Mediacom misreporting forces clients to ‘check everything constantly’ amid trust issues
Meet the Marketers at Mumbrella360 L:R Bauer’s Natalie Bettini, Acer’s Katherine Nguyen, Mumbrella’s Alex Hayes, Brown Forman’s Sarah Nichols, David Jones’s Adriane McDermott,
The misreporting which occurred at Mediacom has created an atmosphere of suspicion with even trusted individuals in agencies now subject to greater scrutiny, a panel of top marketers at the Mumbrella360 conference has said.
The general manager for consumer marketing at Bauer Media, Natalie Bettini, suggested it has needed to be more vigilant since the controversy, in which staff at Mediacom were found to have deliberately faked TV results in campaign reports for key clients.
Speaking at the Meet the Marketers panel discussion at the 360 conference in Sydney yesterday, Bettini, declined to comment on the incident specifically as her company has retained Mediacom as it media buyer, but admitted it was a “wake-up call”.
Unless Acer is buying etam data, which would be a colossal waste of money, their systems could not have prevented what happened with some of Medicom clients. A lot of marketers just don’t get it.
@Spelling police, If Acer had bought etam data, and it prevented what Mediacom had been doing to other clients, how is that a waste of money?
The problem:
Quote 1 – ““I am not sure whether they are not remunerated enough because we certainly get charged enough.”
Quote 2: “At the same time I do sometimes wonder, not so much with media but with other agencies, just how do they actually make money because it’s an expensive arena to be in”.
First quote says basically ‘we are charged a lot of money’ (ie possibly too much, how could they not be remunerated enough) then the second one contradicts the statement stating she doesn’t know how agencies can make money due to costs of being competitive. A prickly dynamic to exist within for any agency.
@Tim – Because ETam data is very expensive, they already pay for it through their agency contract. It’s a difficult situation because the only way to know the post analysis info a client generally receives (ppt, excel) is accurate is to literally do the agencies job yourself in terms of TV optimization. Or…I guess you could ask a hungry competitor agency to run it for you through AQX and do spot checks?