Media accountability and transparency continues to grow through ever improving measurement systems, yet we find that many media agencies either don’t have the time, or perhaps the inclination, to provide their clients with meaningful and transparent post campaign reporting. Apart from the common absence of detail and learnings, some reports can be misleading. So is there a point to these reports?

Absolutely.

There are some critical questions that need to be addressed within these reports:

• Did the activity appear as planned?
• Did we get what we paid for?
• Are any credits owed?
• Do the planning costs need fine-tuning?
• Have our communication goals been achieved in each market?
• Is reported bonus delivery based on media we’d actually pay for?
• Are media values based on ‘market’ rates, or on negotiated levels?
• Does the report look beyond metropolitan TV? What about regional television, print, radio and online?

As well as ensuring quality in campaign delivery, or the opportunity to investigate and improve upon underperforming components, a reporting discipline will keep your agency relationship on a solid footing. It adds an additional layer of transparency to the investment made on your behalf by your agency.

Need more convincing? The post campaign reports may be largely verification based, but bear in mind the following:

• Advertisers who do not track what they have been promised may be short changed in the future (we’ve seen this all too often).
• “The squeaky wheel gets the oil”. The advertiser who appoints an independent third party to review performance will benefit from the increased attention to detail and reporting by their media agency.

However the greatest value in meaningful post analysis is the ability to link product performance to media performance. Media post analysis should be about learning for future improvement – of media and marketing outcomes.