Earlier this month, during the Agency-Only Day at the iMedia Agency Summit, I gave a presentation on agency automation and streamlining the media planning process.

Media planning is a complicated and expensive process still done manually at most agencies. It’s a process that’s clearly ripe for automation and the seventy media executives in the room were all in vigorous agreement that modern media planning tools can bring huge productivity benefits.

So, I was feeling great about my presentation because it clearly resonated with this group of experts.

Do We Really Want to be More Productive?

However, at the end of my presentation, one digital media veteran who will remain anonymous raised his hand and said, “There’s an elephant in this room. I’m going to ask the question that everyone is thinking but is afraid to ask: do we really want to be more productive? After all, we get paid for our time and the slower we work the more we get paid.”

He was talking about the standard practice of “cost plus” billing: charging your client your team’s all-in labor costs plus a modest profit margin. Despite scoring lowest on the Grossman Grid of agency compensation alternatives, the 4A’s reports that time-based “cost plus” is the leading media agency pricing method today; 91% of proposals are priced this way.

What is Cost Plus Billing?

In days past, media agencies got paid a fixed commission on the media they purchased on behalf of their clients. However, the commission model broke down with the advent of digital media because of its extra responsibilities and complexities: optimization, reporting, reconciliations, etc. The typical commission did not cover the cost of digital media buying and was unprofitable for the agency.

Instead of fixing the root cause by streamlining operations, many agencies treated the symptoms by switching from commissions to cost plus pricing. Now these agencies are addicted to charging for their time and have a negative incentive to invest in automation to streamline their operations.

Eliminating “Grunt Work” from Media Buying

My on the spot answer to the Elephant in the Room Question was that by eliminating the “grunt work” these same resources can be re-deployed to higher value activities. Instead of copying and pasting 600 placements from Microsoft Excel into an ad server, your employees can spend time on media strategy, negotiations, and client consulting. The agency could bill higher rates for these high-value activities.

Everybody would be happy, right? Employees would be happier with more meaningful work. Agencies would increase profitability. Clients would get better results.

Automating Media Buying is Scary

Later that day at the cocktail hour, I met up with the person who asked the Elephant in the Room Question. He said my answer is a nice bedtime story, but the reality is that automation is scary because it threatens revenue streams and people’s jobs.

Guess what? That is completely true.

If you work at an agency and spend more than 50% of your time doing things that are really boring (copying and pasting to create multiple spreadsheets), or really repetitive (typing fields from a spreadsheet into fields in an ad server’s UI), or really pedantic (pulling out monthly delivery numbers from a media plan, so you can reconcile billing for a client), then your job is in danger. However, if you are really good at working with clients or doing media strategy and analysis, then your job is not only safe but you’re in a great position for a promotion when your grunt work is automated.

The Elephant in the Room

David Kenny once remarked that “if you are using people to do the work of machines, you are already irrelevant.” He was comparing what is was like running Akamai, which had a lot of computers and relatively few people , to an ad agency, whose “inventory goes down the elevator every night,” as another David (Ogilvy) once said. In the end, computers always win the low-value, repetitive tasks, whether it’s welding bolts onto a car—or trafficking ad tags.

The question agencies have to ask themselves is, “will my clients continue to pay me to do this kind of work?” That’s the real Elephant in the Room.