The advertising industry has long had a complicated relationship with the phrase "we're not trying to replace anyone." It is the kind of assurance that tends to precede doing exactly that, or at least trying to.
Stagwell, the holding company assembled by Mark Penn from the parts of MDC Partners and his own digital-first agencies, has introduced a new product called Curate, which is meant to give the company more control over how its clients' programmatic advertising dollars are spent. Matt Adams, the global chief executive of Stagwell Media Platform, insists that the offering is not intended to supplant the demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms that have come to dominate digital advertising infrastructure.
"There's so much inventory that is still terribly executed within the programmatic ecosystem," Mr. Adams said in an interview with Digiday. "We need to eradicate that from our client's media spend."
The distinction Stagwell is drawing — between owning the supply chain and merely exerting more influence over it — is one that would have been familiar to agency executives a generation ago, back when the question was whether to bring media buying in-house at all. Now the debate has moved several layers deeper into the plumbing. (The plumbing, it turns out, is where the money is.)
Mr. Adams was careful to acknowledge the limits of agency ambition in this area. Building technology that outperforms Google or The Trade Desk, he said, would be "a naive ambition." What agencies can do, in his view, is occupy the space between client and platform more assertively, curating supply rather than simply purchasing it.
"The cream will rise to the top," Mr. Adams said. "Those that are in the middle of the middle will potentially, sadly fall to the bottom."
Whether Stagwell's new offering represents a genuine shift in leverage or simply a new line item on the holding company's capability deck remains to be seen. But the desire to control more of the transaction — expressed with appropriate modesty, of course — is unlikely to fade anytime soon.
Original story published in Digiday: "Stagwell’s Curate launch puts agencies’ ad tech ambitions in focus", by Kimeko McCoy