At the Insight 2007 Summit in London yesterday, one of the most interesting presentations was - for once - the keynote from Doubleclick's CEO David Rosenblatt.
Naturally he dodged any comment on the forthcoming merger - courts willing - with Google. But his comments on the state of online advertising suggest that there might be a bit of a chill wind about to blow through the agency sector.
His argument is that online advertising is fundamentally too expensive - both in terms of rates, but more importantly in terms of set up costs. And that expense makes it ripe for automation.
There's more than a shred of truth in his comments. We use a lot of technology to set up and run campaigns, but the set up itself it a painfully manual process. And it's much more time consuming than a typical offline campaign, partly because - for us at any rate - we tend to run quite complex campaigns with many different placements, ad sizes, formats and the rest.
It's easy to sit back and say that technology can never replace the job of an agency. But any function within an agency that is essentially mechanical - copying data from one Excel spreadsheet into another, or manually entering data into a web interface - probably will come under threat sooner rather than later.
I guess that media agencies need to focus on what they are supposedly really good at - like planning and strategy - and get that buttoned down before the machines come knocking!
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