A tidal wave of change is coming for the ad industry.

By Andrew Baker, Sesimi CEO?

With staff shortages being witnessed across the advertising and marketing industry there’s no doubt that Ad Agency fee increases are imminent. The challenges around retaining and hiring good quality staff is a global problem across all kinds of industries andAdvertising is no different with “staffing and retention issues at almost every level, which means your agency rates can’t stay where they are,” (Darren Woolley, CEO of Trinity P3).

There are absolutely solutions that can be applied on both sides of the fence - client and agency alike. Solutions like? renegotiating the fee card, refusing the agency play of having you directly retain one of their team, avoiding repitch and the downsides of lesser service, and changing the nature of your relationship with the agency such that they get better people working on your team.?

But the solution that continues to be missed by agency heads and Marketing teams alike is the elephant in the room - Tech.

Tech has the power to change the landscape for the benefit of all. And I’m not talking specifically Sesimi tech. Any and all tech that is designed to remove inefficiencies can be beneficial and can create significant value on both sides.?

If I talk specifically about ours. Sesimi removes the drudgery of campaign rollout for agencies (and all the associated head costs of big teams of production people) allowing them to focus on what they do best. Creative. Our platform automates their creative, smoothing workflows, ensuring brand consistency and facilitating the creation of content at scale in a fraction of the time a production team can do it.?

And the big benefit for the client? Massive savings - both cost and time.?

Leading into the pandemic, only the most forward thinking Brand/Retail Marketers and agencies were looking at the problem and applying forward strategic thinking. But times are changing fast. There is huge growth in media channels with the explosion of digital and the only way to compete is to automate creative. Only Brand Management platforms like Sesimi can keep up with the workload and get messages into market on time ensuring zero human error around brand compliance and legal requirements.?

Technology is the most obvious solution to handle shifting cost and skill bases in the advertising and marketing industry. Alleviating the enormous pressures that come with content requirement at scale by using best in class, industry changing tech effectively redirects talent to value add activities in both agency land and marketing departments.?

James Young, Magnite MD recently connected the dots to technology much better. “As job roles grow increasingly complex, so too does the task of finding the right talent to take on the challenge. So perhaps the answer is technology.” I can’t agree with him more around getting the tech to do the gruntwork -? “I see the increasing use of technology as an amazing opportunity for organisations to redeploy their people into new roles.” The only way to make sure great talent is retained is to eliminate the repetitive tasks that are growing by the day.

"Change is hard and viewed as risky and difficult"

So what’s holding agencies and organisations back? My view is that change is hard and viewed as risky and difficult. But a tidal wave of change is coming in line with the explosion in demand for content that can't be met by adding more non-existent people.

The smart agencies and clients are already on the tech path in content creation. We have household name ad agencies and global brands working with us right now to streamline the flow of campaigns into market. It’s only a matter of time before the rest follow.