'This is what the future is going to be': The CMO of JPMorgan Chase explains why she's spending more time with Adobe than ad agencies

Getty/John Lamparski

• JPMorgan Chase CMO Kristin Lemkau manages a whopping $5 billion marketing budget.
• But she's wary of spending that on ad agencies, particularly agencies that buy media on behalf of brands.
• In an interview with Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget, she questioned the long-term sustainability of today's ad agency model, saying that it was challenged.
• She also challenged the ad agency holding company structure, questioning whether it was as valuable for the client as it is for the shareholder.

Brands are hiring their own data scientists and brand safety officers, bringing creative in-house and even building their own technology stacks.

That's threatening the existence of ad agencies, JPMorgan Chase's chief marketing officer Kristin Lemkau told Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget in a recent interview. And she doesn't know if they will survive.

"Publishers have in-house agencies, brands have in-house agencies. What can they (agencies) do that will continue to provide value for the marketer in a meaningful way that we can't ourselves?" she asked. "Every publisher I've spoken to, and every CMO I've spoken to, says that they would prefer that more people get out of the middle."

Specifically, Lemkau, who oversees a whopping $5 billion ad budget, questioned media-buying agencies, that procure the space for ads to run on the internet, TV and other mediums. JPMorgan Chase, among other brands including Verizon and Pernod Ricard, has brought its data and programmatic advertising in-house.

"I do think creatively agencies will always have a role to play, because they will see different perspectives, they will see different brands," she said. "On the media buying side, I think they may struggle more."

That's because brands that have been burned by the murkiness of digital media and issues of fraud, viewability and transparency, have stepped up and started to take matters into their own hands. They are trying hard to come up to speed and learn it all quickly, she said.

"We are spending more time with Salesforce, Adobe and Pega and some tech vendors than we are traditional agencies, because this is what the future is going to be," she said. "Particularly if you are a company that has data and customers entrust you with data."

JPMorgan Chase has also been beefing up its internal advertising technology team. The team has a chief technology officer, a product owner, a program manager, as well as different sets of teams leading different integration points, according to Lemkau.

"I talk to my chief technology officer probably more than anybody else who works for me," she said. "Most marketers today will say this is the thing they spend the most time on that they understand the least."

Lemkau also questioned the ad agency holding company structure as it currently exists.

"I think we're all looking and seeing what's the value of the holding company structure?" she said. "Is it as valuable for the client as it is for the shareholder? I don't know."