In a post on DevHub CEO’s LinkedIn titled: DevTrend: Moving Marketing In House? Mark Michael noted three common threads from current customer conversations:
- Infrequency - companies wanting to control the total experience on an ongoing basis
- Owning the relationship - brands want to control the information/ relationship from start to finish
- Asymmetric information - measuring effective ROI through analytic dashboards is easier for companies/ brands now
A reader of the post noted a Harvard Business Review article that quoted the Society of Digital Agencies (back in 2015) that there…”has been a dramatic spike in the number of companies who no longer work with outside marketing agencies…” The article goes on to say, “27 percent, up from 13 percent in the previous year.” FYI - this is also a noted trend first reported by the Association of National Advertisers (in 2013).
Here were some of the common themes from that article that could help explain what was/ is going on:
- Agencies are slow - noted.
- Agencies are stuck on advertising - companies are looking for more than ad spend but a total digital experience leveraging social, content...etc
- Continuity has become more important than campaigns - keep the conversation going outside of planning the next campaign meeting.
- Companies no longer want to outsource customer relationships - noted.
- Companies want to own the data - makes sense (companies) also need to be able to read and interpret the data while making adjustments quickly.
- Are agencies attracting the best digital marketing talent? - this was the most interesting one. As we (DevHub) had never considered this before - we typically work with product managers and digital marketing managers and they execute efficiently digital marketing/ presence campaigns via DevHub but how is the rest of the team made up? SEM specialists etc.
We are starting to see more of this transition. Will report as this develops.