Doing right by others is certainly a core value and one that many of us subscribe to. For me personally, as a former ad agency account director, I have always been fond of the quote by Victor Hugo, the nineteenth-century French author: “Initiative is doing the right thing, without being told.”
In the professional services business sector this credo was once considered “cost of entry.” Today, however, having one’s advertising agency and or intermediaries “do the right thing” isn’t a given and, in the current environment, very likely will come at a cost.
As an example, Forrester recently interviewed thirty-four media agency clients and found that “transparency” was a key priority for marketers. However, many of the media agencies that they spoke with indicated that they “are only transparent if clients require it in their contracts.” Nice to know.
Perhaps you’ve been following the trend among influencer marketing agencies and their vendors who are now charging clients incremental fees for conducting content reviews or brand-safety checks to safeguard advertisers’ placements. For years, influencers have been paid largely based upon the number of followers that they had. Sadly, many influencers had engaged in buying followers to boost their appeal to advertisers and, in turn, their revenue. Now that advertisers are savvy to this practice and are looking for assurances on the influencers utilized and the nature of their followers, influencer agencies want to incorporate an upcharge to advertisers.
What about those instances where trading desks and DSPs are now charging premiums to access content from exchanges that will ensure proper placement, safeguarding brands and minimizing the incidence of media fraud? Whoever said that it was okay to purchase high-risk, low return inventory to begin with?
Maybe you’ve experienced abnormal delays with regard to your ad agency partners closing and reconciling projects to actual costs or in receiving post-campaign media performance recaps. Or perhaps you were expecting your agency to competitively bid your production work, only to find out that they were relying on the same vendor(s) that they’ve always used (maybe even an agency affiliate). Or, you were of the belief that your media campaigns were being monitored and that audience delivery guarantees were being negotiated in-flight, only to find out that there was no such stewardship of your media investment.
What is going on? What happened to doing the right thing? When you query your agency partners they suggest that the Scope of Work (SOW) didn’t specifically call for those activities nor did the agency Staffing Plan allow for providing that support at the frequency or within the time frame that you had come to expect. This obviously begs the question, “When did the agency stop providing the level of service and oversight support that it once did?”
The message is clear, advertisers can take nothing for granted and certainly cannot assume that their agency, adtech, production and media vendors have their back. Simply stated, we are operating in an era when advertisers must incorporate legal terms and conditions, which provide the requisite safeguards and controls that govern the behavior and service levels that they expect, into their agency agreements in order to have each vendor in the advertising supply-chain do the right thing.
As importantly, having solid contract language and tightly written scopes of work in and of themselves does not guarantee that agents and intermediaries will fall in line and comply with advertiser expectations. Experience suggests that adherence will typically only be achieved through performance and accountability monitoring. As the old adage goes; “What is inspected is respected.”
Please note, that we are not suggesting that an advertisers shouldn’t pay for the level of coverage and service that they expect to receive. That said, advertisers can no longer take it for granted that certain service standards, which historically have been part and parcel of agency standard operating procedures and hadn’t been necessary to be called out in an agreement or an SOW, are still being followed. If a service provider drops or alters the nature of a service being provided, it should be incumbent to at least communicate those decisions to the advertiser and engage in discussions to ascertain if the changes are acceptable or negotiate additional fees to cover the desired level of support.
In the end, successfully aligning advertiser expectations and supply-chain member service delivery standards comes down to all parties committing to a policy of open, honest, two-way dialog to ensure that there are no surprises and to incent an environment of Initiative taking.