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Why your digital strategy needs an ‘Advertising Architect’

Introducing automation into your organization extends well beyond a binary decision — it is a journey. At Fluency, we believe that a dedicated role, an Advertising Architect, is crucial to managing the initial journey, and refining the overarching possibilities thereafter.

The digital advertising world has gone through a tremendous shift over the last few years. The number of available platforms has grown. The amount of data and customization to leverage has expanded. Meanwhile, consumer behaviors are changing far faster than anyone can make reasonable predictions about. 

For most in this industry, it seems like the technology is now starting to outpace the traditional agency structure. For a time it seemed like the solution was just to simply start hiring — though look at any job board today, and you get the sense that there are more open positions out there than people looking for them. 

The answer, at least the way we see it here at Fluency, isn’t about hiring — it’s about ensuring your organization is identifying and realizing new operational efficiencies, while your existing talent is upskilled to do the things they are good at. That is why you hired them, right? 

Automation is a journey, the Advertising Architect is your guide

At Fluency we believe that embracing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a crucial strategic mechanism as you push to evolve your organization into the future. From exploring new data sets and connections, to updating existing business processes, and again, upskilling your people — the potential benefits cascade across a great deal of your organization. For example, an account manager’s talents can’t really shine if they’re stuck moving things around in a spreadsheet or babysitting ad spend in a campaign manager all day. 

Automation, however, is not a plug-and-play solution. Introducing automation into an organization works best when there’s someone who’s responsible for that transition. Someone who not only intimately knows what automation can do, but also knows what automation can do for that specific company. At Fluency, we call this person an Advertising Architect.

What does an Advertising Architect do? First, they talk to decision-makers at every level — from the associates all the way up to the CEO — to gain a holistic understanding of the organizational strategy, operational goals, processes, and underlying pain points. This helps the Advertising Architect develop an approach that impacts the business from the top level, and driving efficiencies through to benefit everyone, not only those focused on digital advertising.

With that full-stack understanding of how their organization works, and how automation should work for them, the Advertising Architect then shifts to managing their company’s automation journey. That means working closely with teams to help them better utilize the time that automation has given back to them, recognize what their true “human” strengths are and help drive bigger conversations around not just organizational efficiency but also ones of purpose and mission.

Automation is the answer to opening up big questions

It sounds high-minded, but here’s what it could look like in practice. The Advertising Architect first engages the CEO to familiarize themselves with the strategic vision of the company as it relates to products, go-to-market strategy, competitive differentiation, data resources, and other crucial elements. From there, the Ad Architect begins to stitch together a vision that can now connect all of the disparate parts of the organization (ad ops, operations, finance, business units etc.) on the back of automation. Next, they sit down with the COO and CFO to strategize around operational efficiencies and how certain actions will support overall profitability. Further on down the line, the Advertising Architect works with the digital advertising managers and strategists to develop ways in which automation can transform employee capacity and reshape the dynamics of work-life balance. The ecosystem quickly becomes interconnected and supported by a unified Strategy, People, and Technology.

Using Fluency’s RPA software, the Advertising Architect automates away the busywork around things like budget management and insertion orders, and suddenly account managers now have anywhere between 7 to 15 hours of extra time every week. So what’s the best use of all that extra human capacity? 

Maybe you want to differentiate your agency by enabling your account managers to take that time and put it back into more collaboration with their clients. Perhaps you could use this opportunity to rapidly scale your business and take on more clients, confident in the knowledge that with automation, new accounts won’t require a big increase in headcount. Another option? You recognize that the true competitive edge in today’s market is the ability to empower and retain your existing talent…and so you entrust your account managers to decide how best to take advantage of their new bandwidth.

This is the transformative power of automation when managed by an Advertising Architect. It’s not just removing the busywork, but getting your organization to the place where you can have meaningful high-level discussions about the best ways to use your time and talents. 

Learn more about how automation can unlock future success for your organization with Fluency.