Media Buying's Hidden Waste: Why Agencies Must Reclaim Control From Sellers

Graham Webster, CEO of Enth Degree, has a straightforward diagnosis for what ails modern advertising: too much of it is money burned on nothing. His argument arrived in the wake of a conference speech by Raja Rajamannar, the former chief marketing officer at Mastercard, who claimed that 98 percent of advertising spending amounts to pure waste. The number was designed to provoke—and it worked. But beneath the hyperbole lies something harder to dismiss: a genuine, measurable inefficiency baked into how agencies buy media on behalf of their clients.

Rajamannar's critique centered on YouTube's viewability standard, which counts a five-second exposure as a completed view regardless of whether an ad was meant to run for fifteen seconds. The logic is perverse: if a brand has crafted a message to unfold over fifteen seconds, why should five seconds of viewing—often ending in active rejection—carry the same value as full exposure? Yet the industry accepts it. "Somebody has come up with this viewability matrix, and we, like idiots, are accepting those and paying their money," Rajamannar said. YouTube is not alone in setting the terms of engagement. Media owners across the landscape have quietly become the architects of the metrics by which their own inventory is judged.

Television buying offers the clearest window into avoidable waste. A decade ago, linear broadcast still commanded the ability to build mass reach with precision. A skilled buyer could construct a campaign delivering weekly reach above 75 percent by interrogating audience data and selecting program combinations that minimized duplication. The buyer purchased audiences, not volume. Today, despite television still commanding more than 23 percent of Australian advertising expenditure, much of it is bought with almost no scrutiny at all. Agencies negotiate a schedule at a predetermined cost-per-thousand and then hand the network the keys. The network places the spots wherever it wants. The result is a schedule that hits the contracted numbers and average cost but fails spectacularly at the advertiser's actual objectives.

Consider a recent case: an agency booked multiple spots in a program called "I Cut Off His Penis—The Truth Behind the Headlines," a main-channel, peak-time slot that delivered a rating of approximately 0.2 against its target demographic of adults 35 to 64. The resulting cost-per-thousand was extraordinarily high. More troubling was the question of whether the brand should appear there at all. A more rigorous buying process would have filtered it out immediately. The spreadsheet looked acceptable. The outcome was not.

As television audiences have fragmented across streaming services and on-demand platforms, achieving incremental reach has become progressively harder. Yet schedules still contain hundreds, sometimes thousands, of spots. What are they actually doing? Too often, they simply pile another exposure onto the heaviest viewers—people who have already seen the campaign many times over. At some point, frequency stops adding value and becomes pure waste. A schedule can deliver its contracted audience, hit its cost targets, and stay within budget while simultaneously generating excessive frequency among a small slice of the audience. That is not optimization. It is buying more of the same people repeatedly while leaving potential new audiences untouched. Every dollar spent on a tenth, fifteenth, or twentieth exposure is a dollar that could have reached someone new.

The root problem is that agencies have ceded control to media owners. Viewability definitions, trading currencies, inventory allocation, placement decisions—these are now determined by the sellers, not the buyers. Webster argues that agencies need to reclaim their responsibility. That means managing frequency deliberately, measuring incremental reach, scrutinizing which programs carry the brand, establishing brand-safety parameters, rejecting inventory that contributes little to the campaign, and challenging media-owner metrics rather than accepting them as gospel. Most importantly, it means becoming comfortable saying no: no to hundreds of additional spots that add negligible reach, no to programming inappropriate for the brand, no to inventory the network simply needs to sell, and no to measurement conventions that transform marginal exposure into billable impressions.

There is a complication. The rise of Principal Media and similar inventory-based trading models means some agencies now have a financial stake in particular inventory being purchased. When an agency profits from the sale, the line between buying media for the advertiser and selling media to the advertiser blurs considerably. It becomes difficult to eliminate waste if parts of the industry have a commercial incentive to help media owners monetize inventory an advertiser might otherwise reject. Transparency becomes essential. Advertisers should know not only what they are buying and what it costs, but why that inventory was recommended and whether anyone involved stands to gain financially from the transaction.

Rajamannar's 98 percent may be hyperbole, but the principle matters more than the precise number. Advertisers should be asking how much of their media investment genuinely drives incremental reach and business outcomes versus how much simply satisfies the mechanics of a deal. The fragmentation of audiences is permanent; the old days of television dominance will not return. But one principle from that era deserves revival: media buyers should actually buy media. They should scrutinize placement, manage frequency, protect brand environments, challenge questionable metrics, and reject inventory that does not sufficiently serve the advertiser's goals. The biggest opportunity in media buying may no longer be negotiating a lower cost-per-thousand. It may simply be wasting less money.