Mediacom audit: Audience misreporting may have been because staff wanted good client reviews, says CEO
Pejic
The motivation for Mediacom staff who faked post-campaign reports appears to have simply been to get good reviews from clients, as the agency did not stand to gain financially, the company has said.
The practice entailed some staff in the Sydney office reducing client agreed audience targets for TV spots they had bought for Foxtel, Yum! Brands and IAG to make it look like they had hit targets.
TV schedules are generally measured on an agreed level of TARPs – target audience ratings points – a technical terms which refers to the percentage of people in a certain demographic who saw the ad. In effect, clients thought they had reached more people than they really had with their campaigns.
So we presume they will be auditing digital now……
auditing digital will be a nice little headache…. numbers rarely match and the scope for variance will need to be considerably wider.
That said – there’d be a few agencies bricking themselves if a client wanted an ‘agency login’ access to trading desk and DSP to check actual spends vs the reports (and not a login created for the client that likely includes a markup).