Auditors of advertising campaigns: in Lithuania, the customer often does not receive what he paid for

Dainius Blynas, head of Media Audits, who has been working in the advertising audit business for six years, says that the advertising planning campaigns audited by his company in Lithuania often fail to implement the goals set in the advertising plans, that is, they do not reach the specified indicators.

“The purpose of the audit is to verify whether the advertising budget was used transparently and rationally, whether the media planning agency achieved the indicators it promised to the client. We monitor that all parameters of the campaigns are fulfilled and that the purchased advertising positions are not overpaid. “Unfortunately, in quite a few cases, during the audit, we see that the advertising positions were not paid in accordance with the terms of the agreement, sometimes they were overpaid,” admits D. Blynas.

A similar opinion is held by Rafal Szysz, the 19-year-old media planning audit manager of the company STARS, whose company has also audited campaigns in Lithuania.

When asked to compare the situation of the Lithuanian market with other Western markets, he pointed out that few customers in Lithuania decide to audit their expenses, which is not good for the market, because the majority of the market is never audited.

“Lithuania stands out the most because here we very rarely see fine clauses in contracts between clients and advertising planning agencies, which is quite surprising. Yes, there are some consequences for underperformance, but they are usually limited to reduced or lost bonus rewards. But let’s be honest: in tenders, media planning agencies can dump prices and not fulfill the order or achieve the promised figures. They lose the bonus (usually 0.5-1% of additional reward), but the client pays 5-15% more to the advertising channels for this,” points out R. Szysz.

According to him, the result of such contracts is that the advertiser receives much less communication for their set budget, the agency loses a small part of the official income, often keeps the unofficial income, but keeps the contract with the client, which is the most important thing for the agency.

“This situation exists in other European markets as well, but it usually prevails where few clients use the services of professional audit consultants, or where very close cooperation between the client and the agency prevails from a long time, where mutual trust is so strong that audits are avoided, in order not to spoil such relations. However, such cases can cost advertising clients a lot of money,” points out the manager of the audit company “Stars”.

Auditors monitor and check many advertising indicators – rates of advertising positions, discounts, markups, collected ratings, audience reached, digital advertising impressions, panel clicks and conversions. Not infrequently, the observed indicators do not correspond to the terms of contracts with clients.

The Media Audits guide explains how this manifests itself in the daily work of auditors.

“We notice that the data of advertising campaign reports provided by media planning agencies do not always correspond to the indicators that we observe. Additional markups and indexes are applied during the implementation of campaigns, pricing is incorrectly detailed, clip durations are incorrect, wholesale prices are incorrectly specified, and conversion indexes between different buying audiences are incorrect. Sometimes manipulations and research data are even noticed,” says D. Blynas.

D. Blynas, who has many years of experience in the field of digital media planning, says that when auditing campaigns, it becomes clear that sometimes other objects are sold to the client than bought, for example, impressions are bought with CPC pricing and clicks are sold with CPM pricing.

“In most cases, the customer purchasing advertising services cannot and does not know how to check whether the advertisement has been broadcast effectively and to what extent it has reached the target audience. “For example, specifically in Lithuania, our audited advertising campaigns often have an unattainable number of conversions (for example, sales), but this is not visible in the agency’s reports, because other, better-looking indicators are presented,” D. Blynas mentions the observed inconsistencies.

The head of “Media Audits” says that in Lithuania advertising clients are taking the first steps by checking the results of advertising campaigns and analyzing their financial efficiency. Some companies are not aware of such possibilities, while others are not yet inclined to check how the money allocated for advertising is spent. Such problems would be solved by a regular campaign audit”, D. Blynas believes.

He claims that an advertising audit is not a tool to put pressure on the advertising planning agency, it is more about helping the advertiser get the best services from his agency, both in terms of price and strategy. In addition, it gives an advantage to agencies that provide higher quality services, because the quality of the work is visible during the audit. According to D. Blyna, the auditing of advertising campaigns contributes to the overall improvement and transparency of the advertising planning market.

“Advertising planning agencies, knowing that campaigns are being audited, make much more efforts to provide services properly, and clients are more assured that the proposed measures meet the goals of their campaigns, and thus less valuable offers do not appear. An audit is an important method of analysis in order to transparently and effectively use every euro allocated for advertising”, the auditor is convinced.

For his part, Mr. Szysz says that a solution to more transparent use of advertising funds has already been invented and is being used – a very well-written media planning contract that not only motivates agencies for good rates and good work, but also severely punishes underperformance commitments where the fines are high and, most importantly, where the fines are known to all market participants before bidding. In this way, the price offers are brought closer to a reasonable market level, but still competitive.

“This almost completely eliminates price dumping and creates a good basis for strong cooperation with media planning agencies.” And this is enough for most agencies to play a fairer game, because in the event of an audit, they may have serious financial problems,” says R. Szysz.