Marketing Technology as Agency Service

Ogilvy’s marketing technology center recently published a booklet called "Making Martech Matter” to package and describe their latest offerings.

The center provides access to around 900 platform-certified experts on the most widely used third party martech applications from Adobe, Google, Marketo, Oracle, Salesforce, Sitecore and others. (The center does more than this, but that’s not my focus here.)

The booklet resonated with me because it marks how the services that agencies provide to their clients, and the talent behind them, have technologized over recent years.

As more and more consumer-brand interactions are automated, agencies have had to expand their roles so they not only produce the communications and experiences that run in/on these platforms, but operate them too.

Why agencies?

For the moment (this may not be an end-state) it is simply to remove blockers that delay adoption.

At the top of the list of challenges that clients complain about is that they don’t have the organizational agility or internal resources available to use marketing technologies to pursue new opportunities.

There may be other models, for example, the platforms providing their own managed services, but agencies doing it doesn’t feel wrong.

And there is an advantage for agencies. It makes sense for marketers to stack-up and connect the layers through their agencies because if communications and experiences are designed and then just poured into martech, these systems cannot perform to their potential.

The platforms also see value in this; all of them offer agency partnership programs to maintain quality standards within the service providers and incentivize growth.

Makes sense.