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Offsetting Marketing Budget Reductions

30 Dec

budget cut“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” ~  Warren Buffett

If you’re like many marketers, 2023 budgets have either been frozen at last year’s level or reduced in light of what many organizations believe will be a soft economy in the coming year. That said, company expectations relating to brand development, customer acquisition and revenue generation goals can seem daunting.

The good news is that there are five key steps that can be taken to offset budget reductions and refuel marketing budgets:

  1. Review and revise annual Scopes of Work – Working in conjunction with your agency partners, representatives from the marketing and procurement teams should reassess project deliverables relative to approved spend levels and make the requisite adjustments. Focusing the extended team’s efforts on strategies and tactics that are critical to the attainment of the organization’s core business goals are the top priority. Out-of-scope work should be prohibited and or at a minimum, tightly controlled and non-essential programs shelved until business conditions improve and or additional marketing funds are allocated.
  2. Evaluate and improve Client/ Agency work processes – The opportunity for efficiency gains in this area are numerous, particularly in longer term relationships where too often bad habits, that drive costs up or limit market timing opportunities have become status quo. Key areas to review include the creative and media briefing and client-side approval processes. Ineffective and or inefficient approaches to these basic tasks waste time and increase project costs. Conversely, tightening brief development and streamlining the approval process can reduce fees associated with agency rework costs and decrease the time required to execute certain tasks.
  3. Right size your agency network – Over time, an organization’s roster of agency partners can swell to unwieldly levels, leading to management challenges, overlapping resources and duplicative costs. Internally reviewing each agencies roles and responsibilities to identify opportunities for focusing each agencies resource offering and reducing overlap. Longer term, consider the creation of broadcast and digital production and content curation and production centers of excellence, consolidating activities in this area to generate scale economies and reduce agency fee outlays. Additionally, work with your agency partners to identify opportunities to remove links from the marketing/ advertising supply chain. In short, reduce the number of intermediaries involved in the production, placement, and trafficking of your advertising to reduce unnecessary fees and costs.
  4. Review agency financial management practices and contract compliance – Auditing agency compliance and financial stewardship can lead to the identification of billing errors, earned but unprocessed credits, unbilled media balances that should be returned, the application of unauthorized mark-ups and agency time-of-staff under deliveries that could result in financial recoveries. Additionally, the independent review of project management, job initiation and reconciliation processes can lead to cost avoidance strategies that result in meaningful savings.
  5. Reconsider the “Estimated Billing” process – As interest rates have increased, so too has a company’s cost-of-capital. One key tenet of any organization’s treasury management practice is to retain control of its money for as long as possible. However, when it comes to advertising outlays, the industry tends to work on an “estimated billing” process where each agency bills for work to be done, services to be procured or media to be purchased upon approval, with the pledge to reconcile estimated costs to actual once a job has closed or a campaign completed. Unfortunately, this results in an advertiser’s funds being held and managed by others, with no economic benefit (e.g., interest income) and some level of financial risk. Consider moving to a “final billing” process whereby invoices are submitted by the agency for payment once services have been rendered and third-party costs validated. In turn, advertisers should be prepared to tender payment upon receipt of these invoices, so that none of its agency partners is required to go out-of-pocket to compensate third-party vendors.

Taking some or all of these actions can offset the impact of budget reductions or freezes. As importantly, an open-minded review of a marketer’s partners and processes will generate financial recoveries and future savings that will help refuel and improve their marketing investment.

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Ad Industry: Lack of Transparency Limits Trust

5 Dec

dreamstime_s_38659968“Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” ~ Stephen Covey

The question often asked of senior marketers by their C-suite peers and in turn by marketers of their agency partners is: “Are we getting optimal value in return for our marketing investment?” A simple question, but one that is not easily answered given the breadth and intricacies of an advertisers marketing communications investment.

Let’s face it, with the pervasiveness of non-transparent fees and AVBs throughout the supply chain along with the number of intermediaries involved in service delivery (often without the advertiser’s knowledge) the strains on working ad dollars are many and can be profound. Combine this with the industry’s “estimated billing” methodology where few if any agencies ever provide third-party vendor invoices to support their billing to clients and it is easy to understand the difficulty advertisers have addressing the question of “did we get what we paid for?”

