The digital advertising industry is in the throes of a monumental shift. From rapidly evolving platforms and increased opportunities to leveraging data and unpredictable consumer behaviors, it’s being transformed into an exceptionally competitive and tumultuous labor market.
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: present problems, poor solutions
First, let’s examine today’s problematic present: Today’s digital marketing teams are often made up of a significant volume of people with degrees in communications and 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 in an attempt to 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, but that’s not always a good thing either. 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 high turnover rates that cascade into even bigger problems. In the current job market, losing people who are critical to your business model means that account productivity and satisfaction suffer while you search for ever-more costly replacements.
The future: the advertising architect
Now, 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.
To identify your ad architect, ask yourself who the resident tech wizard is on your digital marketing team. That’s your ad architect, and with the right software you can watch that employee soar. Ad architects can turn concepts and conversations into strategy shifts at scale, all while letting the data dictate the details.
So what happens to all your other employees when you condense your digital marketing tasks down to one ad architect? You can strategically redistribute them. 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, this communication—deep, strategic conversations about brands, their categories and their audiences—is exactly what your clients are ultimately buying from your agency. Clients today are asking the real questions, namely, What results are you driving for my business?
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 value for your clients and growing your business as a result.
Enabling the advertising architect role
To exploit the value of the advertising executive, you’ll need software that will let your team deliver customization and speed at scale, requiring only an advertising architect to spearhead the efforts of hundreds—or even thousands—of accounts.
It can be difficult to sell through and then implement a revolutionary idea in mature and upstart organizations alike, which is why I invite you to check out Robotic Process Automation for Advertising (RPA4A). 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. 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. There’s no time like the present to shed the ways of the past.
