The 60 Minute Media Audit

A new year is here…again! Strategising, planning, organising, goal setting.… before you get stuck in the weeds ensure that you and your wider team know exactly what to Stop / Start / Continue this year.

Carrying out a review quickly and effectively is critical. One key component is an audit of your full year media spend - after all, this is usually the biggest part of your annual marketing investment. Reviewing this investment would seem not only wise, but imperative.

Our approach to media audit is that it should always be streamlined and focus on the big wins.

If you had 60 minutes to review your media investment processes, here are 4 key areas we’d recommend you consider:

PERFORMANCE

Effectiveness - Do you have a consistent approach to measuring effectiveness?

Waterfall of objectives™ - Do you differentiate between overall business objectives, campaign critical success factors and media metrics?

Communicate - Does everyone who touches the business share this effectiveness framework?

GOVERNANCE & CONTROL

Spend match - Do you have a single real-time view of budget and regularly match planned v invoice v delivered? How well was this controlled?

Delivery check - Do you have a systematic approach to checking delivery? Did you get what you paid for?

Campaign control - Do you have structures for changing and optimising mid–campaign? How agile are you?

VALUE

Set targets - Have you detailed required outcomes and are they amended regularly?

Think about the metrics - Are you measuring value or price? Can you measure the metrics you have?

TRANSPARENCY WITH YOUR PARTNERS

Understand your contract - Read it, ask direct questions, expect full disclosure.

Key watch outs - Are you talking the same language around costs, trading and fees?

If, after 60 minutes, you’re happy that :

• you have answers to the relevant questions

• you and your agency partner have processes in place to extract maximum value from your media investment

..….then give yourself a gold star and move to the top of the class!

More often than not, you will find areas for improvement. The specific areas will be different from organisation to organisation, but the common theme will be increased focus on this significant investment.

Here’s a resolution for your 2023 list - add a little more scrutiny. This alone will not make you more effective but, as we said, it is one piece of the jigsaw – find some efficiencies here, and you’ll free up budget to invest elsewhere, in activity that has already proven to have a strong ROI.

We’d love to talk!

If you have questions about agency resource, feel free to reach out for a chat.

Call us on 01 556 3678 or email us at hello@pt78.ie