While the challenges to building trust between advertisers and the myriad of suppliers that touch their business are real, the means of addressing this issue is clear… the industry needs to commit itself to providing full transparency at every level.

Marketers will need to take the first step, reviewing all marketing services agency agreements to ensure that there is adequate language granting them audit rights, establishing record retention criteria and extending these guidelines to not just their agencies, but to third and fourth-party vendors. Further language regulating the appointment and monitoring of “interested parties” by their agency partners and limits to the use of principal-based buys must be incorporated into all agreements. Also, clear reporting and invoicing guidelines must be established with each agency partner to provide advertisers with a clear line of sight into the disposition of their marketing spend at each stage of the investment cycle.

Importantly, marketers will need to invoke their audit rights to conduct periodic reviews of agency compliance with these contract terms as well as each agency’s support of their billings to the client. This is a cost of entry for marketers if they’re truly interested in evaluating the efficacy of their marketing investment.

Consider but one aspect of advertising spend, digital media.

  • Digital media represents more than 50% of client ad spend.
  • Programmatic buying represents better than 90% of all digital display ad buying.
  • Publishers only receive 51% of advertiser programmatic ad spend.
  • Costs such as DSP fees, SSP fees and technology costs represent between 15% and 35% of advertisers spend in this area.
  • An “unknown delta” of one-third* of programmatic supply chain costs could not be identified.

*Source: Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and PwC “Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study.” 

While alarming, these statistics may represent a “best case” scenario when one considers the poor visibility that exists into the layers of intermediaries between advertisers and publishers, including but not limited to agencies, DSPs, SSPs, Ad Exchanges and data verification vendors… each charging a fee for their involvement. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA), which earlier this year commissioned a study on programmatic transparency, estimates that of the $200 billion plus in programmatic digital media spend “70% doesn’t reach the end consumer.” Where does it go? According to the ANA “it goes to fraudulent or non-viewable impressions, non-brand-safe placements and unknown allocations, as well as being spent on ad fees.”

Take SSP’s for example, they typically bundle fees with media costs once an auction is won and an impression purchased. Thus, advertiser visibility into SSP take rates, revenue share deals with publishers, margin realization rates and the number of hops is obscured.

We do not want to belabor the point, but similar examples of limited transparency exist across the entirety of the marketing communications supply chain.

In closing, we believe that the notion of trust is certainly attainable, but not until transparency reform becomes a reality for advertisers. Near-term, advertisers have another reason to push for transparency and audit the financial management practices of their agencies… stagnant and or reduced budget are putting pressure on marketers to do more, with less. The knowledge gained, historical dollars recovered and future savings realized from a formal accountability program can help to refuel marketing budgets.

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Super Bowl Advertising: Much Has Changed Since 1967

1 Oct

dreamstime_xs_74069813Fox Broadcasting recently announced that it had sold 95% of its inventory for the 2023 Superbowl. The average rate for a 30-second spot will likely top $7 million.

The growth in the appeal of the Super Bowl to advertisers and the price they are willing to pay is remarkable when you consider that the cost of a 30-second spot in Super Bowl I in 1967 went for $42,000.

Equally as compelling is the unique impact of the Super Bowl broadcast, with the game being broadcast on over 225 different television stations in approximately 180 countries garnering over 110 million viewers.

Interestingly, if we go back just 10 years and adjust the price paid by advertisers using the annual CPI increase the rate for the 2023 broadcast would be $4.8 million for a 30-second spot…  much less than the $7 million per spot achieved by Fox Broadcasting.

The reason for the rate differential is very simple, supply and demand. Demand is driven by the strength of the NFL “brand,” the cultural impact of both the game and the broadcast and the showcase that the broadcast represents for advertisers.

After all, not many other programs attract viewers that are as keen to see the advertising as they are the game itself. It is for this reason, that according to Fox Broadcasting the 2023 event will feature more than twenty “new” sponsors representing over $100 million in ad revenue.

