Pre-campaign audits may well be an audit too far

by Colin Grimshaw Media Week 13-May-08, 07:30

It is well known to all but the idiotically gullible that there is much murkiness in the world of media trading. That's why media auditing became such a popular service for advertisers.

The massaging of an agency's media book, such that the biggest discounts obtained from media owners are passed onto the agency's biggest spending clients, or new clients, or those about to review their business, to the disadvantage of all the agency's other clients, is well known. Some of these discounts aren't passed on to any clients.

So, most reasonable media buyers have come to accept the auditing of a client's campaign to ensure that it represents decent value as good practice and the process is less confrontational than it once was. Others must have something to hide.

That said, the lack of trust it implies still rankles. And this simmering disquiet has risen to boiling point with the news that Billetts plans to offer a pre-campaign audit to clients, raising the spectre of accountants with calculators standing over media planners and critiquing their work before its results are known.

The reasons why this is absurd are too many to list here. For starters, for it to be meaningful would require the recreation of an agency integrated planning operation within Billetts, with the same knowledge of the client's marketing strategy and objectives, making the service so costly that no client could afford it.

More tellingly, it would depress creativity in planning as pressured planners revert to tried and tested channels where it is easy to predict the return on investment, eliminating any possibility of improving that ROI through innovation.

Billetts may see it as a much-needed new revenue channel, but can this really be the case? If the campaign has been audited at the planning stage, why would clients want to pay again to have it audited post-execution?

There is much positive change that companies, such as Billetts, can help initiate in media planning and buying. There is an urgent need for a more relevant demography than ABC1s, and a way of measuring multiple and simultaneous consumption of media and its effects on a campaign.

Such improvements would be much more valuable to clients than auditors second-guessing their agency's media strategy.