Opinion: Perspective - Interpublic clean-up raises transparency issue.(Column)

They say a principle isn't a principle unless it costs your bottom line dear. Well, the principle of transparency - roundly applauded when the IPA president, David Pattison, made it a key plank of his manifesto - could just be about to cost some agencies very dear indeed.

It's IPG's fault (or good example-setting, depending on your point of view). In a final, desperate bid to clean up its act, the mired holding company is putting transparency at the very top of its agenda. As well as cleaning up its books after years of mismanagement and worse, IPG is trying to clean up every aspect of the way it does business.

That mission has some particularly thorny implications for media agencies, and not only those within the IPG family. As part of this clean-up, IPG's Initiative and Universal are being told to hand back any monies made from pretty much everything that isn't honest-to-goodness client fees. It's a nightmare scenario, and I'd have thought a pretty impossible one to pull off fairly. And it will certainly make profits harder to achieve at these companies in the future.

As any media agency will tell you, client fees alone do not a profit make (or rarely). So media agencies will make a bit extra here and there in terms of volume bonuses from media owners or holding on to money that clients have paid for their campaigns but media owners have neglected to invoice for.

All this is standard practice, and certainly not illegal. Some canny clients, of course, will have negotiated contracts with their media agencies to ensure that this sort of extra money gets paid straight back to them.

Usually these clients are willing to pay a proper price for their media agency service in return for such transparency. Other canny clients will pay their media agency dirt money knowing full well that the agency will work hard to make - and keep - revenue from these other practices.

But, let's face it, there are plenty of clients who are being taken for a bit of a ride on this one. Perhaps these are ...