More than a decade ago, a local cigarette manufacturer shot an advert in Spain costing Rs26 million. The cost of airing that advert campaign on local TV was Rs15 million. Strange isn’t it? Well, it’s not for those closely associated with the dark underbelly of Pakistan’s media industry, where cost overrun, kickbacks and embezzlements of sorts are quite the norm – all of course at the expense of the client.

Some observers often wrongly bemoan the fact that nowadays most of the adverts that Pakistanis see on their idiot-box are shot in Thailand, Malaysia, or some other exotic location such as Eastern Europe. Their sense of patriotism doesn’t allow ads targeted to Pakistani audience are shot in foreign location. But they wrongly bemoan so because in many of those cases Pakistan either lacks the necessary human capital – say the director of photography – or the lacks the technology to shoot some of the shots.

Be that as it may, there is also no denying that all those trips to Thailand and beyond that marketing team at the client’s end as well media/ad agencies teams make every so often is a part of a complex web of in-kind kickbacks that everyone in that part of the industry is very much comfortable with. And since the client usually lacks the capacity to look where the devil lies – i.e. the details – it ends up paying for all these trips over and above the incremental cost of an advert that could have been easily shot in Pakistan.

Then there are media agencies that happily get their paychecks by showing them the GRPs or normalized TARPs convincing the client that their campaign money has been well spent, when in fact the client needs to be shown other indicators such as the reach, effective frequency and the affinity or conversion to be convinced that her advert is well spent.

How then can the client ensure that she is not being ripped off for the advert she is paying for, and that the media she has is in the right places at competitive places. BR Research posed this question at a recent media audit organized by TerraBiz facilitated by Arif Jhumra and Jibran Hassan of JASB Consulting, and Associates respectively.

Of the many things they emphasized upon, three stood out as most important. One, have a detailed media plan and other strategy documents where the rules of the game and other SOPs are clearly spelled out. So for instance, instead of saying that the advert will have 80 percent reaching; it should be more specific — say 80 percent reach at more than three exposures. Or instead of having normalized TRP, it should spell out age-wise TRPs, and so on and so forth.

Second, they argue that the internal audit departments at the corporations should be tasked to set up policies and procedures in place, just as they put policies and procedures in place for the purchase of any capital intensive machinery. Third, corporations, especially those that have a high marketing spend, should also seek external assistance by employing an independent auditor to conduct a media audit on periodic basis.

Media audit as a business line for audit firms has been growing which is why the likes of JASB, PWC, and E&Y have set up shops of late.

But in the final analysis, the realization and the push for media audit will have to come from the boards of these corporations; boards that not only understand that media is after all is often the single biggest item in the marketing budget but also that misspent or ill-spent ad/marketing money will eventually affect their top-line growth.