Challenge:
San Diego County Credit Union was suffering from the same problem as many other major advertisers. Its media buy was running without weekly evaluation and each month the media buy was falling short of projected ratings goals. (Independent auditing firms estimate that $48 billion out of every $50 billion spent on advertising in the U.S. is unmonitored. In other words, there is no auditing process in place to ensure that this money is spent appropriately). This fact was a growing concern for our client. They asked Advanced Marketing Strategies to evaluate its media purchases and use the agency’s proprietary media tracking technologies to better ensure its media investment in future months. Advanced Marketing Strategies performed a media audit for the months of April and May, and discovered that stations delivered only 83.1 percent of their purchased T.V. ratings and 77.9 percent of their radio ratings for those months.
Strategy:
To prevent this shortfall from happening again, Advanced Marketing Strategies recommended that they implement our Strategic Media Auditing for Radio and Television (SMART) system. SMART monitors television and radio buys for traffic errors (i.e., wrong spots running and spots running in wrong timeslots/dayparts) and ratings shortfalls. With SMART, we can provide clients with daily and weekly reports on the accuracy of their buy. With this information, make goods can be requested before the end of the buy and clients receive what they paid for, when they want it to run.
Results:
With Advanced Marketing Strategies’ SMART system, our client began receiving 100% of the ratings that they purchased, representing a 16.9% increase for television and a 22.1% increase for radio. As the stations were compelled to deliver the schedules accurately, they saw their cost-per-points decrease dramatically (56.1% for radio and 50.8% for television), resulting in a more efficient buy. Our client has met and exceeded its broadcast media goals with AMS recovering $287,339 in media dollars, as well as a 105% delivery of the total buy in 2009. They plan to continue to use this system to ensure their broadcast dollars are spent efficiently.
