Dentsu Aegis Network’s move to bring its UK planning and buying teams back together shows that clients are demanding faster responses to briefs and do not want the disciplines to be separated.
That is according to Graham Brown, director and co-founder of pitch consultancy MediaSense, who said that Dentsu Aegis Network’s changes "make absolute sense as clients require agencies to be more agile and responsive businesses".
He added: "These silos in planning and execution I don’t think work any more. If you are going to act quickly and in real-time, planners need to sit with buyers, and that is the case increasingly. If you institutionalise the silos, you create less flexibility.
"Clients want to be able to act faster, they want greater integration and they want fewer silos."
Euan Jarvie, Dentsu Aegis Network’s UK and Ireland chief executive, told ±±¾©Èü³µpk10 that he wants to create a business that is easier for clients to navigate.
Last month, he announced that the media investment teams that sit under the Amplifi banner will move into agencies, including Carat, Vizeum and Dentsu X. This led to the departure of Amplifi chief executive Pippa Glucklich.
Dentsu Aegis Network, which manages about £1bn a year in media billings in the UK, is also in the process of relocating Amplifi’s programmatic trading team to iProspect to bolster integration and is to consolidate its data and insights M1 team into Dentsu Data Labs.
It will leave Amplifi predominantly focused on supply-side management, overseeing all media owner contracting and negotiation both globally and locally.
Jarvie said: "This is the culmination of what we’ve been working on for six or seven months, and it’s not just Amplifi. We’ve been looking at the entire organisation and streamlining [the operations].
"In the UK and Ireland we’ve listened to clients and intermediaries and they have said it has been difficult to navigate our business. So we’ve been on a mission to streamline and be 100% client serving.
"What happened with part of Amplifi is that the buying was divorced. We looked at how to make Amplifi better and faster for our clients. So we moved them into the planning teams. We’re re-placing people back into the brands."
He added that this is not a "radical" move, but a journey, and described Dentsu Aegis Network as a "planning-led activation business that understands client challenges".
Other media buying groups have been looking to simplify operations.
Group M has dropped its mPlatform brand globally to improve "consistency".
The search, social and programmatic team are becoming part of a shared services division and the technology innovation team is joining a separate unit.
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