Consumer media consumption behavior is ever evolving. And advertisers must select from an expansive array of content venue choices to communicate their messaging. Balancing these two dynamics is the key to optimizing media investment decisions.
Time was when agencies based their media resource allocation recommendations on insights gained from an exhaustive, objective review of media performance and audience delivery data.
In traditional principal-agent relationships, agencies have a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interest of their clients. This includes providing advertisers with informed recommendations, free of bias or conflicts of interest, that are advantageous to the advertiser. Most advertisers understand that in the twenty-first century, unless the principal-agent relationship is firmly established in the Client/ Agency agreement, all bets are off when it comes to their agency being bound to adhere to principal-agent guidelines.
Over the course of the last decade or so, practices such as “principal-based media buys” and ABVs (rebates) came into vogue. This is where an agency takes ownership of the media inventory and resells that inventory to the advertiser at a non-disclosed mark-up, making a profit on the spread and or receives an incentive based upon its total spend with a media seller. Good Client/ Agency agreements require the agency to secure the client’s written authorization before employing these type of practice and in the case of rebates to remit the advertisers pro-rata share of such rebates.
Fair enough. Buyer beware. Trust but verify. Got it.
There is another practice that seems to be gathering steam between media sellers and media buyers that raises questions about the objectivity of an agency’s media planning and buying recommendations. Simply stated, media owners, seeking to lock-in a revenue stream from a given agency holding company, are offering to reserve inventory in bulk for that agency to allocate to its client base at some point in the future.
One recent example of this is Omnicom Media Group’s (OMG) commitment earlier this month to spend $20 million of its clients’ media funds to advertise in podcasts distributed by Spotify. Given the nature of the advertisers represented by OMG (McDonalds, AT&T, P&G, PepsiCo, etc.), their total media spend and the fact that 2020 media plans have been completed and buying commitments presumably made perhaps there is little risk of such a deal influencing whether or not an advertiser should commit dollars to Spotify podcasts.
Separately, it was recently reported by Digiday that TV networks and agencies, in an effort to jump-start the annual upfront marketplace, were considering share of spend deals to “address advertiser commitment issues.” In this scenario, an agency holding company would commit to spend a percentage of its clients’ aggregate upfront budgets with select network groups. However, client budgets are in flux and there are multiple questions surrounding the traditional upfront marketplace. Thus, the commitments being made by agencies are being done in advance of any client media authorization process. It would be natural for one to ask; “What incentives are being offered by the network groups to facilitate such deals? And How are such benefits distributed to an agency’s clients?”
The primary concern with this type of approach is the potential for these buying commitments to bias an agencies recommendations to its client base. As the author of the Digiday article points out if aggregate spend projections come up short, the holding company may find itself in a position where it may “need to push clients to spend their money” with a given network group.
Practices such as these are fraught with risks. When an agency has already committed to a pool of inventory on a network group based upon hypothetical aggregate spend levels across its client base objectivity is lost.
We are simply not fans of this practice, believing that agencies have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients to make media recommendations, based upon an unbiased fact base, that are in the best interest of the advertiser.