Rethinking the Profession Formerly Known as Advertising: How Data Science Is Disrupting the Work of Agencies

Speaker's Box invites academics and practitioners to identify potential areas of research affecting marketing and advertising. Its intention is to bridge the gap between the length of time it takes to produce rigorous work and the acceleration of change within practice. With this contribution, John Deighton shows how data technology sits within its industry, which he defines as the "commercial Internet." He depicts this industry as a supply chain and shows how a small number of firms have defied the chain metaphor to integrate all the way from data source to data application. These integrators, he argues, are titans in a battle to create the dominant design for a platform on which all marketing will be practiced. But, he asks, who will do the work of marketing? Will it be done by an evolved version of the advertising agency; will it be institutionalized into the culture of data science; or will it not be professionalized at all but rather defer to one or more standard-setting industrialists, perhaps Google or Amazon?