Point of fact: The media marketplace is evolving at a pace never previously experienced.
While consumers have a dizzying array of choices for accessing content, ad sales are dominated by a handful of media ownership groups. According to a recent GroupM report, the “Top 10” firms accounted for 55% of global ad revenues in 2020. Of note, the “Top 5” firms (Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Amazon and TikTok owner ByteDance) represented 46% of global ad sales during this same period.
In the U.S., the world’s largest ad market, digital media represented 62.9% of U.S. media spend with 88.1% of digital display spend being placed programmatically in 2020 (source: eMarketer). Not surprisingly, Google, Facebook and Amazon increased their share of the U.S. digital market to almost 90% in 2020 (source: GroupM).
Top media ownership groups such as Comcast, Disney, ViacomCBS and AT&T have expanded their offerings to advertisers on a direct basis to include media space/time, content, product integration, experiential support, audience research and production services… somewhat reminiscent of the days of full-service advertising agencies.
And finally, media planning and buying decisions are becoming more highly automated as AI-powered algorithms and machine learning continues to expand their role in the advertising and media sector. This in turn has spurred advertiser investments in AI marketing, totaling over $6 billion in 2019 (source: Statista).
The question to be asked is, “How will media agencies distinguish themselves and their client offerings to protect their share of the media services market?”
This is an important topic, one which is surely being discussed within the major ad agency holding companies. Why? Media agency contributions to agency holding company financial performance are significant. This has been particularly so with the growth of digital media over the last decade-plus. According to Ad Age Datacenter, digital work in 2020 accounted for 58% of 2020 U.S. revenue for agencies from all disciplines. Yet, overall revenues for U.S. ad agencies have been lackluster at best, with low single-digit growth in 2017, 2018, 2019 and a 6.8% drop-off in 2020.
For advertisers seeking to boost campaign performance, improve media ROI and reduce time-to-campaign launch times, they will inevitably evaluate a range of approaches to planning and placing their media budgets. These may include adding consolidating their media agency networks to achieve better integration and improved leverage, in-housing certain aspects of the media strategy and or placement processes to improve efficiencies, working directly with media ownership groups and a host of other alternatives.
In a dynamic, evolving marketplace marked by uncertainty, the onus is clearly on media agency management to defend their role as gatekeepers and stewards of client media spend. Perhaps agency leadership can draw some inspiration from the words of American educator and the founder of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan: “Wisdom is knowing what to do next; skill is knowing how to do it and virtue is doing it.”