Overview
When your business starts advertising, you sign a marketing services agreement with an agency and work with them to shape a campaign strategy. The business is now actively engaged in the general media ecosystem and needs to deal with various aspects such as pricing, media performance and control frameworks.
Based on our experience, we have often noted that there are gaps between client expectations and agency delivery. Digital performance and ad spend is complex and our research and experience have shown that between 30% - 90% of digital campaign impressions are not delivered fully as intended due to inefficiencies within the media advertising ecosystem.
Our media review services include digital performance reviews, digital supply chain reviews, financial contract reviews, media performance reviews and post-cookie marketing.
We combine deep media agency expertise with PwC professional standards: Our global team includes former media agency leaders and digital/adtech/martech experts, alongside qualified assurance practitioners with high professional standards.
We have a proven track record delivering media review services: Our insights strengthen media spending governance over several years. We also share best practices from other PwC projects and provide specific observations.
We bring unique insight into digital advertising, evidenced by our multi-award-winning programmatic study for ISBA: Our supply chain transparency study has earned 16 prestigious global awards.
We use comprehensive market data instead of opaque cost pool auditing to ensure accurate media benchmarks and avoid costly errors caused by limited data sampling.
We have a track record of success with four of the Top 5 global advertisers and major financial service companies in various markets.
Issues you may be facing with your digital ad spend
Did your campaign reach the right audience?
Did your campaign deliver real value?
Was the spend of your campaign fully utilised?
Were optimisations and improvements made to your campaign?
Were fraud and viewability checks done on the campaign?
How can we add value to your campaigns
- Digital Process Review
- Financial Contract Review
- Media Performance Review
- Martech Diagnostic
Digital Process Review
Digital process review: Our unique approach to digital media
This approach offers major efficiency opportunities with quantifiable monetary benefits.
- Virtually all digital media is biddable as an agency cannot control the price of media.
- A key question that should be asked on paid campaigns is, ‘Is my agency bidding for the right audience, in the right context, at the right time?’ i.e. people, process, technology, transparency.
- Our digital process review considers the following:
- The design of the agency's process for digital campaigns
- Whether processes are consistently applied to all campaigns
- Are brand safety measures in place to protect your brand's reputation
- PwC reviews both design and operational efficiency.
- The process and campaigns are tested via read-only access to adtech tools, walkthroughs with agency teams, and the inspection of documentation supplied by the agency.
- Findings reviewed against our digital process review framework identifies strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement across the digital ecosystem.
- Digital campaigns can be covered across programmatic, social and search.
- Our findings have been consistent across all clients (including the Top 5 global advertisers) and across all agencies and regions: 30%-90% of impressions delivered contain errors and/or ad spend inefficiency.
Financial Contract Review
The financial contract review process aims to understand agency costs, fees and income.
The benefits of our approach include:
- Comprehensive test of the agency’s compliance with the contract terms.
- Professionally rigorous, systematic and detailed reconciliation of all financial elements (rebates, unbilled media, fees, etc.).
- Combining media experts with qualified financial accountants and assurance practitioners.
- Conducted with direct access to agency electronic records, ledgers and media owner contracts (via screen share and secure file transfer if on-site accessibility is a challenge).
- As a leading professional assurance firm, our media experience is allied with process and controls expertise, and the suitably certified IT security and data confidentiality.
- Not a time consuming project for our clients – mostly our time, some agency time.
- Considered best practice for commercial governance.
Media Performance Review
Our media performance review offering delivers a robust review of delivery versus campaign benefits.
The media review process includes the following:
Professionally rigorous, systematic and detailed reconciliation of all financial and media performance elements.
Combining media experts with qualified financial accountants and assurance practitioners.
Conducted with direct access to agency electronic records and media industry systems.
As a leading professional assurance firm, our media experience is allied with process and controls expertise, and the highest standards of IT security and data confidentiality.
Not a time consuming project for our clients — mostly our time, some agency time.
Considered best practice for commercial governance.
Martech Diagnostic
We have a ready-made ‘Marketing Diagnostic Framework’ that can help support your marketing transformation and Marketing team planning/process.
Our Marketing Diagnostic Framework:
- Comprises eight (8) assessment components, collectively catering for all aspects of Marketing and Marketing output:
- Marketing, advertising and media objectives and KPI settings
- Marketing competency
- Audiences
- Marketing, ad and media tech
- Data and insight
- People and structure
- Processes and controls
- Measurement and return on investment
- Can be contracted as whole or as an ‘a la carte’ menu
- Sitting behind each component are a series of diagnostic questions. We score your maturity against good market practice and capture any areas we believe have room for improvement
- Typically, a full Diagnostic across all components takes 12 weeks to deliver. A bundle of 3 components can be completed in 8 weeks
- We tailor our team resources based on your needs, whether that be a deep-dive into your programmatic set-up/performance or ad operations processes through to our Marketing org design specialists who can advise on target operating model development and/or key Marketing skills requirements
The output of our diagnostic provides you with clear pointers on your areas of strengths and weakness versus industry best practice. Our scoring output uses a RAG status for easy identification of areas for improvement. We also deploy tag testing technology to understand your analytics baselines and score your ability to measure Marketing value accurately.
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