Advertisers can build more transparent, partnerlike relationships with their media agencies by taking four steps.

“We’re at an interesting point— CMOs can achieve more success now by showing growth versus cost cutting.” This quote comes from the former CMO of a leading global brand and reflects a broad desire in businesses to turn marketing into a bona fide engine for growth. An important way to make that happen is to free up dollars and funnel them into high-growth opportunities.

However, finding those dollars can be challenging when it comes to media spend. This is because many companies don’t have a clear view of where their dollars are going and what impact they are having. This lack of clarity means that a significant portion of media spend—in the form of fees or rebates—isn’t recouped by the marketer. In our experience, marketers can address this issue and fuel growth by increasing transparency between advertisers and media agencies, which decide where consumers should see marketing messages, and then purchase the needed ad space from broadcasters and digital platforms.

Transparency is a hot topic in the advertising world today. Many large advertisers have long felt a lack of clarity in their relationships with media agencies. Companies that make sizable media buys often find themselves asking: What are we paying for? Are we getting all we are entitled to from our spend? Advertisers currently have concerns about agency transparency—or the lack thereof—in three primary areas: media rebates, programmatic fees, and data and tech sharing/ownership.

  • Media rebates. Agencies often don’t disclose or pass along to their clients rebates (also known as agency volume bonuses, or AVBs) they receive from media companies.
  • Programmatic fees. Programmatic digital-media buys often carry difficult-to-understand and at times opaque agency fees whose face value is small—pennies per activation—but can add up when the numbers involved reach into the millions.
  • Data and tech sharing/ownership. Agencies typically share only the data generated by ad tech platforms, which may not provide an optimal view for clients. They are also sometimes in charge of parts of a client’s tech stack, even though advertisers can achieve more data transparency and greater control by running the stack in-house.

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