No doubt advertisers investing to run their commercials during the Super Bowl are hoping that their ads can go beyond simply elevating brand awareness and appeal to attain the cultural impact that past iconic Super Bowl ads achieved:

  • Coca Cola – “Mean” Joe Greene
  • Apple – Macintosh (1984)
  • Anheuser Busch – “Bud” “weis” er” Frogs
  • Pepsi – Cindy Crawford
  • Wendy’s – Where’s the Beef?
  • Snickers – Betty White

Already looking forward the Super Bowl LVII broadcast and this year’s commercial offering.

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3 Reasons Advertisers Should Audit Their Advertising Spend

29 Jun

auditsketch.102447

Virtually all client-agency agreements contain both an “audit” and “record retention” clause. The purpose of this language is to afford advertisers the ability to answer the question, “Are we getting what we paid for? Yet, few advertisers ever implement contract compliance, financial management or performance reviews of their agency partners.

There are multiple reasons why the marketing budget, a material expense, and the stakeholders responsible for stewarding those funds (e.g., advertising agencies) have not undergone more scrutiny. Few of those reasons make much sense when compared to the risks and costs faced by advertisers choosing not to periodically assess how effectively their funds are being managed.

Below are three key reasons why we believe that advertisers should exercise their audit rights:

  1. Flaws Tied to Estimated Billing Process – The ad industry operates primarily on an “Estimated” billing basis. Plans are approved by the client, purchase orders issued, and the agency then bills the advertiser in advance for the approved amount. In theory, estimated fees and third-party costs are reconciled to actual costs once a job is closed. However, this does not always occur in a timely or accurate manner. Experience shows that perils abound such as, approved but unspent funds are accumulated by the agency, unused funds are rolled over to other brands/ jobs/time periods for future use, unapproved and non-transparent mark-ups are applied, unbilled media balances are retained for inordinately long periods of time and aged credits are not always returned to the advertiser in a timely manner. In the end, left unchecked, agencies can hold and direct how and when client funds get applied to a greater extent than most client-side CFOs or Internal Audit directors would approve of.
  2. Review of Support for Agency Billings to Client – Because clients are typically billed in advance by their agencies on an estimated basis, and agency final invoicing almost never contains third-party or fourth-party invoice support, the only way an advertiser can evaluate whether agency billings are accurately supported is to conduct a financial review of all underlying billings being passed through from the agency to the advertiser. At a minimum, this includes validating billing costs from vendors to the agency and payments from the agency to the vendors. Further, for direct labor-based remuneration programs, which rely on the accurate entry and tracking of time by agency personnel, advertisers should independently review agency timekeeping system data and processes to validate any time tracking reports being provided. Such reviews should also include assessing the types of personnel logging time (i.e., full-time employees, temporary employees, freelancers, interns, etc.), the staffing mix relative to the approved staffing plan and agency employee turn-over rates on their business… data not always shared with clients.
  3. Performance Validation – Results matter. Whether in the context of compliance with contract terms, attainment of agreed upon goals and KPIs or delivery against planned spend levels advertisers stand to benefit from independent reviews of their agency partners’ performance. Given the increased pressure on CMOs to achieve results, it is imperative they have confidence in the outcomes associated with their and their agency’s stewardship of marketing funds. As importantly, their C-Suite peers routinely question the efficacy of an organization’s marketing investment and to what extent that expense is contributing to the attainment of company goals and objectives.

Audit is not a four-letter word. We have witnessed first-hand the positive impact that an independent review of an organization’s marketing investment can have on both safeguarding and optimizing those funds. These reviews yield solid learning as it relates to improved controls, risk mitigation and efficiencies tied to process improvements. Further, the identification and recovery of funds tied to billing errors, compliance violations, aged credits, rebates, and under-delivery (i.e., agency resources, media, etc.), when combined with the identification of cost avoidance strategies for the future, far exceed the cost of an audit.

Importantly, advertising agencies also benefit from these projects when client-side instructions, process inefficiencies and timing issues (i.e., ineffective briefing processes, disorderly client approval process, short project lead times, the timing of the release of funds, etc.) are brought to light and addressed.  As well, it’s always a great result when the clarification of the intent of certain terms included in client-agency contracts aligns with everyone’s future expectations.

