ANA.net  14.08.2015

Kamran Asghar, Managing Director CROSSMEDIA New York, kommentiert in der aktuellen Publikation der Association of National Advertisers den Umbruch im Media-Business und die aufflammende Transparenzdebatte in den USA.

Issues surrounding media transparency could threaten the marketer-agency relationship; here’s what industry leaders are doing to assess the problem and pull us back from the edge.

Rumors abound. Are client-side marketers getting the biggest bang for their media-buying buck, or are certain practices by some media agencies diluting marketers’ buying power and maybe even undermining the strategies those agencies were contracted to support? That’s no longer a rhetorical question — if indeed it ever was. […]

“If your agency brings value in the form of advice, then neutrality and transparency are mission critical,” says Kamran Asghar, president and co-founder of Crossmedia, a New York-based media agency that promises its clients 100 percent transparency. “Even the slightest doubts about how your agency makes money destroy the trust that is the basis for the relationship.”
So is transparency a make-or-break issue that could spell the end of the traditional marketer-agency relationship, or is it merely a hiccup in the ongoing evolution of that relationship? The results of the ANA study on media transparency, the impact of the cross-industry Media Transparency ask Force, and the steps that follow will likely play big roles in determining the answer to those questions. Asghar believes the industry is at “a very intense crossroads” and anticipates the system, as it currently exists, will collapse in the next three to five years. “The confluence of marketplace automation, media proliferation, and consumer fragmentation will collide, and from this collision will emerge a new way of operating,” he says. Analytics will drive planning input, inform creativity, and help measure success, and intuition will trump inertia. “Marketers who invest the time and resources to understand what’s really happening will be able to craft a better agency model for themselves rather than choose a different shade of vanilla every few years in hopes of saving a few bucks,” Asghar says. […]