From the most complex audit of billions of dollars of agency media purchases to the intricate details of effectively working with agency creative teams, R3 has the most comprehensive service offering in the business.

All of our services combine extensive insights with proprietary processes for ensuring the most effective and efficient outcomes with your agency partners. We can tailor-make any of these services to address your unique concerns and challenges.

Analysis of your internal and agency processes with clear ideas to achieve best practice

R3’s Media Effectiveness Audit service takes an in-depth look at current practices by your Media Agency, marketing team and Media Owners to effectively enhance overall media discipline. The goal is to optimize working processes and benchmark and improve media performance. R3 investigates what worked and what could be optimized to provide actionable steps in driving tangible improvement.

What Are The Benefits?

Enhanced Working Effectiveness between you and your media agencies.

Independent Benchmarks & Planning Metrics to measure the performance of your media agency.

Optimized Media Planning through best practice insights and analysis.

R3’s Approach to Media Effectiveness Audits

Our analysis centers around 6 key factors to pinpoint areas for improvement in your current approach.

1. Client Brief – Does your brief set a clear challenge to the agency? Are there metrics put in place to drive maximum ROI?
2. Insights – Are consumer, media and brand insights strong enough to drive a differentiated strategy?
3. Strategic Planning – Has the communication plan brought the strategy to life? Are the touch points optimized?
4. Tactical Planning – Have the right goals been set in a specified time frame? Has a buying/optimization approach been implemented? Does the media mix enhance impact?
5. Post-Buy – Does the post-buy provide a detailed explanation and action plan? Is there room for better automation and reporting of post-buys?
6. Best Practice – What has worked so far and where is there room for improvement going forward?

An MEA involves a thorough and disciplined review of your current approach to marketing insights, metrics and output – with the goal of improving that output.

Our objective is to benchmark how well the whole organization is aligned to achieving its business goals and objectives and to offer an independent assessment of what actions will come next.

R3’s approach to Marketing Effectiveness Audits

We follow a consistent five step process to audit your current approach.

• Immerse: Discovery, Stakeholder Interviews, Stakeholder Reviews
• Define: Role of Marketing, Priority Questions, Force-Field Analysis
• Benchmark: Best-practice Assessment
• Align: Audit metric set and develop metrics as required
• Action: Roadmap for evolving measurement capabilities

R3’s training to workshops and training

• Every workshop is led by an R3 Principal or Senior Consultant equipped with extensive experience on both the client and agency side. We may also bring in outside Social Media and Digital experts as needed to support and tailor to your needs.
• We kick off the workshop with a pre-program discussion with you to pinpoint your needs and enable us to tailor our tools to them before we agree on the appropriate modules for a one or two day session.
• The workshop content is entirely flexible, based on your team’s specific needs. We have developed 15-20 ‘modules’ that run for one hour each – with each module supplemented with an interactive element to allow participants the opportunity to test out their knowledge and engage in a thorough exploration of the topic/category through discussion and hands-on practical applications.
• Following the course, we then follow up one month later with one-on-one interviews with each member to review, gather feedback and provide an informal assessment for management.

R3’s Agency Model Approach

• We identify where you and your agency partners currently are, and your needs for the future.
• We assess if current agency partnerships are well-positioned to deliver against your marketing priorities and requirements.
• We re-think ways of working and agency engagement models to ensure you receive a solution that is agile and maximizes marketing budgets against a drive for efficiency.

R3’s Agency Review Approach

• We have agency knowledge and understand how to drive a clear process.
• Our recommendations are objective and independent; our only goal in this process is to find the very best long-term partner for you.
• We follow a consistent seven-step process fine-tuned over hundreds of reviews to ensure a long-term fit with the agency you ultimately select, wrapping up with a six-month review to make sure you made the right choice.

R3’s Approach to Agency Remuneration

In the remuneration review, we take an in-depth look at the fee negotiation process from five angles – scope index, resources, time allocation, overhead rate and fees. We then use the quarterly reconciliation process as a platform to share feedback and facilitate timely decisions on scope and fees.

