Goodbye Social Media Agency? Hello UX Consultants…

Although the South African digital marketing and advertising landscape is vastly different to that of the U.K. and Europe, we are likely to mirror some of the key trends in the coming several years. Justin Spratt, Chief Growth Officer at Quirk, highlights some of the major shifts taking place in the U.K. digital marketing sphere…

“We’re seeing an increase in programmatic buying, which basically requires less human intervention in the planning, and tries to get the most cost effective ad unit – usually through some kind of digital buying mechanism,” he explains.

In addition, Spratt says social media is being pulled out of many of the digital agencies and ‘pulled up in-house’.

“So, social media as a standalone play seems as if it won’t be a long-term strategy for most agencies,” he adds. “I think that’s good for above-the-line agencies that have been struggling to get some of that digital budget…”

Staying within social media, Spratt says there is increasing collaboration between publishers and platforms – ‘so the storytelling is starting to go into the TV ad or onto the billboard, and often it’s being led by a social conversation.’

He cites the example of Truffle Pig, a joint content marketing venture between WPP, DailyMail and Snapchat. The venture aims to combine the best of global agency, newsroom and social media talent and expertise.

“You’re getting long-form copywriters working with, in a sense, media buyers and planners – and we see a lot of business coming there,” says Spratt. “A brand will start creating a lot of this content and place it almost like an advertorial, but we’re starting to see very rich and interesting stories around that content – that is indirectly or loosely coupled to a brand.”

Spratt notes that this trend will likely take a while to impact the local market, as it’s ‘hard to justify those kinds of budgets unless you’ve got tens of millions of eyeballs’ because the production costs are high (over $100,000)…

User/Customer Experience Takes Priority

Another key shift, according to Spratt, is emerging from the lack of dedicated software development houses for brands – and the growing emphasis on the customer journey.

“Brands are now going to software agencies and saying spend less money on the actual build, and spend more money on the user experience,” he explains. “And user experience is now morphing into customer experience – which is the wider set of digital engagement [platforms], from call centers to email, and the digital assets that get you to spend money…”

As a result, this ‘customer experience’ element is starting to take more of the total budget, and therefore the development budget has to become far more cost effective.

He says this trend is also being fueled by the proliferation of tools such as Drupal, which is an open source content management system, and a highly cost effective platform.

“This means that we [agencies] can use license-free software, with enterprise security and architecture (it’s safe) – at ridiculously cost effective prices,” he adds. “If you’re an agency in that space, you can then start bringing in user experience and customer experience consultants, and then put the bigger budget to that.”

Essentially, instead of technology driving what the customer does, this trend flips that, and says ‘what does the customer want to do – and let’s build digital assets that follow their user journey, or their purchase decision path…’

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