Quite often media agencies get put into the exact same category as advertising agencies and ad buying agencies. When this happens they all tend to get painted with the same brush when opinions are being made about them. There is a difference between these entities as a media agency takes on the role of planning the advertising and marketing campaigns and then managing them.
According to some news opinions, one of the difficulties that advertising and ad buying agencies are facing an issue with transparency and they are concerned about the repercussions of this.This revolves around digital ad buying. Clients depending on this type of advertising spend big dollars on their ad campaigns but at times may not be totally clear as to what the actual cost of the advertising is in respect to its rate of return.
As a result of this, some ad buying agencies are striving to make this more transparent so it won’t be such an issue in the future. From a media agency point of view, this would be perceived as good news as this particular agent focuses heavily on costs to the client as part of the services they offer as a media agency.
It appears that this really came to a head when the National Advertisers Commission released a report that indicated how money was being made through ad buying for buyers and technology vendors. This raised concerns about rebates and commissions that perhaps could be classed as hidden fees.
This type of news is important to the media agencies as it is something that they must be aware of in order to keep control of the costs for their clients.
One of the steps that is being taken by at least one agency is to offer free software usage to their client base to allow their clients the chance to track their costs. This way their clients are getting a clear picture of their digital media transactions and they are able to analyze their costs much easier and are able to track it. It is believed that this is a useful resource and it may entice some media agencies to lean towards others in the industry that they do business with that are taking these types of steps to create more transparency.