Should Your Business Pitch its Media Planning & Buying Account?
23/07/2019 11:40 AM
By Tony Emment
For many agencies, media pitches are the time when they can showcase their best work and demonstrate to prospective clients their best people and creative potential.
What We Think
At 23 Media Audits we work with many “UK Challenger brands”, “SME businesses”, “regional advertisers” and “digital only advertisers”.
Based on our extensive experience we tend to advise our clients that pitching should be the last resort, and only pursued if they have a legitimate reason for doing so such as contract breach, sustained poor performance or a competitor conflict.
In reality pitches are often instigated because a new senior person wants to show authority, or to mirror a sector trend for pitching or even a desire to save money on your advertising. All of which, in our opinion, are not the best reasons for conducting a pitch.
At 23 Media Audits we aim to sit down in advance with our clients and work out a strategy to repair the relationship between agency and client.
We evaluate where they would like to be and how we can achieve their goal by working with client and agency alike to set targets and goals for brand inception through to ROI and the monitoring of pricing and quality.
We are now more than ever auditing the entire “customer journey” rather than merely producing a standard audit check, and this approach embraces all the process stakeholders and focuses the advertiser and agency talent on a full 360-degree model ultimately benefiting the brand.
So, what are we hearing from our clients on why they want to pitch?
1.
Larger Agency = More Media Savings
As we work with growing “UK Challenger brands”, “SME businesses”, “regional advertisers” and “digital only advertisers” the main reason they decide to pitch is their appearance on the radar of larger agencies and the temptation to potentially make instant media savings. However, as we audit the “Customer Journey” it is important to put into context not only the media quality but also the agency personnel and creativity that are added into the mix. Therefore in our opinion, it is not just media price that should dictate a pitch process.
2.
The Move to Digital
With digital now accounting for 54% of media the need for understanding on how to monitor and assess performance has become paramount and many advertisers need guidance on how best to do this. SME businesses and UK challenger brands can steal an advantage on more established brands by ensuring they have the right agencies onboard for their digital buying, as in our experience these brands tend to have stronger in-house metrics for monitoring ROI due to their size and with our guidance can partner with the right agency to further develop the brand within the digital environment.
3.
Digital Transparency
With the growth of buying platforms across agency trading desks and programmatic, there is a burgeoning need for clients to not only see how their money is spent but also how it actually performs across an often misunderstood area. This means they need help to work out a set of bespoke guidelines for their business covering all aspects of digital, enabling them to distil the reality from the perception. At 23 Media Audits we can advise what you need to be asking your agency when it comes to digital awareness.
4.
Contract Restrictions
Even with the explosive growth of digital in the media mix many advertisers contracts are still not annually reviewed and subsequently amended in order to take in the advancements of digital buying. As a result many brands are finding they have restricted access to their bought media making it impossible to fully audit the agency claims.
These are just a selection of the reasons we have encountered for why advertisers are looking to review their media but take note, pitches are expensive and time consuming and before embarking on the process you must ask your organisation these three key questions:
- What do we want to achieve by pitching?
- Where do we want to be post pitch?
- Do you fully understand the demands on your time and your agency?
Want to know how the pitch management process works? Read The Beginner’s Guide to Pitch Management next.