The digital advertising industry is in the throes of a monumental shift. Led by a combination of factors—from rapidly evolving platforms, increased opportunities to leverage data, and unpredictable consumer behaviors—to an exceptionally competitive and tumultuous labor market, agencies are seeing more volatility and uncertainty than ever before. Against that backdrop, new philosophies and technologies have been developed and refined, illuminating the path toward a new solution. This is a transformative moment, an inflection point that can completely consume a business you’ve spent years building—or empower it to sustainable success. The difference between those two outcomes starts with embracing the idea of a new role: The Advertising Architect.
To know how the Advertising Architect is going to influence your business’ future, it’s important to know where the industry is right now.
Digital Marketing Teams: Problems of the Present, Solutions of the Past.
Today’s digital marketing teams are often comprised of a significant volume of people with degrees in communications, people with specialized educations and skillsets—but their average day might not leverage their knowledge, talents, and passion to any meaningful extent. They labor under legacy processes and business models—usually absent of real technology. They spend their time doing a massive amount of duplicative data entry, cutting and pasting day in and day out, in an attempt to barely keep up with the individual needs of the 35 to 50 accounts they’re responsible for.
As your company grows, your headcount grows along with it; that’s not always a good thing. That expanding number of people’s time will continue being tied up with all those traditional ad tasks—repetitive, process-based work that could otherwise be automated. Conversely, actions that would benefit their accounts (think: strategic planning, relationship building, ideating and refinement) are afforded virtually no time to pursue.
This glut of unsatisfying, error-prone taskwork causes a multitude of issues throughout your business, from credits and refunds you need to cover for mistakes and spending issues, to high turnover rates that cascade into even bigger problems. In the current job market, losing people who are critical to your business model means account productivity and satisfaction suffer while you search for ever more costly replacements. This is expensive, consuming time, money, and energy in equal measure, and it’s more acutely painful than ever before.
The Future: Advertising Architects
What if you could shift the work of those highly trained yet poorly utilized team members over to one similarly passionate and capable yet differently specialized person, the Advertising Architect? An Ad Architect’s role is to manage automation software—software that allows you to scale your efforts in multiple ways—while opening up opportunities for others to do what they do best. With an Ad Architect on your team, your conception of capacity and speed (and their relationship to head count) will transform instantly. And guess what? Most likely, there’s already someone on your team who would be the perfect fit for the role.
To identify your Ad Architect, ask yourself, who is the resident tech wizard on your digital marketing team? Who is well-versed in all the nuances of advertising, and also likely to be found writing scripts or macros? That’s your Ad Architect, and with the right software, you can watch them soar. Ad Architects can turn concepts and conversations into strategy shifts at scale, all while letting the data dictate the details.
While making room for an Ad Architect may seem risky, it’s actually the opposite: It de-risks your business. People think they need 50 pairs of eyes, ears, and hands to run X number of accounts. The truth is much less complex, and let’s face it: at least some percentage of the people you hired to manage accounts have never done that job before, and you took a big risk staffing your team with them. Assigning an experienced team member to be your Ad Architect and enabling them with the right software mitigates these risks.
So what happens to all your other employees when you condense your digital marketing tasks down to one Ad Architect? You can strategically redistribute the others. Since most of them probably come from a communications background, have them do what they already know how to do: Communicate with customers, explain value, interpret results, and help spend more effectively.
After all, isn’t this communication—deep, strategic conversations about their brands, their categories, and their audiences—what your clients are ultimately buying from your agency? They don't want to pay for low value task work (even though we all know that work needs to be done). Clients today are asking the real questions; namely, "What results are you driving for my business?"
This is what your team should be focusing on. And with the right technology, a support team, and a dedicated Advertising Architect in your agency, the existing team can do just that: focus all of their energy and effort on creating this value for your clients, and growing your business as a result.
How Fluency Enables the Advertising Architect Role
Fluency’s Robotic Process Automation for Advertising (RPA4A) software doesn’t force your team to adopt compromising adjustments to their processes, making an often bad situation worse. Instead, RPA4A lets them deliver customization and speed at scale, requiring only an Advertising Architect to spearhead the efforts of hundreds—or even thousands—of accounts. You know what your team’s been able to accomplish under less than ideal circumstances; just imagine what kinds of opportunities could open up for both a dedicated Advertising Architect—as well as the rest of your crew—if they had the right tools.
It can be difficult to sell through and then implement a revolutionary idea in mature and upstart organizations alike, which is why Fluency’s RPA4A isn’t just a technology, it’s also a team. Your principals, stakeholders, account people, Ad Architect, and anyone who they work with can rely on Fluency’s professionals from onboarding all the way through the lifecycle of the relationship, as a safety net, sounding board, and an expert guide on the journey to a truly technology enabled agency.
Your agency doesn’t have to worry about losing what makes its brand unique: Fluency’s job is to find out what your people would do, then do it at an unlimited scale, quickly and accurately—over and over again. You can still keep what makes you successful, without being limited by the size and speed of your team.
If you’re ready to be part of the future of digital marketing, it’s time to set yourself up for success with an in-house Advertising Architect. Request a demo today to learn how Fluency can enable this shift, allowing you to conduct a more strategic and efficient workplace that feeds growth, because there’s no time like the present to shed the ways of the past.
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