Ninety-six percent of marketers now say they know what principal media is. Twenty-four percent do not know whether their own agency contract says anything about it.

That gap is this week's kit. The advertiser side already has a written standard for principal media buys, drafted by its own trade body's outside counsel, and it is more demanding than almost anything being enforced in practice. Section 9 of the ANA's Master Media Buying Services Agreement version 3.0 requires your agency to get written approval for each specific buy, each time, from people named in the contract, and to hand over eight specific things in the approval request before you sign off.

Two of those eight are the ones that end arguments. The agency has to tell you whether you are giving up rebates you would otherwise have earned, and it has to tell you what transparent options it looked at and why this one is better. Almost nobody asks for either. The template has required both since June 2023.

Members get the full kit below: the eight required disclosures written as a demand you can paste into an email, four contract lines to add at renewal, the five dodges you will hear and the follow-up for each, and the numbers to have in front of you when someone says everyone does this.

Free readers get the reason it matters. Fifty-seven percent of marketers have internal guidelines for principal media, which is down from sixty-two percent two years ago. Usage went up. Governance went down. That is not a trust problem. That is a paperwork problem, and paperwork is fixable in an afternoon.