SOURCE: Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source

I ran across a piece from David Pasternack today that makes the following point:

Despite the mythology that big ad agencies are populated exclusively with people who can’t even figure out how to open their email messages, the truth is more complicated. The main reason that more ad dollars aren’t flowing into digital is that digital is too hard to buy. If you wanted to reach a million people 10 years ago, you could execute this buy in less than 10 minutes with one phone call. To reach the same million people today, you’d have to have a team in place, which would have to spend a week planning, constructing and executing such a digital campaign.

I inherently disagree with the simplification model. I don’t see how agencies would want digital to be easier to buy. The easier it is to buy, the easier it is for clients to buy and bypass the agency.  He goes on to say:

Every form of “traditional” media, including print, radio, TV and outdoor, has an agency discount associated with it. Agencies make a significant share of their earnings from the spread between wholesale and retail media prices — except with Google and the other search engines. When buying this kind of media, agencies pay retail, even if they’re buying millions of clicks a month. So at the end of the month they’re faced with a truly rotten choice: either present their clients with a very high bill (retail price plus media management fee) or a bill without a markup (which means they’re going out of pocket running the search campaign).

It’s the not 15% model that’s outdated, in my opinion, but the traditional agency model. Or more accurately stated, agencies will begin to move full-circle into the role of buyers of ever-complicated digital campaigns. Access to the minutia, and the resulting tweakability, is the very reason digital advertising offers so much promise. Eliminate the tweakability, and you might as well buy something else.

It’s not up Google to simplify for the agencies, it’s up to the agencies to simplify for the client. And therein lies the value for the next generation of agencies.

SOURCE: iMedia Connection: Follow the money: inside the Publicis/Google deal