Agency Search 
Site Search Strategies to Make Your Agency Data-Driven
By Venkata Bhonagiri, Senior Partner, Group Director, Strategy & Analytics at Mindshare.
The power of data needs no explanation. In almost about every aspect and area of life, petabytes of data are getting generated every second. Businesses are investing billions of dollars in capturing and harvesting this large volume of data to help them make better, smarter, and faster decisions. Yet, building a data science capability in an agency is not that easy; it’s critical but not easy.
“Seventy-two percent of data and analytics (D&A) leaders with digital initiatives are either leading or heavily involved in their organization’s digital transformation initiatives”, according to Gartner Inc.’s sixth annual Chief Data Officer (CDO) survey. That’s because having a well-rounded data science discipline is pivotal to digital transformation—it’s a key factor in how you integrate critical media services that drive overall agency performance, establish connections with core agency operations, empower collaboration and data transparency across all functional disciplines, and drive automation and efficiency to scale.
With that in mind, these are the key challenges executive leaders must tackle if they are to succeed.
Establishing a strategic direction
To lead the transformation to a data-driven organization, start by contextualizing overall agency goals and processes—and how they intersect with a clear data strategy. At the core of most media agencies are the planning, buying, and activation solutions and processes. Almost every major functional discipline that offers these solutions within the agency must identify and understand the role of data and align data with the agency’s vision and priorities. Constructing a relevant and meaningful strategy to pursue data-driven capabilities ranks as the number one challenge to, and a reason for, a company’s success, as shown in a recent survey by McKinsey & Company. Assessing your company’s data maturity and comparing it with the competition will help gauge the current state as well as the desired future state.
This discovery process will help craft a clear strategy. A few questions agencies must ask themselves to assess their data maturity:
- Does your leadership understand the value of data?
- Do data-driven initiatives align with the broader agency’s objectives?
- What data management and governance infrastructure are currently in place?
Solving for budget sufficiency for data-centric initiatives
Getting buy-in from stakeholders and rightsizing budgets to support data-centric initiatives can be challenging. Solve this by first identifying your organization’s needs as well as the client’s needs and then aligning potential data-driven capabilities to these needs that translate to growth and revenue. The key to optimizing investments to support this initiative is not monetizing the value of data but rather demonstrating the ability to quantify its impact on the bottom line early in the process.
As an example, let’s look at capabilities around audience strategy and analytics. Agencies must invest in such capabilities largely because they offer substantial value to the business and to their clients by addressing the growing concerns around data, privacy, and online identity protection. They drive responsible use of consumer data and push for intentional investments in delivering value for consumers. This is what clients care about and thus equates to business for a media agency. The need to build and scale solutions this large that can realize revenue makes a tangible case for securing optimal budgets.
Transforming the agency’s culture to more data-centric planning and decision-making
There are several dimensions to this aspect of the journey. Agencies must focus on cultivating a data-driven culture, ensuring that their teams have the right resources and skills to leverage data and are empowered to make key decisions. This is where re-imagining the existing processes and integrating data across multiple silos become critical. An agency must follow these steps to move towards a data-driven culture:
- Wrangling and integrating data across sources, both internal and external
- Lean in support of technology
- Education – increasing data literacy across disciplines
- External certified training and programs that train the trainers
- Sharing best practices across teams.
In addition to updating the skills and literacy across the organization, assessing, transforming, and winning clients’ businesses also play a role. Because it’s not just about your own transformation as an agency, but winning, and investing in, the right clients. If you’re picking and choosing clients that aren’t interested in going on this journey, then they’re not the right choice. Work with brands that allow you to not just think and act as a media agency but offer you the opportunity to bring integrated solutions to the table as a true business partner.
And by having conversations with your clients’ leaders at the frontline, you can ensure that data analytics, technology to support, and partner choices complement existing processes so that agencies can manage a gamut of trade-offs effectively. Rather than signing up for massive changes, data leaders should focus on small yet concentrated efforts to source data from both internal and external partners, build models, and transform culture across the agency as well as the clients. Such efforts help not only to progress but ensure there is this constant trust built among clients who are also on this journey of becoming data-driven.
While a clear strategy, budget sufficiency, and transformation to a data culture are key enablers to making an agency data-driven, the true measure of success lies in intentional investments in clients—and how your agency’s work helps them succeed.