Last Thursday I was in San Francisco speaking at a SFBIG (San Francisco Bay Interactive Group) event entitled, “With the developments in technology, will media planners be obsolete in 10 years?”.  I Twittered a bit about it last week (follow me here), but I thought it deserved some more discussion.

Although Balihoo is a technology provider to this industry, my position on the topic was a solid “NO”.  I believe that the operative word from a technology standpoint should be “streamline” versus “automate”.  I frankly believe there is significant opportunity to streamline the workflow in the media buying and planning industry, allowing both sides of the equation (buyer and sellers) to focus less on administrative tasks and more on strategic efforts.  By focusing on this “streamlining” concept, I believe the industry can be in a much better position to deal with massive fragmentation, increased targeting requirements and pricing pressure driven by clients. 

I also believe that technology companies and service providers that look to drive “automation” in the industry are damaging the online advertising industry as a whole.  We have a significant challenge in front of us to demonstrate the value of online advertising beyond pure Direct Response metrics, online can and does provide significant value to the brand/awareness advertiser and pure metric-based automation hampers that objective.  Not that Direct Response and Automation don’t have their place in the industry (they do) but to look at the industry as a whole and drive towards this goal I believe is short-sighted. 

What do you think?