What a decade selling to CMOs taught us about how marketing money is actually spent

We've spent years on the vendor side of the table, inside ad tech and media businesses. Here's what that vantage point shows about where a marketing budget really goes.

Before this firm existed, people on our team ran revenue for technology companies that sold into marketing organizations. Demand-side platforms, video, data. The customers were agencies and brands. The job was to get as much media budget flowing through those pipes as possible, at as high a margin as the market would bear.

There's nothing sinister in that. It's what every vendor does, and it's a rational way to run a business. But sitting on that side of the table for years gives you an education most marketing leaders never get, because they only ever see a vendor from the outside, across a negotiating table, reading a proposal built to be read a certain way.

What the vendor side teaches you

The rate card is a starting position, not a price. Every platform and every agency has a list price and a floor beneath it, and the distance between the two is the entire negotiation. Buyers who know the floor exists pay a fraction of what buyers who don't know pay for the identical service. Most buyers never find out the floor exists, because nobody on the vendor side is incentivized to tell them.

Margin doesn't sit in one place, it sits in layers. Fees get taken in small pieces scattered across the chain: a platform fee here, a data fee there, a technology fee, a trading margin, a rebate quietly retained, sometimes a fee on the fee. Each one, looked at alone, is defensible. A vendor can explain any single line with a straight face. It's the sum of all of them together, which almost nobody on the client side ever adds up, where the real cost lives.

Incentives run on volume, not on outcomes. A platform gets paid on spend moving through it. An agency paid a percentage of spend gets paid on spend, full stop, regardless of what that spend produces. Nowhere in that chain does anyone get rewarded for the client spending less and getting more out of what remains. That job, if it exists at all, has to belong to the client, or to someone the client specifically brings in to do it.

What we'd tell a CMO

You are not being cheated. You're being sold to by professionals who are good at their jobs, and the commercial mechanics of the relationship were never supposed to be where your expertise sits, nor should they be. Your job is the brand, the growth, the team, the work that actually requires marketing judgment.

But someone on your side of the table needs to know where the floor is, see the layers, and hold the incentives straight against what you're actually trying to achieve. If that's not you, and it's not procurement, and it's not the agency (it will never be the agency), then it's nobody. And nobody is an expensive place to leave that job.

A simple test: pull up your last three vendor or agency contracts and see if you can answer, in one sentence each, where the floor was, where the margin layers sit, and who is accountable if spend goes up and performance doesn't. If you can't answer instantly, that's not a knock on you. It's a gap in the org chart.

The upside, when it's done right

When the commercial side of a marketing relationship is run properly, the marketing itself gets better, not just cheaper. Money that was leaking into intermediary layers goes back into working media. Senior agency people come back onto the account because the contract specifically asks for them and holds the agency to it. Measurement gets more honest, because the model marking the work is no longer the same party being graded by it.

That's the starting premise behind the work we do now. It came directly from having sold the other side of this table, watching how the game is actually played from the inside, and deciding that most marketing organizations deserved someone on their side of it who'd seen it from there.

It's also why we're skeptical of anyone who promises to fix this with a single audit or a one-time renegotiation. The floor moves, the layers get rebuilt, and incentives reassert themselves the moment attention shifts elsewhere. The vendor side doesn't stop being the vendor side because you caught it once. Whoever holds this job for you needs to hold it on an ongoing basis, not as a project with an end date.