Winning new business for media agencies starts with the advertiser’s RFP. But, not every RFP fully captures what the advertiser’s needs are. Some miss the current state of technology while others seem to have that new shiny object syndrome – use of the latest tech whether it fits or not. Getting the media agency/advertiser relationship right, starts with the advertiser’s RFP questions and how media agencies answer them.
Imagine if question #7 in the RFP document asks, “How does the media agency propose campaign effectiveness measurement?” It’s a question worth 10% of the overall grade, and is connected to further questions in the RFP about use of technology, privacy management and collaboration with other agencies – adding up to about 50% of the content in the pitch document.
Devon MacDonald, president of Cairns Oneil, says, “This is my favourite question from advertisers. It lets us get into a discussion about the true ROI of media and how to get there. Our planning process sets campaign measurements up front and identifies all of the data points needed to deliver quantifiable business results. Uniquely, our transparent approach means we expose all media costs and tech fees to clients, so they know exactly what they’re buying. We then use our data warehouse and data processing tools to ingest client data like sales, leads, traffic and more. Combining these media performance and business results in our data visualization tool easily allows us to clearly show campaign effectiveness.”
The media budget is often the marketer’s largest line item. As such it has a massive impact on the direction of the company, not just revenue and profit but also how bumpy the road is that gets you there, so it is critical that advertisers and agencies define what they mean by effectiveness so there is a fit with the prospective advertiser on what success looks like over the years the working relationship.
Pitch consultants help ensure the right fit between the advertiser and agency and have clients focus on areas where transparency is critical and the technologies that should be included in overheads. Their job is to help advertisers define their needs, to evaluate agencies and get the relationship off to healthy start.
“Advertisers looking to hire pitch consultants should review the consultant’s expertise in martech platforms, media planning, buying and measurement and their ability to capture best terms within a contract,” says Chris Williams, CMO at Arima Data. “There has been a massive change in the martech landscape, which provides collaboration space. When agencies are smart about their technology choices, they bring enormous value to prospective clients.
Williams says, “With the right technology, we can provide more insight, develop better media strategies within an efficient scope of work tailored to advertiser’s needs. As media has become more complicated and more fragmented, better martech allows our clients to operate more efficiently. You manage what you measure but how you measure determines if managing has any effect at all.”
Chris Herlihey, head of Insights, IPG Mediabrands, says, “The effectiveness of the campaigns that we run can be measured through a variety of techniques. Two of the most common are brand lift studies and marketing mix models. Brand lift studies measure the impact of the campaign on key brand metrics like awareness, consideration, and purchase intent. You can either survey consumers pre- and post-campaign or survey exposed/unexposed groups of respondents, and then comparing the differences between the two groups. Marketing mix models, or MMMs, are an analysis of the lift in a key performance indicator over time, such as sales, and attributing differences to various elements of the campaign and other marketing activities.”
Scott Stewart, general manager of Glassroom says that more and more, accountability to ad spend is becoming a central question in the RFP process. “Today’s media agency needs to be able to demonstrate value beyond just rate, fee incentive or strategy and this requires having the analytics infrastructure and modelling capacities to valuate return on ad spending and draw a clear and visible linkage between ad dollars spent and transactions created.”
He says when live marketing mix models (MMMs) are used, they become a collaboration point between agency and advertiser providing a shared understanding of what is working. The agency uses the reporting to optimize media spend and the advertiser generate incremental business at the right ROAS to achieve profit without overloading the amount of staff working on the account. These reports are critical to the health of the relationship.
In the past, Stewart says, marketing models were cost prohibitive for most advertisers but in today’s MMMs, agencies can not only fully integrate the data sets used to measure and buy media but also optimize media channel selection against the business results that are being measured. “The ability to model the impact of media spend on sales, and over long periods of time is allowing us to analyze not only the impact of media spend on a tangible business result and move away from hypothesis-based ROI to actualized ROAS.”
