Independent Media Validation Review: your questions

Because broadly happy is not a defensible decision. When renewal reaches procurement, finance or the board, someone will ask how you know the partnership still delivers, and internal confidence is not an answer that carries.

The review turns a relationship you believe in into a decision you can evidence. If you are right about the agency, you get proof. If something needs tightening, you find out while it is still fixable.

A pitch is the right tool when you genuinely need a new partner. It is a poor tool for testing one you already trust: it costs months of senior time on both sides, disrupts live campaigns, and most tenders end with the incumbent retained anyway.

If the relationship is broadly working, a proportionate review answers the renewal question at a fraction of the cost and disruption. If it is not working, the review will tell you that too, and any pitch that follows becomes a decision rather than a reflex.

No. The review is a standalone engagement with a fixed fee and a defined outcome: renew, renew with amendments, or go to market, whether that is a proportionate search or a full tender. The fee does not change with the outcome, and the reasoning behind the recommendation is set out in full, so it can be tested rather than taken on trust.

If the recommendation is to go to market, that is a separate decision, and yours: you choose whether, how and with whom to run it. The purpose of the review is to make unnecessary pitches avoidable, not to generate them.

Mosaic is engaged and paid by you, not your agency. The agency has no financial stake in the outcome and no ability to shape it, which is what makes the findings credible to procurement, finance and the board.

Independence cuts both ways. The review is not there to validate the incumbent automatically, and it is not there to manufacture a case for change. It reports what the evidence supports, whichever way that falls.

Then you have found them at the right time. Issues surfaced through a structured review, with context and recommended actions attached, become a plan: most land as renew with amendments, a practical list of what to fix before recommitting.

The same issues discovered late in a renewal become a reason to tender. Early sight of a problem keeps the decision yours.

Handled properly, no. For the agency, the comparison is not between the review and a quiet renewal: it is between the review and a tender. Most agencies would far rather face proportionate scrutiny than defend the account through a pitch.

Strong agencies tend to welcome it. It gives their best work an independent audience, and it surfaces frustrations they may not have been able to raise themselves.

Very little. The review works largely from documentation you already hold: contracts, scopes, plans, reporting and billing, plus a small number of structured conversations with your team and your agency.

It typically runs over 4 to 6 weeks, alongside business as usual. Campaigns and delivery carry on uninterrupted.

Only what the review needs, and access is agreed upfront. Commercially sensitive material sits within a clear confidentiality arrangement, and how findings are shared, including what the agency sees and when, is agreed with you before anything is gathered.

The report is yours. It is written to be usable with procurement, finance and the board, and nothing reaches the agency without your agreement.

Some organisations (charities and other highly governed bodies in particular) have rules that mandate periodic tendering, however healthy the relationship. The review earns its place either way.

Where discretion exists, it gives trustees, procurement and finance a defensible, evidenced reason to use it. Where a tender must run, it sharpens the process: clearer scope, an evidenced benchmark of the incumbent, and a faster, fairer exercise.

Earlier than feels natural. The review works best raised well before the contract notice period, before any formal process discussion starts. At that point it reads as good governance, and every option remains open.

Left until the notice period is live, options narrow quickly, and there is rarely a route back to a lighter-touch process.

The fee is fixed and agreed upfront, depending on scope. Set that against the alternatives: a full tender costs months of senior time on both sides, disrupts live campaigns, and carries transition risk if you change for the wrong reasons.

Rolling the contract over unexamined looks free today, but it can cost far more later, if issues nobody looked at surface mid-contract. The review buys what neither a tender nor an unexamined renewal offers: a decision you can defend, made with evidence, at proportionate cost.