June 21, 2019 Dan Wilson

Plans are nothing, planning is everything

There was an eye-catching post from Adweek last week on agency-client relations and how they’ve hit an all-time low. A solid bit of clickbait if I ever I saw… Despite clicking on it, and despite getting 37 trackers firing from the Adweek site according to Ghostery (who needs 7 site trackers?!?), I am none the wiser. I can’t read the rest of the article as its for their “Adweek Pro” subscribers.

I don’t know if this is a USA survey that Adweek did or if it is linked to 2018’s so-called ‘Mediapalooza’ where clients put huge amounts of business out to tender, but I don’t see anything wrong with advertising agencies. Yes, some agencies are largely a commodity service. Yes, they have a problem in their business model. And so on, I don’t think any of this is new information, so I am not going to blog about that.

A while back I was discussing with Vinny Flood about my favourite teams inside agencies – planners. They are the backbone of agencies and most of them are worth their weight in gold. We love speaking to them, we love showing them the benefits of our forwards market and we love hearing about their challenges with programmatic. When we hear about the challenges of in-housing we instantly wonder as to the role of planners in this and I suspect this is the bit that the client underestimates as they chase headline cost reductions in some adtech vendors that they don’t actually need.

Expect more from LMX on the in-housing market soon, in the meantime we’d love to speak to anyone doing a planning role in-house, so drop us a line on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/lmex), Twitter (@LMX_HQ), or via our website.

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