• Scope of Work Management: R3 believes that the foundation of any remuneration is developing a detailed scope of work. We help marketers co-create scope of work and remove redundancies and duplications.
• Fee Benchmarking: R3 compares agency fees against each other, and against R3 benchmarks. We don’t just review the fee and hours, but also mix in seniority and discipline and resource allocation. Our benchmarking pool is constantly updated and covers over 300 agencies across 10 categories and 65 countries.
• Contract Negotiations: R3 ensures that best practice contract clauses are in place with focus on transparency, programmatic, audit and data ownership.
• Fee Reconciliation: R3 helps marketers track scope of work changes, and advises on how to offset differences to enable better planning of retainer and resources. Our reconciliation process goes beyond work scope to check on resource commitment and allocation.

• Online evaluation: We begin by understanding your needs and assessing previous evaluations to get a feel for where you stand. We then adapt our questionnaires, or use a format of your choosing, to host on our online platform.
• Presentation & report: From the raw data amassed from the evaluations and interviews, we provide a detailed report with both quantitative and qualitative insights. Rather than apportioning blame, our presentation looks to pinpoint areas for improvement and what steps can be taken to move towards a better relationship.
• Follow up actions: One big difference between our tool and other standard reviews are that follow-ups are provided to every individual who agreed to commit to action over the ensuing 30 days, 60 days, and so on. In short, we empower them to face the issue and take the action to reach the goal.

R3’s Agency Exit Audit helps marketers resolve outstanding issues with outgoing agencies in a professional and transparent manner, while allowing marketing teams to move forward with new agency partnerships with ease.

We provide an independent view on agency volume bonuses, accuracy of billing, unpaid and overdue balances, fee reconciliation and credit balances.

R3’s Exit Audit Approach

• Immerse: Understanding the situation in detail through interviews and briefings with key members of the company and incumbent.
• Define: Defining outcomes and goals, with supporting documentation.
• Review: Audit of the documentation in the agency’s office.
• Consolidation: Consolidation, with clear actions, best practices and recommendations for action related to outstanding issues.

R3’s Agency Process Audit ensures the optimization of ways of working within the client teams and with the agencies.

We help develop and track the RASCI between the client and the different sets of agencies and review internal and external team structures to ensure integrated process. We also provide an independent assessment compared against global best practices and industry standards.

R3’s Media Financial Audit takes a detailed look at key projects and the invoices that relate to them.

The goal is to attain better relationships based on transparency in the financial processes between marketers and their agencies. The objective is to give clear direction for improvement areas and ensure best practices among agencies in the handling of client money.

The largest discrepancy we see in the auditing work we do relates to the correlation between third party invoices and what marketers are charged. Our analysis covers 5 key metrics to provide a comprehensive assessment of the rebates, the financial processes, and the compliance of your agency versus Contract and Best Practice.

Here are some of the key questions we aim to give answers to:

• Completeness – Are all the rebates returned to the client? Are there any rebates received by the agency that have not been communicated to the client?
• Accuracy – Are the rebates provided to the client as per the terms in the vendor agreement?
• Timeliness – Are the rebates communicated to the client on time? Does the client utilize the rebates on time?
• Validity – Do the supporting documents provide adequate assurance on actual transactions?
• Transparency – Are there any arrangements that exist between the agency and vendor that are not communicated to the client? Does the agency demonstrate initiative in providing the client with sufficient information on the rebate process?

R3’s proprietary online Client Agency Performance Evaluation tool – is designed to provide complete feedback and diagnostics on the relationship. CAPE has already been extensively implemented with multinational and government marketers. We now have global benchmarks to compare relationships, usually supplemented with face-to-face consulting. We encourage a two-way CAPE process where agencies also receive the opportunity to evaluate the client, and we closely monitor the Action Plan.