Do billings reflect the reality of media agencies?(Brief Article)

Why are media specialist reluctant to declare their income figures? Is it modesty or do they have something to hide?

Some people say that the league tables published annually in Campaign's Top 300 report are a matter of life and death. That (to borrow the words of a Liverpudlian Scot once revered in sporting circles) is nonsense. Of course it's nonsense. They're far more important than that.

There are always those who are tempted to dismiss the rankings as an irrelevance. Or no more than a bit of harmless fun. But those same people will doubtless be obsessed with their league position. It's something you tend to feature in credentials material or in pitch presentations. It matters a lot for internal morale too. The raw numbers may not say very much about agency culture or branding but they do say an awful lot about status and your general place in the pecking order.

Strange, then, that the billings remain the currency used by the industry to calculate that pecking order. Billings are a notoriously inaccurate marker. Or, to be more accurate, "declared billings" figures are a notoriously inaccurate marker. Agencies routinely make them up. They rarely bear any relation to the media spend figures as measured by MMS.

And aren't they increasingly irrelevant anyway? Haven't media agencies been evolving from old-fashioned haggling specialists into brand communications strategists and consultancy companies? Don't many agencies have tons of planning-only business? Surely billings no longer reflect the reality of the industry.

In this year's Top 300 entry form, Campaign invited media specialists to give us their income figure. Only six responded. The issue was also debated recently by the media policy group within the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising -- and according to some reports, it was dismissed within a couple of minutes.

Is that true? If so, why? Jim Marshall, the chief executive of MediaVest, states categorically that this version of events is well wide of the mark. "The truth is that it only took a couple of words and the second one was `off'," he reveals. "I'm not at all sure there is any real argument in favour of releasing an income figure. I sort of understand why it's relevant for [creative] agencies where billings are less relevant. I know that people are talking about media companies becoming more like brand consultancies but the truth is that we are all primarily planners and buyers of media. Where media companies have acquired consultancy expertise it is always directed to the effective planning and buying of media. And people talk about the fact that they have planning-only business these days. But it's not beyond the wit of man to find a way of representing that."