The London-based global media investment and agency review firm, Ebiquity, currently managing the NSW Government’s media contract review, has flagged concerns for any surge in agency reviews by blue chips as peak Covid restrictions ease. 

ANZ Managing Director Peter Cornelius told Mi3 there were clear signs that agency talent and resources were stretched through Covid and had not recovered, resulting in an unusual level of preparedness from agencies to turn down involvement in review processes. He said it was partly linked to protecting staff burnout and the drag a review puts on already stretched resources. Equally, he said marketing teams were stretched and reviews were time and resource-sapping distractions.

The media and agency sectors have a love-hate relationship with Ebiquity, the market leader locally in what once was called media auditing. Historically, Ebiquity and the companies it acquired here, including Faulkner Media, benchmarked media and agency performance from a blind pool of blue chip advertiser budgets that focused on price and less on media effectiveness. It led to all manner of gaming by agencies to “beat the pool” as advertisers and procurement teams obsessed mostly about media cost performance.

Most of the focus for decades was on the TV sector although Ebiquity has now moved into the murkier world of digital media performance with more effort on qualitative analysis for media and advertising efficacy.

“Part of the challenge after the past two years is marketers themselves have been running at a million miles an hour,” Cornelius said. “Agency reviews are really time-consuming projects to undertake. Our general recommendation is unless there’s a really good reason to review, let the market settle down for a time before you assess agency performance in the cold light of day. 

“The market has been extremely buoyant in the past 12 months and most agencies, the whole industry, really, is running pretty damn hard.”

In this environment, Cornelius said, he “wasn’t surprised” that more agencies were “pushing back on some of those processes".

“What we’ve seen and we’re aware of is some agencies declining to participate in a review, which I’ve really never seen in the past. They either don’t feel they have a reasonable chance of winning or they’re so under the pump they don’t want to put their people through a review process when they’re running so hard with normal workloads.”

Cornelius, a former media agency CEO, said adland used to have new business teams and specialist teams for reviews. “No-one has them anymore, no-one can afford them,” he said. “You have to manage that process on top of normal loads.”

Still, Ebiquity is investing in agency review capabilities after global CEO Nick Waters announced two acquisitions three weeks ago in Stockholm-based global consulting firm MediaPath and US-based “forensic media auditor”, MMi. 

Waters, who led Aegis’ acquisition of Harold Mitchell’s Mitchell Media in Australia more than a decade ago, and ran Dentsu’s APAC media unit after it acquired Aegis and Mitchell, knows how all the agency tactics work and where the bodies are buried.

Waters was the regional boss of Dentsu Aegis Network’s former ANZ CEO Simon Ryan before he resigned under pressure to deliver results for the global group which ultimately became the catalyst for DAN’s troubles here in recent years.