Big brands start auditing the media auditors
Big brands are realising that audits of digital media spend are not up to scratch. Price comparison attempts in a real time digital environment don’t cut it and the smart ones have started auditing the auditors. (Digiday)
Key takeouts:
- Auditors’ models tend to be based on pool benchmarking or value tracking. But the metrics, essentially price comparison, are increasingly outdated and largely invalid.
- Brands including Heineken, Deutsche Telecom, Freesat have hired firms or created auditing consortia to take different auditing approaches – they don’t want media pitches being decided on ‘legacy’ methods.
- Auditors are scrambling to retool, but advertisers unimpressed: “Auditing as we know it is dead and will be replaced with effectiveness modelling,” said one.
- WPP refusing data requests by Accenture, reportedly due to conflict of interest concerns.
As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Nowadays people know the price of everything but the value of nothing”. Auditors risk falling into that bracket. Media agencies that provide value beyond scale discounts should welcome the fact marketers are starting to think more strategically. In a world where scale is ubiquitous, how does reach compare against quality, or viewability? What is the value of transparency? It seems laughable that the binary approach taken by many auditors is only now being seriously questioned. In the auditors’ defence, how do they compare other metrics without a yardstick? Perhaps that’s something for the ANA, IAB and others to start developing.
