Media agency pitches have been a common way to choose a media partner for many decades. The practice started in the USA and nowadays it can be said that almost all businesses choose a media agency through a pitch. So we can ask why Media Audits offers a pitching service, what new things do we add to the process, what value do our services bring? After all, for a long time, pitches have been run without external organisers.
Media agency pitching service is a sign of the maturing of the media market. It happened in the Western markets and it has come to the Baltic countries. But more importantly, organising competitions through external partners brings very real value. Here is what we hear from clients in Lithuania for whom we have already organized competitions.
Organizing pitches is a very costly process for business, as it requires a lot of time and attention. Pitches do not have a very clear model, so you have to improvise every time, creating some parts of the process from scratch. At the same time, it is a very important process for business as it involves one of the biggest cost lines - advertising. But advertising is not homogeneous and involves at least 5-6 media and dozens of channels. Each time, the question is how to evaluate the price offers - after all, there are at least as many prices as there are media channels, i.e. dozens. The challenges do not stop at the price, but are complemented by the challenge of assessing the competence of the media agency. This is certainly not easy for businesses, as they are not media professionals themselves, but they still have to decide which agency has the best competences. And not the best in the abstract, but the best for the specific needs of the business for the next 3-5 years.
In response to this need, we at Media Audits, in our eight years of operation in Lithuania, have developed a template for how a pitch can be run, so that the business does not have to reinvent the wheel. The process is very clear: a business submits its media and channel needs, we put it into our tables, agencies enter their prices and our formulas compare all the prices. The formulas are transparent to the business down to the smallest detail and reflect the business need - media and channels are weighted according to the proportion of the budget allocated to the business media and the size of the audience reached. Thus, the larger the budget allocated and the more business users a medium reaches, the more important the price offered. Agencies know this and are therefore motivated to compete on the prices that matter most to the business.
At Media Audits, we assess the competence of a media agency by providing agencies with a brief for an advertising campaign. Best practice is to take a key challenge facing the business in marketing over the next 3-5 years and we design the brief around that. For example, in recent times this is often the generation of conversions in e-commerce. Based on the assignment, it becomes clear to the business which agency can be the best helper to deal with this challenge.
Media Audits was founded by professionals with experience in media agencies themselves, so we can translate the business need into the language of agencies. Our brief asks for very specific solutions from the agencies - the agencies have to guess less about what the business needs and, in turn, the business gets clearly comparable assignments from the agencies. Later, in live meetings with the agencies, we listen to presentations of the assignments together with the business people and supplement the business questions to the agencies with specific media expertise to help the business compare the assignments. Finally, the process culminates in an expert evaluation questionnaire where 10-15 criteria are scored on a ten-point scale and each agency receives a "grade". The panel that writes the grade is usually made up of representatives of the business and 1-2 external experts (we from Media Audits are often involved).
Price and quality are added together in a predetermined proportion (e.g. 60+40) to produce an objective and transparent pitch result. We almost always ask agencies for secondary quotes, and for businesses (our clients) we recommend giving the agency feedback on the quote, identifying that your price is not good enough in certain media and channels. Almost always the prices become more favourable and are easy to compare with the previous offer, again in the Media Audits tables mentioned above.
In summary, the main value of Media Audits is to save businesses money. Businesses need to spend much less time - organising, communicating, managing potential reputational risks. But that's not the full value of our services, because when we organize a pitch it becomes much easier to audit and ensure the real value of the selected agency. It also gives businesses a more realistic legal means of claiming the "price" submitted in the pitch, as Media Audits' price tables are an annex to the legal contract with the agency.