In short, properly structured audit programs, which deal with both client and agency stakeholders in a candid and collaborative manner identify solutions and help to lay the groundwork for implementing the changes necessary to improve the client’s return-on-marketing-investment. As such, Chief Financial Officers and Chief Audit Officers should require marketing to allocate funds in their annual plan to cover this important transparency and accountability program. The cost? Tenths of a percentage of an organization’s annual spend, with financial returns that dwarf the outlay for implementing a formal audit initiative.

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Building a Foundation for Trust in Client/ Agency Relationships

27 Feb

dreamstime_s_38659968Perhaps I was fortunate. Perhaps it was a sign of the times. When I began my career at J. Walter Thompson, we took great pride as an organization in the number of client relationships that we had, which were measured in decades. Clients such as Ford Motor Company, Unilever, Kellogg’s, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, and others were celebrated, revered, and nurtured.

Not unlike today, there were challenges to be faced and pressures to be dealt with, whether market-driven or internal.  So, what allowed those relationships to flourish through good times and bad?

The answer was simple. Trust and a mutual commitment to the partnership combined with alignment on business objectives.

Today it is believed that the average length of client-agency relationships is around 3½ years. Is this reduction in longevity correlated with the fact that there has been a slow, but steady erosion in the level of trust between advertisers and their agencies? Consider that a couple of years back, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conducted a survey and found that only 29% of its member marketers ranked the “current level of trust between client-side marketers and ad agencies as high.”

A waning level of trust can inhibit communication between stakeholders leading to difficulties that throttle the productivity of the partnership. Conversely, as Stephen Covey once said:

“When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.”

Thus, if you believe that stable, long-term strategic partnerships are more conducive to achieving an organization’s business and marketing objectives, then the obvious question is “How can we establish client-agency relationships that endure the test of time?” The answer seems obvious… addressing the issue of trust.

In our experience, there are three fundamental steps that can be taken to build and maintain trust between advertisers and their agency partners.

  1. Contractual agreement predicated on a “Principal-Agent” model – Simply put, in this type of relationship the agency is charged with acting on the client’s behalf and in their best interest. This legally binds the agency to always put the client’s interests first and eliminates their ability to benefit from the relationship at the client’s expense. One of the beneficial outcomes of this type of model is that the client can take solace in knowing that the advice and recommendations of the “Agent” is more likely to be unbiased. In the event that an agency recommends the consideration of principal-based or inventory media buys or the use of or procurement of services/products from a related party of the agency, then the agreement language should require full-disclosure and prior written client approval.
  2. Periodic agency contract compliance and financial management reviews – Having a sound contract in place is a positive step in the right direction. However, if an agency’s compliance with contract terms and conditions is uncertain then achieving the desired level of trust may be elusive. Given industry concerns regarding transparency, all stakeholders will benefit from an independent evaluation of compliance and performance. Further, knowing that there will be an additional layer of oversight inspires stakeholders on both sides of the partnership to uphold the client organization’s desired levels of governance and transparency established within the agreement. This is not a sign of mistrust, but a signal of an advertiser’s commitment to the principle of “assurance.” As the saying goes: “In God we trust, all others we audit.”
  3. Establishing a fair and compelling agency remuneration program – Properly compensating agency partners is fundamental to securing the requisite level of support and bolstering an agency’s commitment to its fiduciary role. Additionally, a well-paid agency is less likely to engage in practices such as the pursuit of vendor kickbacks, the application of non-transparent mark-ups, profiting from the use of client funds, or the unauthorized use of sub-contractors and related parties. Contractual language capping agency revenue to that which is authorized within the agreement and subsequent statements of work will also protect the advertiser from these tactics and help curtail agency temptation to inappropriately supplement its income at the expense of its fiduciary obligations to its clients.

We have seen firsthand the benefits of this proven formula in promoting transparency and bolstering an organization’s trust in its agency partners. Thus, marketers and their agency counterparts should consider embracing this approach to strengthen and reinforce long-term agency-client relationships by ensuring a solid footing.

