• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 1, 2006

Media agencies are growing accustomed to a the increasing presence of a wide range of consultants and even auditors when their accounts go into review. Now so called "media auditors" are beginning to experience reviews of their own. As the practice of media auditing grows in popularity among big marketers with rigorous corporate compliance departments, auditors are being asked to participate in formal RFP - or request for proposals - to compete for the right to evaluate the performance of media agencies.

The RFP process began in the fourth quarter of 2005, and appears to be accelerating as more marketers - especially packaged goods marketers - become interested in using the third party consultants to look at how their agencies are planning, buying and posting their media.

Two marketers - the Chili's restaurant chain, and drug marketing giant Novartis --initiated reviews for their media auditing accounts in the fourth quarter and have since assigned them to Media IQ, the fledgling media auditing firm launched two years ago by former Interpublic media executive Michael Lotito and his partners. Those accounts, plus a third that was not part of an RFP process, Xerox, bring Media IQ's roster up to 12 marketers. The firm, which utilizes sophisticated analytical systems to evaluate not simply whether agencies got the media they bought for their clients, but whether they were buying the right kind of media, and that their client's ads got the right treatment in terms of the positioning of those ads, also is competing in three new RFPs issued by three of the world's largest marketers, including at least one major packaged goods marketer. All three of those reviews were launched in January and are expected to be decided soon.

Lotito declined to say who they were as a condition of those reviews, but he acknowledged that his closest competitors, U.K.-based Billett's Media Performance Monitoring America (MPMA) unit, and Media Analysis Plus, which owns Hawk Media, are believed to be competing as well. Like Media IQ, those firms focus on the quality of the buys, as well as the validation of the media placements.

"All of a sudden there is a deluge of activity," says Lotito, who believes it is a reflection of the increasing role of corporate procurement departments in the media services area. "Clients want to know what they got. And they want to know that they got the right stuff," he says.