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Just to give some deeper understanding of why sales doesn't scale: here at The Ad Agency, we're responsible for spending our clients' large budgets buying media

Just to give some deeper understanding of why sales doesn't scale: here at The Ad Agency, we're responsible for spending our clients' large budgets buying media from people like Twitter (I don't think we ever buy from Twitter, but we theoretically could). That process involves having Twitter come into our offices to pitch their platform to us, justify an investment, provide us with the tools to sell the idea to our clients, then provide us with ongoing account management to coordinate, implement, track, and report on the campaign. Ad agencies rarely do self-serve media buying, so media sellers need to pound the pavement in NYC to get big brands on their platforms.

mechanical_fish 16y ago
Ad agencies rarely do self-serve media buying And why is that, one might ask? I'll take a guess: Companies hire ad agencies to pursue advertising strategies that go well beyond what's possible with self-serve media buys. It's not that you can't do a lot with self-serve media, or that there's not a huge business for such media. It's that ad agencies serve a different class of clientele, one that has bigger scope and bigger budgets. And, once the budget and scope grow beyond a certain point, it becomes worthwhile to have actual humans negotiate the deals. After all, negotiation is pretty difficult to automate, and most ads are not commodity products.
- joshklein 16y ago
  Well said. There are better "self-service" marketplaces for TV, where the media sellers have organized, but the online landscape is too fragmented. It would be inane for an agency to train someone up in "Twitter buying", so instead there are people trained in "media planning" (usually specialized in TV, Print, or Digital) who then coordinate with specialists at individual vendors (Twitter, Facebook, Google, other networks). Ad agencies add value to their clients through strategy, creative, planning, and experience in execution. The actual serving of ads is largely a pass along expense, and therefore ripe territory for smart technology companies.

mechanical_fish 16y ago

Ad agencies rarely do self-serve media buying And why is that, one might ask? I'll take a guess: Companies hire ad agencies to pursue advertising strategies that go well beyond what's possible with self-serve media buys. It's not that you can't do a lot with self-serve media, or that there's not a huge business for such media. It's that ad agencies serve a different class of clientele, one that has bigger scope and bigger budgets. And, once the budget and scope grow beyond a certain point, it becomes worthwhile to have actual humans negotiate the deals. After all, negotiation is pretty difficult to automate, and most ads are not commodity products.

joshklein 16y ago
Well said. There are better "self-service" marketplaces for TV, where the media sellers have organized, but the online landscape is too fragmented. It would be inane for an agency to train someone up in "Twitter buying", so instead there are people trained in "media planning" (usually specialized in TV, Print, or Digital) who then coordinate with specialists at individual vendors (Twitter, Facebook, Google, other networks). Ad agencies add value to their clients through strategy, creative, planning, and experience in execution. The actual serving of ads is largely a pass along expense, and therefore ripe territory for smart technology companies.