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How is Your Media Agency Making Money in 2022?

17 Feb

agency holding company profitsWritten by Oli Orchard, Partner – Fuel Media & Marketing, a specialist communications consulting company focused on advising clients in media communications. 

With Publicis and OMG in the news this week (February 2022) with significant revenue increases year-over-year, now would seem a pertinent time to look ‘under the hood’ of the different revenue streams agencies have available to them.

Using the traditional commission method, still prevalent today, it is often thought that a media agency has a disincentive to save clients’ money or indeed manage lower budgets.

Because most media agencies are compensated on a percentage of media spend, if they negotiate the prices down, and potentially reduce total spend, they will earn less money.

In practice, the traditional ATL percentages involved stop this being much of a disincentive.

  • A buy of $10,000 at 3% commission provides the agency with just $300 income.
  • If the agency negotiates 25% discount on the media, the agency will only lose $75.

Obviously, the agencies are doing this at scale, and those $75 discounts start to add up, as a result the agencies have long looked elsewhere to bolster their incomes. So, in 2022, what other revenue streams are open to the agencies?

Agency income takes many forms, and too many to go through here, so we’ll stick to the top ten.

  1. Fees & Commissions – Whether Time and Materials based, or a percentage commission on media spend these should need no introduction to advertisers. At Fuel we hold data on innumerable best practice contracts, and always work with clients and agencies to come to the most appropriate basic remuneration package
  2. Bonus/Malus schemes – These programmes have become synonymous with best-in-class-advertisers, looking to reward their agency beyond the basic remuneration for exemplary work. The Malus scheme has gained more traction in recent years, as agencies look to differentiate themselves from the competition by having some ‘skin-in-the-game’, often putting part of their profit margin at risk
  3. Incremental services outside of Scope of Work – These are often the result of out-of-date contracts, and can commonly comprise things an advertiser might expect to be included in the contract, such as Quarterly Business Reviews, competitive monitoring, dashboards, post-campaign reporting and even out-of-home planning
  4. Deposit Interest on bank accounts – Historically agencies have taken advantage of bank interest rates and been fast to invoice and slow to pay. With rates on the increase again, albeit slowly, advertisers will need to become increasingly aware of this. Agencies deal in vast sums of money, and this revenue stream should not be overlooked
  5. Kickbacks from vendors – AVBs, rebates, Specialist Agency Commissions, the list goes on; kickbacks have many names, and they don’t always take the form of cash. Free Space that can be given to advertisers to bring the CPM down to hit bonus targets, or alternatively sold on to other clients is another common form these shapeshifting kickbacks can take. It is also imperative that the contract encompasses as much of the agency holding group as possible, often kickbacks can be routed through other parts of the group
  6. Unbilled media – It is not uncommon for a media vendor to forget, unintentionally or intentionally, to bill an agency for a media placement that the agency has already billed the client for. The agency should be reporting and returning unbilled media on a regular basis, though clients should be aware of the fiscal statute of limitations, meaning the vendor could invoice the agency within a specified period of time (it is currently 6 years in the UK) and demand payment, which will then be passed on to the client
  7. Agencies acting as the principal (rather than agent) – This is commonly known as inventory media, the agency takes a position on, or buys, a quantity of media directly from a vendor, with no specific client lined up for it. There will be NDAs in place with the vendor preventing the agency from disclosing the actual price paid to clients or auditors. This allows them to mark-up prices, generally by a very significant percentage when selling this space on to clients. The flip side of this is that an advertiser can get a great rate on something they may have bought anyway, though they may also be pushed into a buy that is sub-optimal for their strategy just to meet the agency’s internal need to offload inventory
  8. Subcontracting to related 3rd Parties – Agency holding groups are vast and have many complimentary disciplines. It is not uncommon for a specific task to be subcontracted (attracting an additional fee) within the holding group
  9. OOH commissions – It is worth listing these separately to those above because OOH often has a unique commission structure where both the advertiser and vendor routinely pay the poster buying specialist for placing the media. This is frequently dealt with in agency contracts as an additional ‘Disclosed Commission’ tucked away in a schedule at the back of the document as Specialist Agency Commission
  10. DSP usage – Programmatic has long been the poster child of non-disclosed fee structures further down the digital value chain but there is one significant agency revenue stream that crops up near the top of the chain in non-disclosed White Label mark-ups. The DSPs allow their clients (in this case the agency, not the advertiser) to add an additional CPM into the net media cost, meaning that it doesn’t show up in any of the auditable invoicing trails, and is passed back to the agency
  11. As you can see from above, agencies constantly evolve income streams, seeking out new ways to profit, and let’s not get the intent of this piece wrong, agencies should be able to profit from their great work for clients. However, many advertiser clients are becoming cash cows, based on the agencies’ opaque trading practices.

