Gone are the days when media spend was seen as just another expense line item. According to a recent study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), open web programmatic advertising is estimated to be an $88 billion global market. With the allocation of digital spend comparable to offline media, brands recognized its importance in today’s rapidly evolving media landscape and regard digital media as a valuable investment. However, brands often have little governance in place which results in a restricted ability to audit.
In this post, we will examine the importance of Always-On Digital Accountability, analyze how brands can achieve near real-time accountability of their digital media investments, and what they need to get started.
Understanding Always-On Digital Accountability
The traditional approach to digital media auditing provides a readout on media performance with a 3 to 6-month delay, which is too late to implement corrective actions and reduce waste. Reporting is also typically presented in a fixed high-level manner which makes it difficult to drill down into the details of each media channel to assess their efficiencies and drive actionable insights.
Always-On Digital Accountability offers marketers and agencies a real-time health check on their advertising investment, with insights into media risks such as Viewability, Fraud, Brand Safety and Taxonomy Compliance. There is really no excuse to wait 6 months just to find out what didn’t work when Always-On Digital Accountability can provides real-time insights to identify the risk(s), allowing for corrective actions to fix issues and optimize at-risk media asset.
Business Case Illustration
Conducting a media audit/assessment can easily detect 5% to 15% of a brand’s media dollars at risk. Consider the following:
ANA has estimated that 23% or US$20 billion of programmatic advertising dollars were wasted on ad buying inefficiencies which have ‘minimal reach yet likely performs badly in areas such as fraud, viewability and brand safety’. Unfortunately, a traditional quarterly or post-campaign report only offers limited time to apply corrective actions.
By investing a small percentage of total media spend on a media audit or assessment, advertisers can enjoy up to 15 times ROI. Furthermore, with Always-On Digital Accountability, new issues are flagged as they arise allowing advertisers to address them on a weekly basis and optimize media investments three to four times more effectively than in a traditional audit.
Tips to Get Started with Always-On Digital Accountability
Cultivating an Accountability Mindset into the People, Process and Tools across the extended organizations and media partners to drive accountability.
Deploy Ad Verification Platforms such as DoubleVerify or Integral Ad Science to understand viewability, fraud, brand safety, and more.
Use an advance Data Management and Reporting Platform which can automatically collect and connect fragmented planned vs actual spend across your ad tech platforms to ensure a seamless data journey.
Don’t be content with manual Excel/PDF reports when data is readily available and there are technologies that can do this in near real-time and at scale.
Work with an Independent Partner that has experience with client-agency collaboration and can put a framework in place to help all stakeholders drive the maximum value from media.
Create a scorecard to monitor progress over time because what gets measured gets done.
Next Step Forward
The secret of media investments’ success lies in ensuring accountability. With MSIGHTS' Always-On Digital Accountability solution, we leverage on our expertise in media performance management and client-agency collaboration combined with our MarTech platform to revolutionize media assessments and auditing to deliver real-time accountability.
Or contact your MSIGHTS client engagement contact or reach out to busdev@msights.com to discover how our Always-On Accountability solution can help you independently ensure your digital media investment is optimized.
