The Myth of Cost Savings

What if we told you the biggest cost savings opportunity in marketing isn't in your media budget?

When clients ask us to help find cost savings, they usually point us toward the usual suspects: media spend, martech stack, agency fees. But after years of helping marketing organizations transform, we've discovered something counterintuitive: the most expensive thing in marketing isn't what you're buying – it's how your team spends their time, and what they spend it on.

Here's what we typically see:

• Marketing teams spending 60% of their time on administration and management
• Projects taking 3-4x longer than necessary due to complex approval chains
• Valuable strategic talent stuck in endless status update meetings
• Critical growth initiatives dying slow deaths in planning processes

Let's put this in perspective: A typical 30-person marketing team carries a payroll of $3-4M annually. If your team is spending 60% of their time on admin instead of growth work, that's about $2M in salary going to activities that don't directly drive business results.

And no, the answer here is not “simply cut those $2M and achieve the same result, but for less!” (The same thing would apply to media and creative budgets, too.)

When marketing leaders come to us looking for cost savings, they're often armed with industry benchmarks and best practices. But here's the thing: benchmarking might get you to industry standard, but it won't get you to extraordinary. It's a tool for catching up, not breaking through. As Roger Martin brilliantly puts it, "Every moment spent benchmarking takes away from the work necessary for strategy."

The conversation about cost savings often masks deeper strategic questions that need answering. When a CMO asks about cutting media spend, what they're really wrestling with might be:

• Are we in the right channels for where our audience is heading?
• Have we outgrown our current marketing mix?
• Should we be making bigger bets in emerging channels?

The trap is that pure cost-cutting exercises can actually prevent you from seeing massive growth opportunities. The real question isn’t "where can we cut?" but "where should we be doubling down?"

Sometimes what looks like a cost problem is actually a strategic allocation problem. The goal isn't to operate at current industry standards – it's to push beyond them and establish new frontiers of what's possible. Your underperforming display campaigns might not need optimization – they might need elimination to free up resources for that bold new bet that could 10x your growth.

So before you slash that media budget or rip out another tool from your stack, ask yourself:

• How much time does your team spend in status meetings vs. doing the work?
• How many approval steps does it take to launch a campaign?
• How many projects is each person juggling simultaneously?
• What big strategic bets are you not making because you're spread too thin?
• Are you trying to optimize within current constraints, or imagining new possibilities?

The answers might reveal that your biggest savings opportunity isn't in your budget – it's in your operating model. And your biggest cost might be the growth opportunities you're missing while searching for savings in all the wrong places.

Sometimes the best way to reduce costs isn't to spend less money. It's to get more value from the investments you're already making, and to be bold enough to make new bets that could transform your business.

What hidden costs – and overlooked opportunities – are lurking in your marketing organization's way of working?