What will the agency of the future look like? One thing we can be sure of is that the agency world in 2030 will be unrecognisable to the one we know today. To try to gauge the scale of the changes that will come in the next 15 years, we can look back to 2000 when search was in it’s infancy, there was no Facebook or Twitter, and nobody had even heard the term ‘programmatic’. But even that won’t do justice to the changes that we will see between now and 2030, because the rate of change is exponentially accelerating.
By 2030, we can expect to be walking a tightrope between the incredible things we can do with data and what we are allowed to do. Waves of European legislation will have all but forbidden the unsolicited use of personalised data. But the pendulum will swing, and those consumers who haven’t chosen to go ad-free forever will have realised that the more they share about themselves, the more useful the information they receive from the brands they love will be. These individuals will be sharing their personal information voluntarily through data preference centres.
The advertising we aim at these enlightened individuals will be entirely personalised and will engage, enrich and entertain. We will no longer build and optimise by device, but by persona. Nor will we be concerned about tracking across mobile, desktop or tablet… or even watches, home security systems, glasses, fridges or connected cars.
The Agency of the Future will know where its receptive and willing audiences are, and will feature the relevant brands for them when the time and context is right because their consumers will tell us when that is.
Advertising will have become a personalised dialogue between brand and consumer and there will be almost no wastage.
And the Agency of the Future’s shape? It will be leaner. There will be a few creative superstars who work in teams with techies, coming up with great concepts that are part art and part tech solution.
Behind the creative superstars will be a handful of clever technicians, data specialists and systems gurus sewing all the platforms and data streams together.
Content will have taken a giant leap too and will have moved beyond graphics and text, and even video and voice recognition. We will be into the realm of VR and interactive personalised conversations.
Wearable devices and phones will rule local marketing – ads, content and answers to questions (previously called search results) will be 100% based on location, proximity and context.
It’s an exciting future, but expect the legislators in Strasbourg to make life very hard for users of data between now and then.
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Author: Tim France
Date: March 2017