A new client spending about $1M a year on paid media brought us in after its marketing leader started digging into why their cost-per-lead surpassed their target and kept on rising.

The first red flag?

Their in-house media buyer dropped $50,000 on a single newsletter sponsorship. Cost per impression? Sky-high.

That might have been fine if it was delivered—but it produced zero leads.

The second red flag was that their internal buyer couldn’t explain the nuances of their Google Ads campaigns, bidding and performance. It seemed like he was hiding something.

The real problem wasn’t just a single wasteful spend or even the crazy mixed up Google Ads account.

It was that no one inside the company could say whether they were making smart buys in the first place. No benchmarks. No external pressure. No “fiduciary mindset.”

What a Fiduciary Mindset in Media Buying Means to Us

When we manage a client’s ad budget, we treat it as if it were our own money—because our survival depends on it.

We behave as you might, if you had the time, skills and experience to do the job you’ve trusted us to do. We believe that the role of being your agent is an important responsibility.

If a buy fails, we answer for it. If CAC rises, we have to explain why. That’s what an agency does (at least one that takes its mission seriously):

• Every campaign must justify itself.
• Every decision is weighed against measurable growth.
• Every buy is vetted against market benchmarks.
• Every dollar is spent transparently.

Internal hires, even good ones, rarely work under those conditions. Their paycheck doesn’t swing on CAC. They don’t lose their job if a month or quarter’s worth of spend underperforms. And without deep exposure to the broader market, leadership can’t always see when a buy is bad—until the waste has piled up.

The Benchmark Advantage Can Be Yours, For Free

Agencies live in the numbers. We know what other clients pay for the same inventory and outcomes. We see and respond to platforms tightening CPMs or changing targeting rules, which placements overdeliver, and which recommended ancillary buys are just sales fluff (especially true with many platforms’ AI and audience expansion offers).

That market-wide context means we can stop bad buys before they happen. In-house teams make those calls in a vacuum, with no way to know if a $50K placement was a steal—or a stick-up.

We have a free benchmark group built with Databox that enables you to see a snapshot of how you compare with a cohort of more than 300 SaaS firms at the link below:

Join our FREE Databox benchmark group for SaaS companies here.

Accountability You Can’t Fake

Even seasoned CMOs can miss waste if they haven’t run large-scale media themselves.

Media buying is a specialist discipline, with its own patterns, signals, and red flags. And these platforms change the game frequently, meaning you can’t guess, you have to know.

Inside a company, a lone media buyer can look busy—running campaigns, reporting metrics—while inefficiencies quietly erode ROI.

At an agency, that can’t happen. We answer to you for results, not just activity.

Expecting One Person to Manage a Million-Dollar Media Buy is a Trap

Media buying isn’t one skill—it’s a bunch of separate ecosystems. Meta, LinkedIn, Google, programmatic, direct buys… each has its own rules and leverage points.

An in-house generalist can’t live at depth in all of them.

An agency team can—because we’re built that way. Your “media buyer” in our shop may actually be a team of four or five specialists, each living in their own platform, sharing wins and warnings across accounts.

That’s not just knowledge—it’s leverage.

Lost Pipeline is the Real Cost of Going It Alone

The obvious cost is wasted spend.

The hidden cost is the pipeline you never built because the budget wasn’t pushed to its full potential. That’s growth you can’t get back.

Every hour your in-house buyer spends on other projects they’ll undoubtedly get pulled into is an hour not spent optimizing campaigns. Agencies protect that focus—because optimization is the job.

You Want an Agency That Takes the Job Seriously…

If you’re running a seven-figure media budget and aren’t getting the returns you expect, bring in someone whose business lives or dies on making your spend work harder.

We operate as if we were fiduciaries:

• Every dollar is held to account.
• Every buy has to beat the benchmark.
• Every decision is made as if the money were our own.
• Every decision is made for your best interest.

Invite us in for a diagnostic. We’ll show you where the leaks are, where you’re overpaying, and where you could get more from the same spend.

Often, we find quick wins in the very first look, sometimes saving as much as $100 thousand on a single platform—whether you hire us or not.

Let’s find out what your ad dollars could really be doing – before the CFO does!

Get your FREE media strategy deep dive at this link.