By Victoria Potter, US Business Director at ECI Media Management

The current media landscape is complex and ever-changing, thanks to constant technological advances and a dynamic economic context. It’s an exciting yet challenging time to be a marketer: with so much consumer data to leverage and so many channels to choose from, how do you ensure that your advertising investment is working hard to build your brand and drive sales?

To learn from your advertising campaigns, a media audit is crucial

Working with creative, media, tech and data specialists is of course a given: from concept to execution, working alongside experts will help you to ensure that your strategy has the best chance of reaching the right audiences, and resonating with them. But to learn from your campaigns, you need to conduct a media audit.

Go beyond the pool for an approach that optimizes against your objectives

The traditional method of media audit is to use the pool to benchmark the advertiser’s spend to understand whether their media buy has delivered good value. However, pool benchmarking only scratches the surface of how data can help advertisers understand the efficiency of their advertising investment. Our forensic approach to auditing goes beyond the pool approach: it is more strategic and focuses on achieving the client’s goals, not just whether good value was achieved. As media fragmentation becomes more prevalent, KPIs such as targeting and coverage are key drivers of greater efficiency and value. This allows us to understand the sweet spot of hitting the audience from the targeting, reach and cost perspectives, and to provide actionable insights into how they could buy better for their next campaign.

A bespoke KPI framework

As modern auditing needs to incorporate quality KPIs and spend effectiveness in order to deliver value to the advertiser, we establish a bespoke KPI framework that optimizes the client’s ROI. We’re agile, digital-native and independent: ever since our formation we have championed a modern approach to media auditing so that we can help our clients to not just navigate the increasingly complex media landscape, but to benefit from that complexity.

There’s nothing more expensive than buying the wrong strategy

Never has it been so important to optimise media buying and reach the right audiences in the most efficient way. The TV landscape is undergoing momentous change: audiences are fragmenting as the number of streaming platforms multiplies, many of them ad-free. Ratings on linear and OTT TV are deteriorating but, but the cost of advertising is still inflating (see our latest inflation report for more insight and context). This means that being present on the wrong programming carries higher stakes than in the past: there is nothing more expensive than buying the wrong strategy.

Change is the only constant

In the complex modern media landscape, change is the only constant, and keeping abreast of that change is the only way to win. Advertisers must understand how to make their ad dollars work as hard as possible in order to maximize effectiveness – and a modern auditor can help that to happen.

At ECI Media Management, our approach guarantees higher media value than the pool approach, as it is specific and tailored to our clients’ needs.

If you’d like to discover how a modern media audit could benefit your media performance, contact value@ecimm.com

Image: EtiAmmos/Shutterstock