Why agencies must now stop worrying and start to love measurement

Inflation is likely to continue to create challenges for agencies.

At the very least, it will sharpen the attention of clients, and what they seek and expect from their agencies.

Consumer spending is dropping. The effects of increasing interest rates on households was camouflaged to some extent by the excitement of Christmas.

And households in various parts of the world come off very low fixed interest rate home loans to be faced with variable home loans two-three times bigger.,

This combination of rising prices and reduced spending means that discretionary budgets are moving into negative territory.

Premium brands will seek to protect their market share in the face of withering competition from second-tier and generic brands, which in turn will sniff new opportunities to attract consumers with price offers pitched to the realities of belts being tightened.?

What does this mean for marketing services agencies and advertising agencies??

The rise of reason

It's never been a better time for a rational approach to marketing performance.

Being able to demonstrate success is more important, more desirable, and more expected than ever.?

And if marketing means anything, it means making better marketing decisions based on data.

For agencies, this means new opportunities around recasting themselves as advisors based on success they can prove, rather than being spenders based on reactive briefs from clients. Imagine having the upper hand over competitors by being able to demonstrate to a client that an investment in digital marketing made in the right media with the right message delivered revenue, or that a favoured program in truth was not delivering, so that budget could be saved and redeployed elsewhere.

It means controlling the conversation with clients by providing value based on insights, which in turn come from being able to see into the marketing machines entrusted to the agency.

It means replacing processes or loose collections of siloed analytics tools or complex, unwieldy and expensive martech stacks with plug-in-and-perform martech solutions that create insights and value later in the working day.

It means having everyone on client account teams plugged into the data, not account management or specialists holding the keys to the insights. Teams working on digital media, digital creative and web design can collaborate in new ways to create content that delivers, confident that they can prove that it does.

It's about creating trust in the minds of agency clients, because they can see that programs perform, budgets deliver, and sales are made.

In short, it's why agencies must stop worrying and start to love measurement.

And it's never been more important that agencies understand where they really can provide value, providing they actually do.