“If you’re you’re getting something off the shelf, you’re also getting the same data set your competitors might be getting.”

Erin Matts, North American CEO at Annalect, Demystifying Agency Data Platforms

The data platform tech behind agencies is pretty much the same: they use the same APIs as any other agency, same tech stack, and even the same engineers.

And they are also very sticky: once you integrate your campaigns’ data with an agency’s data platform, it will very hard to port the data over your platform.

There are off the shell data pipelines like AWS Glue you can use and take the data collection capabilities in-house. Agencies will have to offer more than a data platform to provide value: they have to develop automation tools and industry/channel-specific optimization algorithms that don’t need to store your data but used it to produce results.

Leo Celis