Include Specific Performance Objectives: Best-practice Agency Evaluation Series Part 1

Agency Evaluation Issues

In developing agency relationship evaluation scorecards, many advertiser now want to define specific performance objectives for the year and accommodate that data into the overall assessment framework.

These objectives are important because they are increasingly linked to incentive compensation calculations and payments.

However, a common frustration is that their existing relationship evaluation program cannot accommodate a process to include various measures of performance against those objectives.

Include Objectives

Advertisers with best practice relationship evaluation programs have found ways to include
performance objectives in their scorecards.

That is, they can set objectives and score performance measures against those metrics.

Here are some tips we've learnt through our efforts working with some of the world's best advertisers:- 

• Avoid overloading the program with too many numeric objectives. Instead, try to identify and define the 
  relatively few but important objectives;
• Differentiate between “hard” and “intermediate” measures. (Hard measures are typically outcomes and may be sales oriented, for example; intermediate measures are often the determinants of those outcomes and may be informed by research, eg consumer research measures of advertising performance) 
• Performance scores against these types of objectives should be entered by only one person. It would be confusing if, for example all the assessors in the program were able to enter what should be a single unequivocal, factual score!
• Prioritize for importance the weighting to be allocated to the achievement of performance objectives as opposed to the main assessment survey outcome.