Well, it’s happened.  The analytics company is “in bed” with the “big agency.”  Who’s looking out for the client?  Almost 10y ago I led a team to build the first ever (that we knew of) metrics system that delivered behavior based targeting as well as analytics for one of our clients.  The client asked, “why should I trust your numbers,” and we used a 3rd party to validate our results for them.  Now, the 3rd party is just another shill for the agency… Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it,… and in the case of client’s demanding lower fees and more services, this is the kind of thing that happens.

• 24/7 Real Media – A Digital Media Company
• Blast Radius – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Brierley+Partners – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Burson-Marsteller – PR & Public Affairs
• CommonHealth – Healthcare Communications
• digital@JWT – J. Walter Thompson’s Digital Advertising & Marketing Group
• G2 – Direct, Digital, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Grey – Advertising
• Hill & Knowlton – PR & Public Affairs
• JWT – J. Walter Thompson – Advertising
• Kang & Lee Advertising – Demographic Marketing
• KnowledgeBase Marketing – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Landor Associates – Brand Identity
• Marsteller – Advertising, Corporate & B2B
• Mediaedge:cia – Media Management
• MindShare – Media Management
• Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide – Advertising
• OgilvyOne Worldwide – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Studiocom – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Sudler & Hennessey – Healthcare Communications
• Team Detroit – A "blended" shop consisting of teams from Y&R, JWT, & O&M to service Ford‘s brands
• VML – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Wunderman – Direct, digital, promotion & relationship marketing
• Y&R – Advertising
• Young & Rubicam Brands – Advertising; Branding & identity ;
  Direct, Digital, Promotion & Relationship Marketing; Healthcare Communications; PR & Public Affairs

Sorry about the long list, but I sort of took a walk down memory lane… I’ve worked for the WPP companies in the past and know people at most, if not all, of the agencies above.  Read my commentary after the break about why I think this is HORRIBLE for marketers…

So, back to the question… is the good for marketers?  Well, media
companies have sort of been doing stuff like this for years, buying
"blocks" of time for their client during the "upfronts," etc….  This, however, in my view, goes FAR beyond those "upfront" buys.  We now have a media company providing a toolkit into ITS platform only and partnering with a HUGE holding company to push that toolkit down stream to the individual media planning and buying agencies.  The agencies just became incentivized to do business with Yahoo!’s properties and not Google‘s and other’s properties.  The interesting conflict here is that some of the WPP brands represent the MSN group, and other Microsoft brands, so it’ll be interesting to see how this "plays out," on the ground with the individual agencies.  In the past, when WPP has "pushed" things like this down to the individual agencies it has been done as effectively as possible, the Team Detroit group, above, is an example where a client wanted to unify their business systems and WPP "merged" three large agencies into a single entity and LOTS of people on the business side of those agencies were asked to "leave the building."