What's Your Real Value Add?

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It Used to Be Specialized Knowledge That Made You Special

Way back in the day, when I started my 1st agency, digital marketers were generally paid because we knew how to start the digital marketing machine. Knowing what the ad specs were, and which keywords to buy on AOL (yeah - I have been doing this a long time).

It wasn’t marketing as much as knowing which buttons to push. It was opaque and things didn’t work the way that they were supposed to half of the time, but having the technical and process knowledge was pretty much all it took to be a better digital marketer than 95% of folks.

Then It Was Performance

That “I know which buttons to push” advantage started to change with the advent of tracking that worked. First Urchin, then Google Analytics, the AdWords pixel, then FB and on and on and on…

Once you could effectively measure marketing, nobody cared about the process, they only cared about what the tracking script recorded. This was a better time, because generally speaking, better marketing generated better results.

But that morphed into only being focused on performance. Brand suddenly seemed less important. The only thing that mattered was the tally of the tracking pixel. Bid management techniques and rule-based workflows ruled the day. We are still riding this wave a little bit still. Rapid creative testing is an optimization play, so the results still dominate the conversation.

But if you’ve noticed, as the platforms algorithms became more advanced, they needed and wanted fewer inputs. Marketers have less input into performance than they used to…and soon, performance will largely be in the hands of the platforms.

What Is It Now?

Now, your truest value add is being able to have a solution that fits. You have to be able to rapidly assess how well your services fit into the client’s landscape to drive results. It’s a lot of pattern recognition and refinement - better team, better processes, more efficiency…

But we are on the cusp of a change. The performance wave has started to ebb faster because the of the opacity of the platform algorithms. This has started to close the performance gap between agencies.

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What’s It Going To Be?

Generative AI is having a profound effect on the world of agencies. Once hard work has become easier, rapid optimization has shortened the time to full performance by 50% or more, and more. The changes are happening so rapidly that is foreseeable that in the not so distant future, an agency of 10 can do the work of what takes a staff of 30 to do today.

As your process gets more efficient, and AI drives down the cost of analysis and content, you might think that the real value of an agency is rapidly diminishing. In some ways - specialized knowledge is less valuable, and optimization falls into the hands of an algorithm, what’s left for the agency to do?

Miraculously, all of this streamlined efficiency and algorithmic improvement lays bare what the true value of an agency has always been —> understanding the real problems facing the client. As the manual part of the agency labor starts to become so efficient that it is of no tangible value, it is the the collective ability of the agency to understand so deeply the problems of its clients that the agency can create and deploy the right solutions. Agencies will no longer be limited to channel expertise, but the agency will have to evolve from a group of execution maniacs into a creative group of explorers who can find the root cause of client problems.

It’s gonna be grand - and it will be here before you realize it.

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