Hello again, and a proper welcome to those of you reading for the first time. July is meant to be the quiet month. This one was not.
Last month, the question was what AI would do to the agency model. This month, the answer started arriving, on the invoice.
The thread running through this issue is cost, specifically who pays for AI, and through which door. Agencies have absorbed two years of AI infrastructure spend, and they are now recovering it in the places clients look least: principal media commitments, bundled token deals, and contract addenda quietly signed at renewal. At the same time, the measurement systems we all rely on to check the math are facing their own funding reckoning, and AI search is shrinking the open web those models were built to measure.
None of this is cause for panic. All of it is cause for attention. The fourteen pieces below are chosen to help you walk into your next negotiation, QBR, or audit conversation knowing exactly where the value is moving, because it is moving.
Two new features this month, both of which we hope earn their place: a download of the month, and an event or two worth clearing the calendar for. Please do register, and please tell us whether they are useful. We would far rather hear that something is not landing than keep sending it.
And as ever, if a piece here prompts a thought, a disagreement, or a story from your own desk, write back and tell us. Those replies are where a good deal of this newsletter comes from.
Christine & the RAUS Global Team
Inventory Media: Why Agencies Are Pushing Back on Audits and How to Enforce Transparency
When advertisers ask to audit inventory media, the response is becoming surprisingly uniform: our MSA does not explicitly require it. Wojciech Ras, the P&G alum and media governance specialist now leading Progmatic, dismantles that pushback piece by piece.
His central point deserves framing: the only legitimate difference between a standard buy and an inventory buy is whether you can see the media owner’s invoice and the rebates behind it. Everything else, including quality, volumes, and performance, should face the same checks as any regular buy. Without placement-level data, you cannot know whether your ads ran on premium sites or were dumped into made-for-advertising content farms; you are buying blind on a trust-us slogan.
Ras closes with a practical governance playbook: either a hard stop on inventory media, or three non-negotiable contract clauses, from log-level placement reporting to the single protected exception agencies may keep. Reread your audit clause before you need it.
Read the full article →
How AI Costs Are Quietly Reshaping Principal Media Deals
The industry has no established price tag for AI services yet, so agencies are finding one. Digiday reports that holding companies are offering to absorb AI infrastructure costs for clients, in exchange for commitments of as much as 70% of media budgets to principal inventory, which the holdco buys wholesale and resells at a markup. It is a familiar pattern: emerging costs get routed through the agency’s most profitable and least transparent business line.
Some see pragmatism, others see profit-skimming dressed up as partnership. Either way, until outcome-based pricing matures, principal media is becoming the mechanism through which AI expenses are absorbed and disguised.
If an AI-inclusive media deal has landed on your desk recently, this article explains exactly what to interrogate before you sign, starting with where the margin actually sits.
Read the full article →
Un-principaled Opposition
A sharp companion read to the Digiday piece above, from a newsletter written for investors and operators rather than marketers, which is precisely what makes it useful.
The Diligence Report examines the bundling of two opaque practices: agencies absorbing AI costs while expanding principal media buying, effectively trading one undefined cost center against another. The timing concern is the part procurement should not miss. Smaller, dramatically cheaper AI models are arriving fast, which means clients who lock in AI-cost-for-principal-media trades today may be paying tomorrow’s premium for what will soon be a commodity.
The recommendation is blunt: demand verifiable cost estimates and preserve contractual auditability before accepting any bundled arrangement. When the finance community starts applying diligence language to agency commercial models, it is worth reading over their shoulder.
Read more →
Agency Contracts Were Built for People and Hours, but AI Is Breaking Both
When technology compresses weeks of work into days, a contract priced on headcount and hours starts to come apart at the seams. This in-depth piece surveys how agencies and brands are actually handling that tension, and the honest answer is: incrementally.
Most agreements are being patched with addenda rather than rewritten, with real changes surfacing only at renewal. The core standoff will sound familiar. Advertisers want to capture the productivity savings AI creates, while agencies argue they need to retain revenue to fund the technology and talent producing those savings. The direction of travel is toward output-based pricing and outcome-tied compensation, though hybrid models will dominate for a while yet.
A clear-eyed briefing on the negotiation every marketing procurement team will be having, if you are not having it already.
