Hasta La Creative!

It was the late 2000s, and advertising agencies had spied their next great growth area: selling clients on an array of in-house audience-buying technologies, including their own online ad networks and exchanges. Agencies procured those technologies in a variety of ways. Some came through acquisitions, other services were homegrown. But a majority of the platforms many agencies used were licensed from third-party vendors.

And then a funny thing happened. Some of those vendors realized they didn’t really need the agencies.

Many venture-backed ad-tech companies that originated as agency vendors are increasingly going directly to marketers and offering them cheaper ways to implement their technology. A combination of factors — ad-tech companies wanting their own client rosters and marketers wanting to control their own data and lower costs, among them — has spurred the movement. And several big marketers have bought in. Procter & Gamble and Kellogg, for example, have set up trading operations, in part to exert more control over their own data.

Continue reading at AdAge.com