In a 400-person company there is a marketing director. Their job is to decide: which channel, what budget, what to stop. In an SMB that role is often held by nobody. The owner decides between two meetings, with the numbers put in front of them and no time to verify those numbers. And with no arbiter, the decision falls to whoever holds the information: the supplier. This is not a competence problem, and it is not an honesty problem. It is a position problem.
A supplier cannot decide their own scope
An agency executes, often better than an internal team would. It delivers campaigns, creatives, reports. It is a craft, and the good ones are very good.
What you cannot ask of them is to settle a question where their answer determines their own pay.
The most common model in the industry is a percentage of the media budget managed, or a retainer that grows with the accounts. Under that model, recommending you spend less means cutting your own revenue. No agency wakes up thinking that way. But over two years, an incentive always ends up outweighing a good intention, in any trade, including ours.
The result is not bad faith, it is slow drift. Work moves toward what is easy to deliver and easy to report, rather than toward what is profitable.
What it looks like in practice
Three patterns worth recognising. None of them proves a problem on its own, but together they say someone is missing.
The recommendation always points the same way. Results are good, raise the budget to take advantage. Results are weak, raise the budget to get through the learning phase. When two opposite situations produce the same prescription, the conclusion is no longer coming from the data.
Return is read platform-side. A platform claims the sales it touched, including the ones that would have happened anyway. That is not cheating, it is how the tool is built. But the number that decides sits in your financial statements, not in the dashboard.
Nothing ever stops. Over twelve months, count the times someone proposed cutting a line. In a real account there is always something to stop. If it has never happened, it is not that everything works, it is that nobody has the mandate to ask.
The question that clears things up
At your next meeting: what should we stop doing.
It is not a trap, it is an invitation. A good agency is often waiting to be asked, because proposing a cut unprompted can look like an admission.
A good answer sounds like this: that channel has cost more than it returns for six weeks, here are the numbers, we propose pausing it and moving the budget here. It is an answer that costs the person giving it. That is exactly what makes it worth something.
If the answer is "nothing, everything is performing", that is not necessarily a bad supplier. It is a sign they have nobody to arbitrate with.
The missing role
Someone whose mandate is to decide, and whose pay does not move with the decision. Someone who can say "we cut" without penalising themselves and "we double" without rewarding themselves.
That role does not replace the agency. It gives the agency what it was missing: a counterpart. Most competent suppliers work better with a client who decides than with a client who never replies.
Us too
It would be a little easy to write all this without saying that part of our own mandates also includes a percentage of media spend. The mechanism described above applies to us like everyone else.
The situation is not the same on every mandate, either. On marketing leadership we arbitrate and we do not spend: execution stays with your teams and your suppliers. On a performance mandate, where we also hold the media buying, we carry both roles. That is exactly the case described above, and it is where the rules below matter most.
No advertising dollar until measurement is verified end to end. If tracking is broken, we propose the pause, even when it shrinks our own invoice.
The recommendation to cut is written down, with its numbers, in the same document as the ones that suit us.
The budget is decided with the client. An increase is their decision, supported by numbers they can verify themselves, not a recommendation we apply.
None of this removes the mechanism. Nothing does, short of changing models. It makes it visible, and visible is the only honest thing anyone can promise.
Three things worth asking for
From us as much as from anyone.
That return be presented accounting-side, not only platform-side. That a recommendation to cut appear at least once a quarter, or that someone explain why there is none. And that every budget increase be traceable: who proposed it, on what numbers, and what was looked at before saying yes.
Those three requests cost nothing to make. They change the relationship the day you make them, and good suppliers welcome them.
We hold that role
Part-time marketing leadership: budget arbitration and supplier oversight, by someone whose mandate is to decide, not to produce. See our marketing leadership offer
Frequently asked questions
Should we change agency? Almost never. The problem is rarely competence, it is the absence of an arbiter. Changing without fixing that reproduces the same situation six months later, having lost the history.
Is the percentage model to be avoided? Not in itself. It aligns the supplier with growth, which is useful during a ramp-up. It simply asks for someone across the table to arbitrate.
How do I know if my ad budget is too high? Look at the acquisition cost over recent months. If it climbs while volume stalls, you are paying more for the same customers. It is the most reliable signal, and it shows up in your numbers before it shows up in a report.