Mediacom misreporting forces clients to ‘check everything constantly’ amid trust issues
Meet the Marketers at Mumbrella360 L:R Bauer’s Natalie Bettini, Acer’s Katherine Nguyen, Mumbrella’s Alex Hayes, Brown Forman’s Sarah Nichols, David Jones’s Adriane McDermott,
The misreporting which occurred at Mediacom has created an atmosphere of suspicion with even trusted individuals in agencies now subject to greater scrutiny, a panel of top marketers at the Mumbrella360 conference has said.
The general manager for consumer marketing at Bauer Media, Natalie Bettini, suggested it has needed to be more vigilant since the controversy, in which staff at Mediacom were found to have deliberately faked TV results in campaign reports for key clients.
Speaking at the Meet the Marketers panel discussion at the 360 conference in Sydney yesterday, Bettini, declined to comment on the incident specifically as her company has retained Mediacom as it media buyer, but admitted it was a “wake-up call”.
“As a business we are very numbers focused and we tend to not just receive an invoice or take something at face value,” she said. “As a team we check everything, we track everything and we are constantly checking against what was planned, what actually happened and what we have been charged.
“It’s always a wake up call when something like this happens and it hits the press.”
She said it makes you focus “a little bit more on the people that you think you can trust” and ensures “you are checking everything off constantly.”
Katherine Nguyen, head of marketing for Australia and New Zealand at computer firm Acer added: “It has definitely given everyone a shake up.”
She said Acer “luckily” has “very strict compliance” with in-built technology that enables all advertising to be tracked. Such systems mean the agency knows that “every single thing we do with them will go through an auditing process”.
Nguyen revealed there have previously been “discrepencies” with agencies reporting different results to its own.
“When I go and cross check with different platforms it is not the same and we are questioning them. We are looking into the discrepancies,” she said.
Asked if the Mediacom saga had its roots in deeper issues, such as agencies not being sufficiently remunerated by clients, Brown-Forman marketing services director Sarah Nichols, whose brands include Jack Daniels, said: “I am not sure whether they are not remunerated enough because we certainly get charged enough.”
She added: “At the same time I do sometimes wonder, not so much with media but with other agencies, just how do they actually make money because it’s an expensive arena to be in”.
Earlier, David Jones customer experience general marketing manager Adriane McDermott said the department store has been on a “rapid transformation journey” as she revealed how digital disruption growth has driven customer expectations.
Consumers now expect a seamless experience online and in store, something David Jones was committed to providing.
“We are trying to bring the channels closer together in terms of meeting those customer expectations,” she said, adding that new technologies will be bought in store as it pursues an omni-channel strategy.
“We are doing a lot of work on our new store format and they’ll be a couple of exciting new inovations before the end of the year,” McDermott said. “In those new store concepts digital and the enablement of both staff and customers will play a big role in that transformation.”
Nichols said changing consumer tastes is among the greatest challenges facing Jack Daniels with the 18 to 24-year-old demographic “no longer wanting the traditonal spirit brands”.
“They are wanting something lighter and refreshing so for a brand like Jack Daniels, which is a robust flavoured whisky, has been a real challenge for us,” she said.
Steve Jones
Unless Acer is buying etam data, which would be a colossal waste of money, their systems could not have prevented what happened with some of Medicom clients. A lot of marketers just don’t get it.
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@Spelling police, If Acer had bought etam data, and it prevented what Mediacom had been doing to other clients, how is that a waste of money?
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The problem:
Quote 1 – ““I am not sure whether they are not remunerated enough because we certainly get charged enough.”
Quote 2: “At the same time I do sometimes wonder, not so much with media but with other agencies, just how do they actually make money because it’s an expensive arena to be in”.
First quote says basically ‘we are charged a lot of money’ (ie possibly too much, how could they not be remunerated enough) then the second one contradicts the statement stating she doesn’t know how agencies can make money due to costs of being competitive. A prickly dynamic to exist within for any agency.
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@Tim – Because ETam data is very expensive, they already pay for it through their agency contract. It’s a difficult situation because the only way to know the post analysis info a client generally receives (ppt, excel) is accurate is to literally do the agencies job yourself in terms of TV optimization. Or…I guess you could ask a hungry competitor agency to run it for you through AQX and do spot checks?
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