At Fuel, we work with the agency and advertiser to produce the optimum contract for the situation, one where transparency around agency income is openly discussed, and the advertiser can make an informed, supported decision about the relationships they forge with their agency partners.

Here’s our checklist for advertisers:

  • Check that your contract is up to date – does it cover the entire scope of business transacted between you and your agency? The very best contracts are reviewed and revised annually to take landscape shifts and revised media strategies into account
  • Make sure that your agency is obliged to ‘call out’ and seek approval for inventory media and use of subsidiaries/sister companies
  • Have a frank discussion with your agency about the non-disclosed White Label mark-up that the DSPs allow them to add into the platform costs, and consider requesting to be part of the conversation around DSP selection
  • Undertake regular audits of performance vs. pitch or year-over-year guarantees, and tie the buying results to a bonus/malus scheme in tandem with service scores and achievement of business objective KPIs 

To find out more on how Fuel can help, contact Oli on +44(0) 7534 129 097 or email [email protected].

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The Best Way to Involve Agency Related Entities on Client Business

28 Jan

dreamstime_s_137202250Four of the world’s largest agency holding companies account for over $47 billion of advertising spending. Each has dozens of agency brands, specialty service firms and media procurement, marketplace and or platform providers.

Part of the success of the agency holding companies in fueling organic revenue growth in recent years has been their ability to involve these specialists on their branded agencies client businesses.

The use of affiliates is certainly advantageous for the holding companies and can be beneficial for clients seeking to have a coordinated, comprehensive marketing communications program administered by a lead agency.

While there may be efficiencies that accrue to advertisers, unchecked there is an equal likelihood that they may be paying a premium for the use of agency related parties. Why? Because affiliate goods and services are often proffered without client knowledge or consent and may not have been competitively bid to determine value relative to marketplace alternatives. Further, affiliate remuneration is often blind to advertisers and can take the form of non-transparent, unauthorized mark-ups applied in addition to the fees and commissions paid to the lead agency.

Many client/ agency agreements have specific guidelines for agencies seeking to involve related parties (whether the guidelines are followed), others don’t even address this important area.

The best approach for agencies seeking to engage affiliate companies is “full disclosure.” This means notifying the advertiser in writing of the opportunity to deploy theses resources on their business, specifying the nature, scope and cost of the work or product to be accessed and being clear on how the affiliate(s) is to be compensated.

Unfortunately, in actual practice, advertisers often have no visibility into the involvement of agency related parties on their business. This is not an approach that we would advocate because it can fly in the face of an agency’s fiduciary responsibility to its clients. Further, when advertisers learn of some of these arrangements it can lead to an erosion of trust and or confidence in the agency’s intentions and their responsibility to provide unbiased advice that is in the best interest of its clients. As it has been said: “a single lie discovered is enough to create doubt in every truth expressed” and no agency should want to raise the specter of doubt with any client.

Sound contract language regarding the agency “supplier group,” the process for involving related parties, their obligations under the agreement and the attendant level of compensation can go a long way in mitigating these concerns. This creates the opportunity for a proverbial “win-win” situation where both advertiser and agency can truly benefit from this practice.

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Reduce Your Content Management Risks & Costs

1 Oct

Content Management Systems

Content curation and production continues to grow in importance as marketers expand their message distribution to multiple devices across a myriad of channels including mobile, web, social media, shopper marketing, public relations, etc. The result is an ever-growing quantity of brand specific content that needs to be managed and shared.

