Creativity to return to the fore following programmatic consolidation predicts AOL Platforms CMO Allie Kline

"The potential for programmatic is that the rate of adoption has surpassed any analyst prediction, and surpassed every internal prediction we had and we have been as bullish on it as any media company out there."

"What will happen is that we'll see more adoption as it becomes pervasive. We're going to start to see creatives reclaim the prestige that they once enjoyed. The belief is that the industry shifted about five to 10 years ago where it started to make this slow but meaningful shift towards media control,” continued Kline, who added that initial caution came from targeting abilities with data and how much could be achieved using data.

“In reality one of the main reasons it took so long was because of the effort it took to make it happen. You needed a ton of people to cull through all the vendors you had and all the data you had instead of going for 10 aisle line items for a TV outlet. You're all of a sudden in an environment with three million line items and that's a lot to manage and organise.”

Kline claimed that research has found that the average company was still working with 20 vendors, having previously been as high as 40 just a year before.

"We're making progress, but 20 different vendors for a single campaign? That's not 20 media outlets, that's 20 different media technology partners. As programmatic consolidates that and makes that problem obsolete, I do think we will start to see that issue being fixed, and people getting back to what advertising is really about again and get back to its roots of being creative," Kline prophesised.

Discussing the trend of brands taking their programmatic trading in-house, Kline said that AOL was indifferent to dealing with agencies or brands managing their own stack.

"One of the reasons that brands have said; 'let's take this inhouse' is that it's hard not to get smart on this because it's so connected to your data and your customer data.

"So if you're not smart in-house on it, you're almost getting blocked out of half the intelligence of your company and your brand. That's part of the draw to bringing it in-house. Also, without the forcing function of having it in-house, it becomes such a black box to have your agency manage it and then you feel like you have no idea what you're doing. You're either in or you're out."

She likened programmatic to the use of shopping data to record and track what consumers buy, with brands now able to divide, manage, compartmentalise and examine the insight they can derive from data, which she claims has meant the creation of a new role for agencies, rather than redundancy.

"We look at it and say that creative is a massive opportunity for agencies and it is really hard with the variety of creative options that an agency can present against just having it in-house. That is really attractive to brands. Then also the strategy is important and being really smart on what is happening in the industry and where it is going. Agencies that are smart on that will be a partner forever," she explains.

Asked what she was hearing from brands, Kline said that they were asking about attribution and how they can tap into linear TV.

Advertising.com however is focusing on multi-touch attribution systems, including linear TV

"We want to start immigrating television and making decisions across every stream, not just one or two. They want to make the lines between every different medium invisible. They say that they don't want to make a decision based on the stream and that then sees them looking for the best formats and the ability to run the best creative experiences on every medium."

Finally, it is the rate of change that Kline once again highlights, stating that's she has never seen the industry change so quickly, but adding that while there is still an education issue for brands, the level of sophistication from a number that she has worked with has "dramatically" increased, she reveals.