. So we actually end up making more money. We just had a low entry fee … It actually increased our average customer value when we did it that way.”

“We are fee based, where we don’t even take a commission on ad spend. It eliminates that whole conversation about commissions and percentages and things like that. We have a tough time responding to RFPs, though, when there’s a demand for you to put in a commission. So we kind of shy away from that.”

“We break everything down into projects and pods. Everything’s given: team resourcing, hourly allocations, etc. And then we back into [status] reports with our clients to say, ‘Look, you are getting exactly what you’re paying for.’ If we’re over burning, then we’re having the conversation about the upselling. But as a smaller agency, that’s how we got away from the commission model, because it was getting smaller and smaller and smaller. With the fee base, it also helps if there’s any kind of cancelations and things like that.”

Color by numbers

As March Madness gets underway — let’s hear it for the initial upsets like McNeese beating Clemson in the first round — the big marketplace focus right now is on college sports. Big Chalk, a consumer data/research company with clients such as Kellanova and Dollar Tree, among others, released the first part of an annual College Sports Perception Survey. Some takeaways:

• The college sports fan base increased from 32.6% in 2023 to 33.6% of Americans last year, many of them more casual fans that watched fewer events than college sports die-hards.
• Nearly 47% of college sports viewers give preference to brands they recall as sponsors when they shop for goods and services, up from 43% in 2023.
• 16.5% cite college sports content as one of the highest factors in their decision process for their subscription decisions — up from 13.9% in last year’s study and a promising sign that streaming is growing.
• It’s not all positive news: Net sentiment around conference realignment flipped from positive to negative in this year’s study, while sentiment regarding the transfer portal also dropped.

Takeoff & landing

• Omnicom and IPG shareholders approved the former’s acquisition of the latter last week, one step closer to consummation into the world’s largest agency holding company. The company still needs to clear regulatory hurdles, and is expected to receive some antitrust scrutiny — not to mention making the deal work financially for shareholders. 
• In the company’s Q2 financial results report, Accenture global CEO Julie Sweet said that Accenture Song will reduce the number of agencies in its portfolio to just that one brand. 
• Personnel moves: Havas made its CFO François Laroze also its COO, effective immediately … PMG for the first time has created the COO position, hiring Andrea Terrassa to fill the post. She comes over from Dentsu where she most recently was COO of Dentsu Americas … Performance agency Converge hired John Lyons as chief performance officer, coming over from Dentsu where he most recently was vp, group creative director at Dentsu Creative.

Direct quote

“We’re pretty bullish on [TikTok], and all but one of our accounts are back on [it].” 

—Shamsul Chowdhury, evp of paid social at Jellyfish, on the agency’s clients taking advantage of low TikTok pricing.

Speed reading

• Kimeko McCoy offered a strong rundown of why tensions remain in figuring out who controls the purse strings in retail media — a topic that came up a few times during the recent Media Buying Summit. 
• Seb Joseph explained why it’s far too early to count out The Trade Desk, despite recent dips in performance and troubles with launching new products. 
• Digiday assembled a story on DoubleVerify’s move to overhaul its keyword-blocking policies, choosing to restrict keyword blocking to “unclassified URLs” only, and launching tools to help advertisers optimize keyword blocklists to avoid excessive blocking against news content.