Notes for owners · Digital marketing
What a media proof of execution should contain
Before you argue about whether a campaign worked, establish that it ran. Photographs, tear sheets, broadcast logs and screening reports, medium by medium.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
Proof of execution is the evidence that the media you paid for actually appeared. Dated photographs of the panel, the newspaper page with its masthead and edition line, the station's transmission log, the exhibitor's screening report, the platform's placement report. It answers only one question, whether you received what you bought, and it answers nothing about whether the campaign worked. Half the disputes that look like performance arguments are delivery arguments nobody had the paperwork to settle.
Why this comes before measurement
A media plan is a promise about the future. The order says eleven hoardings from the fourth of the month, forty spots across two weeks, four insertions in the Belagavi edition.
Then things happen. A site goes up nine days late because the previous advertiser's flex had not come down. The flex tears in the first week of rain and hangs for a fortnight. Six spots move to a weaker band because a bigger advertiser arrived. An insertion runs on page eleven instead of page five.
None of that is unusual and most of it is recoverable, if you know within the week. So the value of proof is not the argument at the end of the cycle. It is the phone call on day four.
What exists, medium by medium
| Medium | What to insist on |
|---|---|
| Hoardings and outdoor | Dated photographs from the approaching carriageway with a landmark in frame, at mounting, mid-cycle and before take-down, plus the mounting and take-down dates |
| Bus and transit | Photographs of the specific numbered vehicles, the route or depot list, and the fleet numbers carrying your panel |
| Metro, airport and mall | The panel list with location codes, dated photographs of each, and the display period |
| Newspaper | The tear sheet of the full page, masthead, date and edition line visible, with the published size |
| Magazine | The physical copy, or a scan of the full spread with the issue date |
| Radio | The station's transmission log, spot by spot, with real air times and dates |
| Television | The telecast certificate or spot log with date, time, programme and band |
| Cinema | The screening report: property, screen, dates, number of screenings, and the ingested film or slide |
| Digital display and programmatic | The placement report listing sites and apps, not a screenshot of a dashboard total |
| Influencer | Dated insight screenshots, the live post link, and the video file if you bought usage rights |
| Pamphlets and door drops | Printer's challan, the area supervisor's sheet, photographs from the drop, and the honest acceptance that this is weak |
Add one line to every row: who on your side checks it, and by when. Proof filed unread is the same as no proof.
What makes a piece of proof weak
Four things turn evidence into decoration.
No date, or a date that cannot be checked. An undated photograph proves a hoarding existed. It does not prove it existed during your cycle.
A crop. A close-up of your own advertisement with nothing around it could have come from the artwork file. The masthead, the page number and the surrounding content are the proof.
One shot at the start. Mounting-day photographs are the easiest to produce and the least informative. A panel is bought for eight weeks and looked at once.
A number with no source. "Delivered 1.2 crore impressions" in a slide is a claim. The placement report behind it is evidence, and asking for it is how you find out whether your advertisement ran on a news site or on a game nobody uses.
Put it in the order, not in the follow-up
Everything above costs nothing if it is written into the media order, and costs a fight if it is requested afterwards. Four lines do it:
- The proof required, named by format, for each line of the plan.
- When each piece is due, with mid-cycle monitoring dated rather than described as "periodic".
- What happens if it does not arrive, whether a retained share of payment, a credit, or an extension of the cycle.
- Two names: who sends it, who checks it.
This is ordinary media discipline and it is also the cheapest negotiating position you will ever hold, because it is far easier to agree before the money moves.
The line between proof and performance
Keep the two apart in your own head and in your reporting.
Proof tells you the panel was up for fifty-six days and the spot aired forty times. That is delivery, and the media owner is accountable for it.
Whether anyone acted is a different question with a different method: the codes, the numbers and the baseline described in tracking offline advertising. Nobody's proof of execution answers it, and a seller who presents a folder of photographs as evidence that the campaign worked is changing the subject.
The reverse mistake is more common and more expensive. A campaign is judged a failure, the medium is dropped, and nobody ever checked that four of the eleven sites were blank for half the cycle.
A worked example
For example, a pump manufacturer runs a twenty-two site outdoor plan across five towns in north Karnataka, with a Kannada daily in three of them. The details are illustrative.
The order asks for dated photographs of each site at mounting and in week four, and the full-page tear sheet for every insertion. The company's marketing coordinator, one person, checks them against the plan in a single sheet.
In week four, three sites have no photograph. Two turn out to have been mounted eleven days late and one was never mounted at all, because the structure was under a permission dispute. The company gets an extension on two and a credit on the third, inside the cycle rather than after it. One tear sheet shows the advertisement ran a day later than booked, on a weaker day, and that becomes a rate discussion for the next order.
None of this tells the company whether outdoor sold pumps. It does mean that the campaign it judges at the end is the campaign it paid for.
What to do next
Take the last media order you signed and see whether it names a single piece of proof. If it does not, add the four lines above to the next one before you discuss the rate. That is the moment when the seller wants the order and you have not yet paid for anything.
If you want an agency that sends the photographs before you ask, that is the standard our own media reporting is held to. The free audit is where it starts.
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