Post-buy reconciliation: closing the gap between the plan and what aired
Every campaign ends with a question — did what we sold actually run? How Western broadcasters and agencies handle post-buy, make-goods and proof of airing.
Every television and radio campaign ends with the same question: did what was sold actually run, at the times and with the audience promised? Answering it is post-buy reconciliation, and it is the least glamorous and most contested part of the trade.
Why the plan and the transmission never match exactly
A media plan is a forecast. Between signing and airing, live events overrun, programmes are rescheduled, breaks are shortened, copy arrives late, and audiences deliver above or below estimate. None of that is misconduct — it is normal broadcast operations. The reconciliation exists precisely because the gap is expected.
Three kinds of gap matter commercially:
- Transmission variance — the spot ran in a different break, a different daypart, or not at all
- Audience variance — the spot ran as planned but delivered fewer rating points than guaranteed
- Specification variance — wrong copy, wrong length, wrong position in the break
What the market does about it
In markets with guaranteed delivery, the standard remedy is the make-good: additional spots that close the shortfall, scheduled after the fact. The make-good is where reconciliation becomes expensive, because the compensating inventory has to come from somewhere, and by the time the shortfall is known that inventory is usually already sold.
The discipline that keeps this manageable in mature markets is simple to state and hard to do: reconcile continuously, not at the end. A campaign tracked against delivery daily can be corrected while it still has weeks to run, using inventory that has not been committed yet. The same campaign reconciled a month after it ends can only be corrected by displacing someone else.
Where the manual version breaks
Reconciliation done by hand means exporting the as-run log from playout, matching it against the plan in a spreadsheet, matching that against the audience data from the measurement body, and then against the invoice. Four sources, three matching steps, each one a chance for a mismatch that nobody notices until an advertiser disputes it.
The cost is rarely the labour. It is that the numbers arrive too late to act on, and that a disputed report is a commercial conversation the seller enters without evidence.
What good looks like
The as-run data flows back automatically against the plan it belongs to. Variances surface while the campaign is live. Make-goods draw on real availability rather than optimism. And the proof of airing that the advertiser receives is generated from the same record the invoice is built on — so there is one version of what happened, not two.