SCOPEN and the Independent Agency Search & Selection Company (IAS) have launched SCOPEN Rating, which has revealed South Africa’s top media agencies. The rating is a South African first, and combines the views and opinions of media agency leaders, as well as the data gleaned from the Agency Scope research conducted every two years.
The top five media agencies overall are phd, The MediaShop, Mindshare, Carat and OMD; the top three independent media agencies are Mediology, Alphabet Soup and relative newcomer, Planit.
The rankings were arrived at through an intense process involving the leadership of South Africa’s media agencies. It was their input that allowed SCOPEN Ratings to arrive at a weighting of criteria agreeable to the leaders.
“This is the first time a ranking has been produced with the consensus of South Africa’s media agencies,” said SCOPEN co-founder and global CEO, César Vacchiano. “We produced it by asking MDs and CEOs of agencies operating in South Africa the key factors, attributes and criteria they thought should be used to produce this rating. We combined the responses, most voted by leaders in media agencies and came up with six criteria,” he explained. This was the first phase of the process.
In phase two, agency leaders were asked to weight the criteria. “Of the specific data sent by 17 media agencies, their ranking was established according to client satisfaction, new business gained in 2019, creativity and innovation, market perception, a match to the ideal of media agencies by marketers and awards won in 2019,” said Vacchiano.
“In combining the data gleaned directly from media agency CEOs and MDs about their business and AGENCY SCOPE 2019/2020, we worked with the agencies to determine the percentage weighting per criteria, which boosted the credibility of our findings,” he added.
SCOPEN Rating highlights the response from marketers and media agencies about what is important for media success.
Johanna McDowell, founder and chief executive officer at Independent Agency Selection (IAS) and managing partner SCOPEN Africa, said reaction from media agencies had been positive. She said the fact that it wasn’t the agencies going out there with bragging rights, but the fact that the ratings were independently arrived at that made it powerful. “It’s the credibility factor,” she said.
Noting their success, Wayne Bishop of phd said the date was extremely valuable to the agency and its clients, and robust enough to take its place among industry awards.
“Creative agencies seem to fare better with the amount of recognition they get, where the responsibility for seeking out target audiences and ensuring their work goes to the right places – the job of the media agencies – is often overlooked,” he said. “SCOPEN Rating’s sound methodology makes it a practical and important tool for our industry.”
McDowell added that SCOPEN Rating, with the support of the media trends report from AGENCY SCOPE South Africa 2019/2020, delivered a focus view the media agency landscape. “This enabled us to ramp up importance of media agencies based on solid data,” she said.
The response from the media agencies showed extraordinary trust in SCOPEN and the IAS, said Vacchiano, “giving us a platform from which to base further studies on to continue to note benchmarks set by media agencies”.
