Despite worries that automation will eliminate the need for professional marketers, technology and human innovation work best in tandem, says Elias Saroufim
Are robots taking over soon? Are we losing our jobs to machines? These were some of the questions that were asked during our early industrial days. However, even today, we still hear these questions when talking to certain citizens of the digital world.
Delivering the right content to the right audience at the right place and time is the Holy Grail for digital advertising. Luckily, the industry has made great advancements in achieving this, driven by an avalanche of technology, information resources and pure innovation.
In many ways, automation has been born out of big data. What makes this the catchphrase of recent years is not simply the amount of information available: it also refers to the size of available information, as well as the access methods and technologies for interpretation. For marketers, it represents a challenge and an opportunity to develop intelligent analytical tools to better reach their customers through the right channel, at the right time, and with the right content. In the digital advertising world today, marketers are faced with an overwhelming level of inventory and audience fragmentation. Each customer interaction happens on a different device or media channel and at a different time during the lifecycle of brand engagement. Information is generated throughout. Automation in media helps bring structure to this fragmentation. It enables marketers to consolidate customer interactions across multiple channels into a single dashboard, and then use that dashboard to develop a strategy about how to best engage with those audiences, initially and over time.
Many marketers worry that their roles will be replaced by this ever-growing technology, but we often tend to forget history when wondering what the future holds for us. It’s hard to believe that as recently as about five years ago, insertion orders (the contracts between media buyers and publishers) were handled manually. That is, they were written out and faxed between entities for the purpose of having documents with actual signatures on them. Thankfully, insertion orders and many of the mundane tasks associated with media buying and selling have become automated in the last few years. First, we moved from faxing to electronic invoicing. Now, we are moving on to automated audience planning and buying. Automation in this arrangement is good for the publishers, good for the agencies, and good for the marketers.
While the word ‘automation’ often causes worry about massive layoffs, it offers lots of advantages, beginning with talent acquisition and retention. Automating certain tasks frees up people’s minds and time to apply their actual talents to more challenging client or company issues. It allows for broader thinking and more strategic cross-platform utilisation. If you manage to hire the best and the brightest (hats off to our human resources departments), you don’t want to make them sit in a corner doing spreadsheets.
Automation allows you to accomplish more with fewer resources. The largest expense that an agency has is human capital, which is a good thing. Automation in media helps you do more with less, thus improving an agency’s operating margins. Likewise, it offers better efficiency and accuracy: automation allows us to reach out to available ad spaces which, in the past, went unnoticed. One example of this that is gaining momentum in the region is programmatic buying.
Real-time bidding allows us to get the best placement at the best price and for a specific audience – and performance numbers are impressive. The reality is that if you want to be efficient, you’re going to have to embrace automation in some form. Otherwise, you’re going to compete against many other businesses using automated platforms and you’ll quickly be left behind.
Technology doesn’t take away the necessity for human innovation, but rather gives the power back to the people. The golden rule of automation is don’t automate everything. It’s not really the data that has value, but rather the ability to harness it to create personalisation. The missing piece is application – i.e. how to tap into information and use it as a trigger. It is great to have software and technologies to help process this huge amount of information, but it’s necessary to have brains and thinking behind these machines. The arrival of computers years ago didn’t eliminate the need for entry-level execs who used to prepare booking orders or develop extensive monitoring tasks. They embraced the technology and now they have to be really good at creating spreadsheets and presentations.
Just remember, any disruption in our industry will generate issues and challenges.
Robots and software aren’t taking over any time soon. The human brain and thought process is instrumental in understanding client businesses, analytics data points, and the deep partnerships between agencies, brands and media properties. At the end of the day, we are still in the communications business, which is governed mainly by human interaction.
Automation in media can simply help us step up our game by bridging the gap between art and science.
Elias Saroufim is director exchange, head of digital, at Mindshare Saudi Arabia