What are the best companies to hire for internet advertising?

What companies have attempted to do automated internet advertising in-house, and when does it become worth it?

• Companies like Nanigans (and there are many others) will essentially manage all Facebook advertising campaigns for you.  The facebook ads API allows for anyone, in theory at least, to replicate this process.  At what level of advertising spending does it make sense to try and automate campaigns in-house (this can be on Facebook or on another advertising platform)?  Perspectives I care about include in terms of cost savings (your ad partner charges you a commission), increased efficiency (you can do a better job than your ad partner), maintaining proprietary data in-house, developing the relevant expertise in-house.

• Answer:

  To your specific point about Nanigans, one of the reasons they seem to succeed with direct business (aka bringing this stuff "in-house") is that the business objective they serve best is the eCommerce one. Here the output is fairly obvious: you want to acquire customers that are worth more than the cost to acquire them (I'm saying it's easy, Nanigans does a good job with a challenging task, I'm saying it's fairly obvious). Most direct plays are built on this construct. If you are making more than your are spending, you are winning. This is potentially doable to take in-house and the major variable is the scope of the project. Are you a flash deal site? OK. Do you have thousands of products (like Target)? Now we're talking about a different level problem. Depending on how intense the marketing mechanisms are, you could take it in house or you could rely on someone who is going to manage it on the nights and weekends for you, which you almost certainly don't want to deal with (even with really good automation this will happen). But what if you are a large CPG who doesn't really do online sales? What if you are a company launching a new product? What if your product is a TV show? For these things, many brands want to do very complicated engagements surrounding different metrics, especially those further up the funnel. Other clients want more information about their audiences in addition to performance. These campaigns tend to need a lot of planning and creative work and campaign creation (not FB campaign, more like "initiative" creation). This is when a great agency shines and direct work becomes simply too labor intensive, both in terms of planning the campaign, buying it across several media formats, measuring it appropriately, and executing it constantly throughout its lifetime.