Your marketingbudget is aP&L line.Act like it.

Finding the right agency is a procurement decision that shapes your marketing performance for years. A well-run search uncovers real capability differences. A poorly run one appoints the agency that rehearsed best.

We manage the full process: brief, market assessment, RFP, evaluation, financial negotiation, appointment. We have run searches for global consumer products companies, national QSR groups, and B2B software businesses. We know the questions that reveal real capability, and we bring the benchmarks before the relationship begins.

Agency relationships drift. Scope expands informally. Fees set at pitch haven’t been benchmarked since. The senior people who won the business have moved on. Output quality declines but nobody has a structured way to measure it.

We assess what your agencies are delivering: cost of service, scope compliance, account team seniority, output quality, process efficiency, and commercial terms, benchmarked against the market. Findings come with a decision: renegotiate, restructure, or replace. Then we run it, with the relationship intact.

Marketing teams are not procurement specialists. Agency contracts written by the agency’s lawyers reflect the agency’s interests. Fee structures designed by the agency reflect the agency’s margin targets. AI has changed the agency cost base and most contracts have not caught up.

We build the commercial infrastructure that protects your position: master services agreements, scope frameworks that stop creep, rate benchmarks, AI-era productivity terms, audit rights, data ownership, and governance that makes compliance visible. For larger rosters, we review every agreement at once.

Media is one of the largest controllable costs in marketing and one of the least transparent. Programmatic supply chains take fees at multiple layers. Trading desks have their own incentives. Resellers sit between you and the inventory. Agency reporting measures activity, not outcomes.

We audit paid media across programmatic, social, search, broadcast, and direct, independently of the agency running the spend: working media ratios, supply path, intermediaries, inventory quality, fees, attribution, and performance against business objectives.

The full media audit practice →

Production, the money spent creating film, photography, print, and digital assets, can be 15 to 30% of a marketing budget. Most brands have never benchmarked it, renegotiated it, or asked whether the production model itself is right. AI has collapsed the cost of adaptation and versioning; most rate cards still price it at 2022 levels.

We audit production spend, benchmark it against market rates, assess in-house versus agency versus hybrid, and build governance that keeps cost controlled without hurting the work.

Most rosters grew by addition rather than design. Each new need got a new agency. Nobody has a clear view of total agency spend or the overlap between what agencies are each paid to do.

We assess the roster against the business need, identify overlap and redundancy, and design the structure that delivers the best performance for the total budget. Consolidate, restructure, or rebuild, with a plan to execute and the commercial terms to match.

The marketing operating model, how the team is structured, how decisions get made, how work flows between internal teams and agencies, is the foundation everything else sits on. When it’s wrong, no agency change, fee reset, or technology investment fixes it.

We assess the current model and design the one that fits where the business is going, including which busy work should now be automated and where senior time should go instead.

The average mid-market marketing stack has 30 to 40 tools. Most were bought to solve one problem, integrated partially, and stayed in the budget. Some are duplicates. Some are used by fewer than half the team.

We audit what’s in it, what’s used, where there’s redundancy, what’s missing, and whether the cost matches the value. The output is a vendor-by-vendor roadmap: keep, consolidate, replace, or eliminate, with the renegotiations run.

AI is changing how marketing organizations produce content, analyze performance, manage agencies, and make investment decisions. Most teams have experimented. Few have deployed in a structured way that produces measurable results, and fewer still have captured the savings from their agencies.

We deploy AI into the marketing workflows with the highest volume and the most to gain: content production, briefing, performance reporting, agency deliverable analysis, contract review, and spend analytics. Every deployment ends with a running workflow and a measurement framework.