Media auditor Ebiquity beefs up processes in wake of Mediacom reporting issues
Eric Faulkner
Australia’s best known media auditor has changed its processes following revelations of discrepancies in how media agency Mediacom reported campaign performance to clients.
Eric Faulkner, CEO of Ebiquity, told Mumbrella he had acted immediately after concluding that the current system based on trust “is only 99 per cent reliable”. The new system will require all audits to have the planned media weights – the audience a campaign aims to reach – provided by clients rather than by agencies.
The move, which will impact every media agency in the country, comes in the wake of revelations that Australia’s second biggest media agency, MediaCom, has owned up to ‘reporting discrepancies’ in its television buying for at least three multi-million dollar clients, some of which are understood to date back up to two years. As a result the clients were told the ad campaigns had hit their targets when they may have not done so.
Good luck in getting clients to fill all the details on that unwieldy website.
Our systems, or lack thereof, are partly to blame. We construct media schedules in Excel, our post analysis systems are hard work and then we have to manually fill forms for audits. It’s no wonder mistakes happen. What environments might cause “inputs” to be deliberately falsified is another subject! If our systems were more integrated and transparent, media auditors would be redundant.
A swift response, perhaps not enough to prevent clients questioning the value of media ebiquity if they failed to pick this up for 2 years.
I geniunly would like to know how Faulkner are going to handle the volume of data they are about to receive.
The reason this fell into the ‘trust’ bucket is that the times a client plan c changes is incredible.
They have two major issues (1) will clients pay for the extra resource or do this themselves ? NO
(2) can Faulkner handle the work with current headcount / systems – NO
I feel Faulkner could be the biggest losers in all of this.
Interesting to say the least, I wonder where all this will finish…….
No wonder creative agencies think they can create a media department in their basement with an old media planner and an Apple IIE.
We are seriously in a discussion about:
1. The errors that can happen by manually inputing data
2. Media performance (planned vs actual) as opposed to spend vs sales/business outcomes
3. Auditors who rely on “trust” as mechanism for auditing
4. Excel!
Again the media industry has to reshape its relevance, perception and its role in the world or face becoming an algorithm.
I’m surpised the clients haven’t started questioning their auditors if it wasn’t for Mediacom coming out clean.. This would have kept on happening for years on..