One efficient team—none of the headaches

Since the early days of advertising, big, bold media campaigns have been the driving force. The mantra was not about how much we spend; it’s about how many eyeballs see our ads. The sentiment of splashy ads reigned supreme.

Take advertising’s holiest day of the year—Super Bowl Sunday. Big brands are spending an average of $6.5 million for a 30-second spot, approximately a $50-$60 CPM. And yes, that works for a behemoth brand like ABI, Frito Lays, or Pepsi, with their unlimited media budgets and established awareness. But does it work for an emerging brand just entering the ad space?

It’s no surprise that traditional ad spending has shifted toward digital advertising in the last decade. Programmatic and performance marketing is much more audience-targeted and data-oriented. As a result, brands want to see increased ROI and less wasted impressions and dollars. And that means it has become common currency to spend less money with a traditional agency and more with a digital agency.

But will we see another shift in how brands plan and buy? With recent changes to data privacy, brands may be rethinking how they prepare and buy media—and who they use to execute it.

Awareness and brand lift are just as important as sales lift and ROI. To achieve all these things, a majority of brands are now working with multiple agencies with different expertise:

• Traditional media agencies are brought in to plan and buy TV, Radio, CTV, Streaming, Print and OOH on a localized level and are often siloed by media.
• Digital & Social agencies are tapped to specialize in programmatic, native, social and pay-per-click.
• Performance agencies are utilized to optimize marketing performance, meaning they are essentially serving the same purpose as digital agencies, but only getting paid for performance (ad clicks, lead gen, conversions or sales).

What could go wrong? 

That’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen. With so many hands operating across different agencies, consistency is in scarce supply. Everyone has a different recipe and technique. Working with many contacts means you could be corresponding with up to 20 different people (buyers, planners, etc.) per day. These contacts are usually reluctant to work with each other and often very slow to share helpful information, driving cost inefficiencies across platforms with no buying power or holistic view of costs and revenue. This can be because they are all vying for more budget, something we’ve seen repeatedly. 

So what’s the solution? Do you hire in-house? Take on more employees, salaries, bigger office space (post-pandemic), high taxes, high benefit premium, etc.? The list goes on. Most brands aren’t fully prepared to tackle that kind of growth. 

Enter the integrated agency model

Integrated Digital Agencies are a perfect blend of mixing digital, programmatic, social, performance, and traditional media channels with the added benefit of having it all under one umbrella and no more talking to multiple contacts across multiple agencies. This equates to higher targeted impressions, better performance, better costs, better acquisition, better growth, better content, and ultimately better revenue.

Back to the cooking analogy. Think of an Integrated Digital Agency like a “catering” agency. They employ multiple cooks and bakers who own their skills but are working toward the same goal. They share a common purpose and philosophy. Their processes are consistent. They put the most successful, efficient, and meaningful plans together to help the client succeed. All the expertise is in one place, 20 years of it. Through better efficiency and accountability, brands reap the rewards of increased ROI and less wasted impressions, dollars, and resources. 

Looking for the right integrated agency? Rareview is a “catering” agency based in Irvine, California, with offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Texas. Our core services consist of Design, Marketing, Engineering, and Media. We’re not a jack of all trades. We’re precision artists who have mastered our craft.