#MediaSnack

On this week's #MediaSnack David Indo is joined by Gayle Noah, Media Director for L'Oreal UK & Ireland. As media guardian of one of the largest media budgets in the UK, Gayle's position is essentially that of Chief Media Officer.Gayle is a huge believer in the importance of internal media leadership and suggests that any advertiser investing in excess of £10m in media should have dedicated media specialist resource in-house. Gayle describes how she has gradually developed her own internal media team at L'Oreal, across the last 6 years, focussing on developing analytical and digital performance capabilities within her team. She believes that these skills are becoming more and more important as L’Oreal continue to evolve its agile media strategy. Unquestionably benefiting from the privileged position of being a 'priority' client within GroupM's Maxus, Gayle provides insight into how to attract and secure the best media talent from the agency's resource pool, explaining that good client behaviours in particular around developing strong and engaging briefs are the secret to her success. Finally, when asked about the big media issue that keeps her awake, Gayle disregards the issue of transparency saying that she has confidence in the robustness of her agency contract and that she feels secure that L'Oreal interests are properly protected. Instead, Gayle explains that her greatest challenge is in identifying the key innovations and the areas where L'Oreal should place the big bets that that will continue to move media forward.

MediaSnack’s most anticipated episode is BACK for 2024!

Tom and David review this year’s 10 biggest moments in media and predict what’s to come for brands and agencies in 2025.

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#MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the global media consultancy dedicated to helping brands achieve better media results. Want to use media to drive brand growth? Visit https://www.idcomms.com/

On this week’s #MediaSnack we provide a little update on the 2016 media agency pitch market. As you will recall it was a busy 2015 with fun-sounding MediaPaloozas and scary-sounding MediaTsunamis at every turn. This year has been a little quieter so far, perhaps because brands have been holding back a little to see how big events like the ANA #RebateGate reports resolved and if #Brexit would materially change the UK and global economy. Now those events are passed, but the implications still becoming clear, we expect more brands to be preparing to launch media agency pitches in Q4’16 or Q1’17. We have seen this week IKEA announce the conclusion of their global framework pitch with Diageo and BT are still in progress. We encourage ID Comms clients to consider pitches carefully and try to avoid pitching solely with a financial objective to cut costs, this is typically a short-sighted tactic which affects business performance in the longer term. A race to the bottom on costs and pushing agencies just to save money creates many of the transparency issues we have been discussing for years. We find these days marketers are more keen to discuss their own behaviours and how they can evolve their media management processes, which deliver better value for their media investments. Next, we report on some highly-charged accusations by Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of agency group WPP. His target today is ‘media auditor’ Ebiquity and their contract compliance division called Firm Decisions. Sir Martin’s accusation is that there is a conflict of interests for the same company (Firm Decisions) performing forensic financial audits of agency book and then reporting back to clients who could (in theory) instruct Ebiquity to pitch that agency. It is a logical conflict of interest potentially but in practice it is probably low risk. SMS taking time out to raise this is probably another indicator of the tense relationship between agency and auditor; the two companies were featured on last week’s Episode because they’re currently battling in the High Court in London. As a client of WPP, Ebiquity or Firm Decisions you’d be right to be growing a little impatient with the pettiness of these fights and wondering why these smart companies can’t collaborate their resources to tackle marketers’ many challenges and stop briefing against one another.Whilst Sorrell's conflict of interest accusation may be overblow, we do think that a potential conflict of interest lurks within the ‘auditor and advisor’ industry though, which Sorrell doesn’t highlight, and that is where auditors are receiving income from agencies and vendors. We think it is critical for marketers to be assured that they know exactly where their auditor, consultant or advisor has ANY commercial relationship with media agencies or media vendors because any preference this creates could affect their objectivity and advice, especially with regard to guiding complex, high-profile media agency reviews. As you know, at ID Comms we are very proud of our 100% neutrality and objectivity - we have zero commercial relationships with agencies or vendors anywhere in the world. This keeps us 100% focused on what’s right for our clients' businesses, not ours. Can you say that about your current auditor or advisor?Finally, we report on the launch of "Digital/McKinsey" - the management consultant has packaged up its digital assets under a new (cleverly titled) brand. Another step into the agency domain, surely now any remaining aspiration that the agency groups may have had as being the go-to for digital transformation is stunted by the total dominance of the consulting groups to own deep digital scope for the world’s leading CEO's?

