ExchangeWire sources musings on the potential implications of ad tech sales teams attempting to bypass media agencies, and the potential implications it can have on the dynamics of the market.

The past couple of years have seen a common trend emerge among digital media sales teams who do not feel they are getting enough attention from media agencies and that is ‘going client direct’.

Back in the pre-digital marketing age, you would rarely see this. Yes, you would have tenacious salesman knocking down the doors of the big TV spenders, but ultimately the agency had a much greater power because they garnered so much spend (remember trading used to be more about ‘how big is your spend?’, rather than a ‘how custom is your bidder?’…).

There is a land grab in the programmatic space happening right now and that is to become the go-to solution for an advertiser’s programmatic needs. Many fear that if they don’t make the ‘client direct’ play now then they will never get a shot of increasing budgets, particularly in light of the growth that agency trading desks are seeing.

Proof? Look through the RocketFuel, Google, Criteo and Quantcast jobs boards, lots of ‘direct to client’ roles are on offer.

The interesting thing about this is that many sales teams are not ‘marketing first’ people, they are ‘sales first’. Take a look at some of the biggest sales teams driving business development for media vendors at present, have many of them helped devise a multi-million pound digital strategy for a client?

What sort of tactics are the sales teams deploying when discussing their solution to an advertiser? They are stating that the agency isn’t carrying out due-diligence across their media buying, isn’t communicating with them regularly enough, and that they do not have a robust strategy in place.

The knock-on effect of this is that advertisers get concerned, put more pressure on their agencies, and agencies then react by scorning against the solution that went direct to their advertiser – a beautifully vicious circle.

The underlying problem is that the vendors do not understand how agencies work and thus do not value their contribution. Agencies in recent times have been trying to bring the vendors closer to their business; lunch & learns, workshops, surgeries, etc. Yet the media vendors don’t get tasked on these, they get tasked on the amount of revenue they can bring in.

Can any vendor win by taking this direct to client approach in 2014? Those that employ marketing and advertising talent can, but the others may struggle outside of Google. Time will tell.