For most marketers this content is being accumulated, produced, and stored by multiple of their marketing service providers. This can create logistical challenges when it comes to managing and accessing these critical assets, invariably creating risks related to compliance, brand consistency and usage rights violations while driving up operational costs.

The solution can be straightforward… a centralized enterprise-wide content management system (CMS) that improves a marketer’s ability to manage and protect this disparate set of images, videos, logos, and text files across its marketing agency network. Further, creating a content management “center of excellence” makes it easier to search, access, transform and distribute these assets in their proper format for use by each marketing partner.

The centralization of this function, whether in-house, with a designated “lead agency” or with a specialized CMS provider can boost productivity and improve both time and cost efficiencies. How? Eliminating the redundancies in labor and costs related to accessing content curation, creation, formatting and cataloging from multiple agency providers. This allows brand management personnel, and their advertising agency partners to focus on their specialty… “origination” rather than “adaption” projects.

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How Should Marketers View Digital Media in a Post-Cookie World?

30 Sep

Third-Party Cookies

As both government regulatory bodies and the advertising industry have become serious about data privacy, browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Explorer have announced safety measures that include restricting first-party cookies and blocking third-party cookies by default.

These moves will clearly have an impact on a range of outcomes, including user experience, data access, ad targeting and attribution. This will limit marketers ability to personalize content, target their advertising to individual users or assess which impressions had an impact on a consumer’s actions.

That being the case, how should marketers view the value of programmatic advertising in a post-cookie world?

For some, their focus has turned to first-party data for which consumers have given their consent. Yet, gathering this data and harnessing its value will take time. Further, this approach still requires an ad ID solution for which there is currently no standard or consensus among publishers, AdTech companies or device makers. That said, there is hope on the horizon as organizations such as the Advertising ID Consortium have emerged and are offering people-based identifiers that are compliant with “self-regulatory codes” and applicable privacy and security laws.

While the industry awaits a robust, unified ad ID solution, the loss of behavioral or deterministic targeting tools will clearly weigh on the efficacy of programmatic digital media.

According to Statista, global digital ad spend will reach $389 billion in 2021, with nearly 85% of that being place programmatically. In light of the challenges posed by the restrictions on third-party cookies, the question is, “Should marketers continue to allocate such a high percentage of their overall media spend in this area?”

In the words of 19th century author, Henry David Thoreau, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

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How Will Post-Pandemic Employee Compensation Impact Your Agency Fees?

26 Aug

Virtual OfficeWith COVID-19 vaccination rates increasing, organizations across the globe are evaluating whether and or when their employees will be required to return to the office. As part of the consideration process, many are deliberating on whether to allow all or select employees to continue to work remotely.

The question being assessed by employers considering extending remote work privileges is, “How will this decision impact employee compensation?”

Many organizations are weighing different pay scales for remote workers. As an example, Google is planning to adjust employee compensation based upon the local market wages where an employee works from. Which certainly seems like a reasonable trade-off.

By way of example, in a recent article by Reuters, which had seen Google’s “salary calculator,” an employee living in Stamford, CT, which is an hour from New York, would earn 15% less if they opted to work from home, rather than commuting into New York City. Of note, Google is but one Silicon Valley company that has implemented location specific compensation models for employees living and working in less expensive areas.

As advertising agencies evaluate their post-pandemic approach to the use of flexible staffing and or remote workers, it stands to reason that while some will opt for location agnostic pay models, others may implement location specific remuneration programs for remote workers. In the case of the latter, the obvious question is, “How will cost-of-employment adjustments impact the fees charged to advertisers?”

Will those on commission-based fees adjust rates downward? Will those employing direct-labor-based compensation programs reduce bill rates?

It is certainly reasonable to assume that if an agency reduces its salary and overhead expenses, that the fees charged to advertisers should be reduced accordingly. That said, it is likely that any adjustment to agency bill rates will need to be the result of collaborative discussions, initiated by the advertiser, between themselves and their respective agency partners.

At a minimum, location-based employee compensation adds an interesting dimension to the ongoing quest for a fair and balanced agency remuneration system.

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