In this weeks episode of #MediaSnack Tom and David talk about changes that took place on the advertiser side 12 months after the release of the ANA report.So, everyone has been curious what the ANA's members are actually doing with these insights. Was anyone taking any action? Where was the impact being felt? Well, now we know, because the ANA have surveyed 190 of their members and asked them what they've actually been doing in the year since the report came out. http://www.ana.net/blogs/show/id/45345In the recent survey of its members, ANA found that over 60% of the respondents have taken steps to tackle media transparency in their organisation in some form. One of the key actions was revision and update of the contract terms. There was also a big improvement in the area of media auditing: more advertisers have started to audit their media agencies in the last year. This is a massive improvement, however, there is still a lot of work to be done. David argues that changes like this will gradually get greater traction. "The industry is on the road to restoring trust, but has a long way to go. To preserve marketplace integrity and protect shareholder values, advertisers cannot let up and must continue to pressure agencies for complete transparency. The delays and public denials by agencies (despite reality) cannot continue."http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/07/20/three-things-the-ana-proposing-advertisers-do-gain-transparency-their-agenciesAt the back of the transparency report, the Department of Justice in the US started to look more closely into media production industry. This investigation is in progress right now, and we think that at some point move to other areas of the industry.That leads us to our question of the day:Will the US Department of Justice investigation into advertising production will move into media at some point?-----Finally, on 31st of July, we are sending out 100 invitations to our #MediaSnack 100 party in London in September. Keep an eye on your inbox.If you think you should be invited, let us know quickly!

Everything you wanted to know about ad fraud but didn't know who to ask or even what to ask...Don't suffer from FOFO (fear of finding out).

This extended #MediaSnack Meets with Dr. Augustine Fou lays out the key parts of the ad fraud challenge and gives marketers the priority actions you can take right now to better protect your media investments from fraud. 

Dr. Augustine Fou is a leading ad fraud researcher and one of the most widely published and quoted authorities in the space. 

We get back to basics to learn:

Episode Links

Dr. Fou LinkedIn

Dr. Fou Twitter

Dr. Fou SlideShare

Dr. Fou's Report on Ad Fraud and Cyber crime

The recent GDPR ruling on the IAB’s Transparency Consent framework has got a lot of attention (and rightly so) with advertisers asking how this is going to affect their business.

However like any legal/technology topic, it can be a challenge to untangle the complexity of what this means.

In this episode, we look to unpack:
- What has been deemed non-compliant
- The implications directly for the IAB
- What it means for advertisers and what you should be doing

CLARITY on the subject and PRACTICAL next steps are key to being proactive and minimizing risk.

#MediaSnack #MediaForGrowth

On this week’s #MediaSnack we discuss the different types of media auditing, in an attempt to clear up some confusion. What people typically call a media audit (using what’s become known as a media auditor) actually isn’t auditing in the strict sense. Asking a firm to grade your agency’s media buying performance by analysing pricing and quality isn’t actually auditing. This kind of work is best called “Price benchmarking”. Is that clearer? Maybe not. So, we invite a proper auditor onto the show to help clear up the confusion. Adrian Jenkins is a Chartered Accountant (like a CPA for those of you in the US), he’s the founder of an independent company called Financial Progression which conducts contract compliance audits of agencies on behalf of advertisers (including media agencies, creative agencies and many others). FP are long time collaborators of ID Comms. With a lot of concern around over Media Transparency, not least following the ANA’s Media Transparency Guidelines, we have found many more advertisers looking to conduct these types of compliance audits of their agencies, to check that the agencies are fulfilling its obligations as a service supplier to the advertiser. In ID Comms “PostK2" Manifesto we recommend that advertisers need to regularly audit their media agencies [add underlined text as which includes both the ‘price benchmarking’ type and the contract compliance type. Our view is that it is important to consider contract compliance auditing in a holistic way, as part of a mix of accountability techniques to make sure your external agencies are working productively to deliver your marketing and business objectives and operating with transparency. It also typically finds where there are errors, especially important in today’s complex world of automated media buying systems. I ask Adrian to help clarify the different types of audits, explain what contract compliance is and how it benefits the advertiser. It is interesting to note Adrian’s perspective that, far from creating hostility and mistrust between advertiser and agency, a compliance audit can actually benefit the relationship because it removes any uncertainty, provides transparency and aligns both parties for the future. Adrian also gives his top tips to those advertisers who haven’t audited in this way before, and he explains how to start and what to look for. 

Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.

My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode is Evan Kory, Executive Director of Global Media at Audible.

Find out:
- What is Evan's role at Audible and what is he most proud of professionally?
- What does he see are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them?
- What does he do to unwind and recharge?
- Plus his best industry leadership tips and more!

You can find Evan here: linkedin.com/in/evan-kory-35774a61

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#MediaSnack​ Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.

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