With every passing quarter, the job of media planners, strategists and activation teams seems to grow in complexity and scope. The decline in the value of legacy ad identifiers requires the testing and evaluation of new strategies to retain scale and relevancy. At the same time, the growth of retail media and streaming has multiplied the number of potential options to spend ad dollars and reach relevant audiences.
This is creating a chicken and egg problem. Agency teams want to continue acting as strategists and consultants to help their clients navigate change, but the increasing operational burden of managing the digital landscape is holding them back.
In new research commissioned by Amazon Ads and conducted by Forrester Consulting, agencies called out the need to automate this growing workload, citing it as the top challenge stopping them from delivering great experiences for customers and results for their advertisers.
So, how can agencies overcome this challenge while continuing to deliver the effective, relevant and impactful advertising campaigns their clients will measure them against? It all starts with a mindset shift on how they plan and activate media, and how they adopt technology advancements to unlock the time and space for higher-value work.
Leading with signals
In a more fragmented landscape, putting the audience, their needs and their overall experience first is central to re-connecting creative and media, as well as brand and performance. This involves bringing disparate sets of signals together from brand properties, partners and publishers to gain an enriched view and understanding of where to activate, what tactics to use and what messaging resonates.
But who has the time to be strategic, you ask? You might feel that spending more time upfront to ensure technology can activate the strategy just sounds like adding another thing to your to-do list. But what if you were able to deliver better performance, in less time?
This is where automation comes in.
Automate with confidence
The same Forrester study found that automation is front of mind for agencies, with 78% ranking “automating manual tasks to drive cost and operational efficiencies” as critical or high priority. After all, less time spent by teams trying to simply get campaigns to run effectively would create space to step back and assess strategic ways to deliver impact.
But agencies have the potential to automate so much on their own. They need technology partners to come to the table with advanced solutions that enable them to activate smarter, better, faster. Amazon’s new performance offering, Performance+ within Amazon DSP, is a step in this direction. It enables marketers to load their first-party signals, set the controls they care about, input their goals and let machine learning do the rest.
Performance+ is already delivering strong results for advertisers across industries and verticals, improving cost per acquisition by 30-90% over traditional manually delivered DSP campaigns, according to Amazon Ads internal and advertiser-provided data.
Agencies that are able to embrace the power of automation to deliver on their objectives will feel the benefits over the coming months and years. They will reclaim time, allowing them to deliver more strategic, impactful, and relevant marketing at greater levels of efficiency. A key question for all agency teams should be how their technology partners are helping them make this a reality.
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Nick McLachlan is a senior product marketing manager at Amazon Ads, where he focuses on adtech and holding companies.
