MEDIA FORUM: Should media auditors be reined in or supported?(Editorial)

Some in the industry think that media auditors are stepping beyond their roles. Do Billett's ITV proposals reinforce that view?

John Billett is, some industry wags say, one of life's natural referees So it is no surprise, those same sources say, to find Billett suggesting that there should be an arbiter in the airtime market, in a proposal which aims to offer a protective framework if Carlton and Granada are allowed to form a single airtime sales house.

While Billett stopped short of throwing his own hat into the ring for his task, the wording of his proposal suggested that a media auditing company would be best placed to monitor the sales houses.

The proposal was made last week in a submission to the Competition Commission's investigation into the proposed ITV merger - and it provoked a response in the advertising business that must have surprised even Billett, who in the past has been no stranger to controversy.

A couple of things seemed to irritate. First, the implication conveyed by the document that, because Billetts acts as a media auditor for 41 per cent of the UK's top 500 advertisers, it is able to speak on behalf of the client community. Then there's the call for an independent auditor to monitor a single ITV sales operation - does John Billett see himself as a possible minister of airtime allocation?

It brought to the surface all sorts of festering resentments felt by both media owners (especially broadcasters) and media agencies towards the auditing profession.

The underlying resentment is fuelled by a perception that auditors have been increasingly stepping beyond their traditional role as the industry's bean-counting police. These days, don't they undermine client-agency relationships, then stage-manage the subsequent pitch and end up trying to cosy up to the client in a more general advertising consultancy role? Clients, of course, have a rather different view and often see their auditor as a guardian of their media spend.