Digital ad spend continues to rise reliably, but which of the major players will come out on top remains unclear. The result for agencies? A push-pull between search and social teams.
In the highly competitive – and lucrative – world of digital advertising, big-name competitors circle each other like piranhas.
Google and Meta have long been dominant in the sector. But with Amazon upping its ad-serving efforts, and TikTok making billions from advertising, the share of the two big players is diminishing. Meanwhile, Reddit is refining its ad strategy and Snapchat has posted recent promising results following an overhaul of its ad business.
All this while the industry as a whole is still recovering from the difficult days of 2022, when tech companies laid off thousands of employees amid high inflation and overlapping cost-of-living and supply chain crises.
Against this backdrop, there’s still plenty of competition at the top between Google and Meta. At a recent roundtable with members of The Drum Network, media experts told us that the battle between the two is hotting up. Claire Stanley-Manock, paid media director at Connective3, argues that there’s a major play afoot by Google, for Meta’s ad revenues. “Something that has been on my mind a lot is Google‘s play for the Meta budget,” she says. “And how demand gen and YouTube, but specifically demand gen, are set up to make it as easy as possible to invest Meta’s budget into Google.”
Stanley-Manock further explains: “Google is making a massive play. Not only just to steal Meta’s budget, but to steal TikTok’s, Reddit’s – there‘s so much advancement happening on Reddit and making it so much easier for advertisers to really cut through in a native way – Pinterest as well. And Google is really collating that all in. It‘s going to be interesting to see how that platform evolves over the next six months.”
Who leads?
These battles are ever-present, and they make for interesting internal dynamics for the agencies making and buying ads for the tech giants. Often, Meta is the purview of social teams; Google of search teams. So, if Google succeeds in taking spend from Meta, should search lead social – or should social lead search? And how can an agency correctly maintain a well-calibrated staff during this time of shifting markets?
Amy Stamper, head of paid social at Impression, says this issue of team structuring is a very real concern. “There’s a client workload element to how teams are structured. If there‘s a gray area, which there currently is, then it‘s whoever can make the best case. Currently (at Impression anyway), we have relatively few people who are genuinely skilled in both areas. So how do we hire for that? Who manages those people?”
Stamper goes on: “If you‘ve got a very heavily social-focused team or a PPC-focused team, how do we give them credit for the work that they‘re doing? Who makes the decisions about audiences and creative? I think that opens up a can of worms, but I think it‘s definitely something that we need to be talking about. To be honest, I don‘t think many agencies are nailing it at the moment.”
Natalie Patel, managing director at Found, says further pressure is being put on this dynamic by automation. “The machines are only going to get better. And yes, we need to make sure that the data going into the machines is as good as it can be. But we need to use our time and our expertise to take our clients to the next level from an innovation perspective. A lot of that sits around creative, influencer content, demand gen, and all the different platforms that are available at our fingertips.
“We‘re now morphing into being media planners and media buyers, in terms of ‘where‘s the best bet to put our budget to capture that audience?’ And ultimately get that conversion across the line.”
Merging roles
Nitin Sinha, head of paid media at Laundry Service, explains how the need for people who are both strategic and creative enough to ‘power the buys’ has raised important questions within his agency. “How do we maybe think about restructuring the team? How do we recruit for this type of talent? How do we train the existing talent to be able to bridge that gap? Because that is going to be the most important distinction, at least for us.”
For Sinha, the upshot is that marketers have to pay close attention to what they’re spending, where – and not just take the major platforms’ word for it. “While the platforms are getting better and better, they do sometimes indirectly start taking you as an advertiser in the wrong direction. Because the platforms are always going to, by default, try to find the easiest-to-convert people. And as an advertiser, as a business, finding those people, by itself, is really tempting, because you realize it‘s going to look good, and your conversion rates are going to look good. But it might not be what‘s right for the business…. So one of the things that we‘re pushing, and trying to break the habits with our team around, is to stop always opting for the easiest-to-convert audience.”
Stelios Pardalakis, chief executive of Stellar Search, agrees that it’s crucial to challenge teams always to innovate. “We‘re trying to change the mindset. And it‘s very, very difficult because you‘re used to using budget, a target, and return on investment. So we’re helping the team to think outside the box and be more creative, with the support of the client.”
Let’s go outside?
Charlotte Dimopolous, former head of technical at AgencyUK, says that agencies should regularly holds workshops to see which client needs can be met in-house, and which need to be sought outside. “Rather than outsourcing we will regularly have team brainstorms to identify what is possible, what it looks like with the strategy, and how much we can make a full 360 funnel,” she explains.
“Then we can bring in paid media, we can bring in my team with tech for reporting. But really getting together on a monthly basis and going through client clinics, identifying core objectives and core trends and how we can match the two has been working quite well, because it is such a fast-paced industry.”
Gina Wisse, biddable associate director at Search Laboratory, says it’s these questions that help agencies remember their core focus and purpose. “I think that really is where we come in as agencies, isn‘t it? Around understanding, truly, where is our audience and knowing what‘s changing all the time. Because I think with Google’s strategy and approach, it makes it really easy for, let‘s say, in-house advertisers to go, ‘Oh, if I just press this button, I‘ll get loads of results. And I‘m still being creative because I‘m using an image.’”