Case study: Increase media spend transparency and raise ROI

One of the world’s largest advertisers had limited visibility as to how and when its media budget was spent. The media processes existed outside of business operation, financial systems, and forecasting processes.

The local nature of media drove many markets to operate in silos with highly fragmented media processes, systems, reports, and analytics. The ability to make investment choices based on ROI was very difficult due to the lack of standardization in Media Mix Modeling.

In addition to the internal challenges, the media landscape was changing rapidly due to emerging media types and new performance metrics. The client aimed to optimize and standardize its media processes on a local, regional, and global level and gain better transparency into media spend.

PwC’s solution

PwC conducted interviews with key stakeholders in five markets: North America, Latin America, Asia, Western Europe, and Central Europe/Middle East/Asia. This included coordination and collaboration with operations, marketing, planning agencies, buying agencies, IT, and finance personnel, both at the local and regional level.

After analyzing the current state, PwC designed the future state based on the field visit findings, industry knowledge, subject matter specialist expertise, and best practices. We developed process maps to capture this future state as it relates to the client’s budget, plan, buy, pay, and track macro media processes.

Impact on the client’s business

As a result of our recommendations, PwC positioned the client for a breakaway sustainable competitive advantage through the following attributes:

• Agility to adapt to consumer’s changing media consumption habits
• Maximized ROI by shifting funds to the highest return medium
• Efficiency gains from spending less on media by establishing common protocols
• Standardized metrics to enable faster media evaluation and decision making
• More transparency at all levels
• Reduced costs by employing global platforms
• Automated reporting via standard templates