Advertising Compensation and Benchmarking, Contract Compliance and Risk Assessments are vital services for large corporations with tens of millions, if not billions of dollars of marketing spend. Advertising Audit International (AAI) provides exactly these services to a broad range of Fortune 500 brands. Adding BriefLogic’s new “agency input audit” to the mix gives corporations a first-ever 360 degree view of their agency engagements.

In the complex and often confusing world of client-agency transactions, AAI’s standard review techniques are cost-effective methods to ensure the accurate and timely review of advertising costs and expenses. While most financial review firms, auditors and CPA firms typically use sampling techniques, AAI examines each individual invoice and its related line item costs for accuracy and contract compliance.

However, as AAI CEO Michael Lay states, “all of the costs we help recover for our clients, and it is a staggering figure, may be just the tip of the iceberg as we go to market with our new BriefLogic partnership.”

According to some industry analysts, total communications spend worldwide, across all marketing disciplines will exceed one trillion dollars in 2010. Currently, the corporate side of the industry is focused on the outcomes of that spend. Marketers are constantly interrogating the output of their agencies, their creative ideas, or the “stuff that sells.” According to co-founder and CEO, Casey Jones, BriefLogic has proved conclusively that someone has to think more deeply about the quality of the direction that sets these billions of dollars in motion. In a recent survey conducted by Greenberg Brand Strategies, it was determined that 30 percent of all agency time and energy is wasted or made inefficient due to poor input from marketing and brand managers.

Where AAI has experience in making sure that every single dollar that a marketer’s agency spends is accounted for, BriefLogic makes sure that it is directed properly at the front end of the process. AAI provides comprehensive audits of agency spend after-the-fact, and BriefLogic provides briefing tools, audit services, and agency input training to give marketers and agencies confidence that waste and inefficiency don’t occur on the input end.

Nice blog post from Media Asia – http://bit.ly/cuN8GH rating the joint BriefLogic/Microsoft bit at the ANA “one of the most introspective and interesting presentations” of the event. Great response in general from a lot of corporations attending the event, including General Mills, 3M and American Express. Thanks and compliments to co-presenter Bruno Gralpois of Microsoft.

On October 12th, AdAge posted the article by Jack Neff titled: Why It’s Time to Do Away With the Brand Manager – P&G, Unilever Among Those Embracing New Roles in Social Media Age

Have any of you ever struggled with the term ‘advertising?’ I’ve been struggling with it since my early career at Ogilvy & Mather when I was first introduced to the concept of agency discipline integration. The most highly regarded publication in our industry is Advertising Age (AdAge). We also have the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Advertising Week (AdWeek), and the 4As, the Association of American Advertising Agencies. Yet none of the companies who belong to the ANA or the 4As and few of the executives reading AdAge or AdWeek limit their forms of communication to advertising. In fact, saying that you are in advertising in the traditional sense has become something of a career-limiting statement. Advertising as a term, in its best sense, is used as synonymous for all the various disciplines of “persuasion” in Marketing, with the possible exception of direct selling.

Persuasion might be a more appropriate “P-word” than promotion in the 4Ps of Marketing—product, price, placement and promotion—yet persuasion connotes a more active approach to marketing than many of the critical tasks we engage in, including brand advertising, web-site development, branded content and even customer support, events, and conferences. In all of them we are advocating.

Let us suggest that despite all the arguments we have in the halls of our corporations or agencies about what type of tactical discipline works best, we are all in exactly the same business. If we are communicating with intent to persuade, then we are advocates in the field of Advocacy. Marketers are brand advocates. Advertising is one form of paid advocacy. There are others. What we are proposing is revolutionary.  It requires new language, or at the very least, the repurposing of better terms to describe what we do in this new hyper-communications age. We are all of us in the business of creating compelling messages that advocate successfully in the hearts and minds of our target audience for and in behalf of products, services, issues, ideals, ideologies, policies and individuals whom we find worthy of our best thinking and efforts.

Physics is struggling to find the holy grail — a T.O.E., a.k.a. theory of everything, or unified field theory. It is because they need to bring together the seemingly incompatible mathematics relativity and quantum mechanics. Our task as an industry is much easier than theirs. Think for just a moment about the fundamentals of our business. Wouldn’t you agree that there is no “line” above which or below which we work as communicators. There is only the goal—to persuade—and the work we do to achieve that goal, to advocate.

Advocacy – the most accurate word to describe what we do.

For those of us in the United States of America, adoption of the term “advocacy” to describe our business simplifies things. We need not change the name of AdAge, or the monikers by which our industry associations identify themselves. We simply evolve our language to keep pace with our times.  The 4As become the Association of American Advocacy Agencies, making public what we already know to be true, that they do web sites as well. (Gasp.) And public relations, demand generating FSIs, banners, direct mail, and email blasts as well.

Yes, advocacy has specific meaning in some countries. It is identified with Law. If we admit it, however, such association might do us credit. Corporate attorneys have more clout in the board room than marketers. If you agree that advertising might not be the most accurate term to describe the full depth and breadth of what we do as an industry then you’ll have to agree that no word in the English language more accurately represents us than advocacy.

Once that slight change in how you perceive our business takes place in your mind, you realize two things. First, that determining what you want people to believe, feel, and do and discovering the most compelling and effective way of persuading them is as important to your company as the other holy grail in our business, the creative.  Reasons, claims, and perceptions constitute what we want to “say.” Our creative teams determine how much attention people pay to these messages. Social media, television ads, public relations, web sites – these are simply the means by which we communicate all of the messages necessary to be successful marketers. Forrester, whom the AdAge article is referencing, is making a compelling point about the titles and responsibilities of those who are currently “brand managers.” What about taking it a step further? Most non-marketers in corporations struggle to clearly understand our discipline as it is. Let’s make it easier for them. We are all, not just brand managers, but advocates.

As many of you may have heard, the ANA conducted a survey in July of this year regarding formal agency performance evaluations conducted by marketers. An ANA news article posted on September 14th titled, “Majority of Marketers Conduct Formal Agency Performance Evaluations According to New ANA Survey” regarding the survey discusses the benefits of these evaluations. The two top benefits are identifying and improving under-performing agency relationships and identifying and recognizing the high-performing ones. A full report of the survey results will be presented at the ANA Agency/Client Forum on September 24th in New York City.

One aspect of the survey we found to be of particular interest is that the rising majority of firms are conducting 360-degree evaluations where the agency also evaluates the client. According to the ANA article, when conducted with a “trusted, neutral point person,” or third party, the performance evaluation is able to remain focused on real results like objectives and metrics instead of contesting personalities.

The 360-degree evaluations are vital to ensuring continuing performance on both sides of the relationship and the presence of a neutral mediator is vital to the success of the evaluation. It is important for the agency’s team is able to be open and honest about the input and direction they are receiving from the client without the fear of dire consequence and repercussion. The fear is understandable; who wants to bite the hand that feeds?

The presence of a mediator should naturally alleviate that fear by providing an unbiased view of the input and direction coming from the client and the resulting performance of the agency. This process provides viable solutions to existing problems instead of wasting time and resources to switch agencies, only to risk discovering the same problems again because the poor agency performance may have been a result of poor input and direction.

Performance relies on the quality of work delivered by both parties. The presence of a mediator can determine which party is ultimately responsible for the success or failure. Sometimes it’s the client, sometimes it’s the agency, and sometimes it’s both.

If you would like to read more on the ANA Survey, take a look at Jack Neff’s September 14th article titled, “ANA Survey: Agency-Performance Reviews Are Now Business as Usual” posted on AdAge.

Of course, at Jones&Bonevac we have a particular stake in this subject. We are, after all, consulting with a few very large brands on the subject of agency engagement. Not so surprisingly, we agree with the majority on this one. What do you think?