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Magic & Logic at 20: The Future of Marketing Procurement & Agency Partnerships
Twenty years ago, Magic & Logic set out a simple but powerful proposition: agencies, marketers, and procurement create better outcomes when they work with shared purpose, transparency, and mutual respect.
On September 10, ISBA, IPA, CIPS, WFA, and industry champions from around the world mark the anniversary with a forward-looking online session, celebrating the 2026 Marketing Procurement Award winners, the first dedicated awards for our profession.
Expect a candid look at what future-fit procurement looks like, how AI and data are reshaping roles and commercial models, and how we keep the conversation moving beyond cost toward long-term value. Speakers include award winners from Specsavers, AG1, Beiersdorf, and Bayer, plus Chris Gallery, CSO of Mother, with a live audience discussion to shape what comes next.
The ambition: the world’s largest gathering of marketing procurement professionals ever assembled. Be in that room.
AI Influencers: Are AI Influencers Your Next Best Bet?
Your creator budget may soon include creators who do not exist. The AI influencer market is small at $16.5 million but growing 40% a year, and the headline acts are already commercial forces: virtual influencer Lil Miquela counts 24 million followers and has generated a reported $11 million in brand partnerships, with synthetic creators claiming engagement rates up to three times higher than their human counterparts.
The commercial appeal is obvious, including full brand ownership, unlimited content, and no talent negotiations. But the compliance map is a maze, with disclosure mandates in the EU, China, South Korea, and a patchwork of US states, plus platform-specific labeling rules on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Given that influencer transparency was the most-clicked story in our Q1 issue, consider this the next chapter: the contract, IP, and disclosure questions arrive before the influencer does.
Read the full article →
Trust to Verify: The End of the Media Audit and the Rise of Continuous Verification
The annual media audit had a good run, but David Indo argues it is no longer built for the job. Traditional auditing grew up around rebates and TV pricing; today’s agency relationships run on proprietary technology, AI tools, and data platforms that a once-a-year review simply cannot see into.
Indo identifies four risks that compound in the gap between audits: fast-changing commercial models, information asymmetry between agency and advertiser, sheer channel complexity, and measuring the wrong things entirely. His alternative is continuous verification: clear success criteria, independent quarterly checks, and oversight of the whole ecosystem rather than just pricing. The commercial logic is hard to argue with, as allocating less than one percent of media budget to verification protects the other 99. “Trust enables the partnership, verification protects the investment” deserves a place on every procurement wall.
Read the full article →
Why Unpaid Media Is Now Essential to AI Visibility
The flip side of the shrinking open web: if AI assistants are answering consumers’ questions, the new battleground is whether they recommend your brand when they do. With 37% of consumers now starting searches in AI tools rather than traditional search engines, this piece argues that earned media has become infrastructure, not garnish.
AI systems weigh external authority signals, including credible media coverage, backlinks, and third-party mentions, far more heavily than anything a brand says about itself, which means the PR budget line and the search strategy are converging whether your org chart likes it or not. For procurement, the implication lands on scope design: briefs and agency rosters that treat paid search, SEO, and earned media as separate silos are optimizing for how discovery used to work. A useful read before your next agency scope review.
Read the full article →
Beyond Billable: Debating the Glacial Movement of Agency Payment Models
WPP’s Cindy Rose has declared the billable hour dead, but as this Cannes Lions panel makes clear, the industry is still arguing about what gets buried with it. Creative Salon convenes agency, client, and procurement voices, including marketing procurement veteran Tina Fegent, to ask why payment model reform moves so slowly when everyone agrees the current one is broken.
The barriers they identify will resonate: marketing and procurement often lack internal alignment, legacy finance systems resist anything that is not a timesheet, and genuine education about alternatives such as technology-access fees and AI-enabled service models remains thin. The panel’s conclusion is the most important part for our community: without aligned KPIs and shared success metrics between client and agency, value-based compensation stays a conference topic rather than a contract clause.
Read the full article →
Publisher Ad Supply Fell by up to 40% in Q2 as AI Search Choked the Open Web
Here is a structural shift hiding in plain sight in your media reporting. Analysis of roughly 20 billion impressions tracked by Ozone shows publisher ad inventory down 32 to 37%, year over year, in the US, and as much as 41% in the UK, as AI-powered search answers questions directly instead of sending readers to publisher sites.
Spend did not collapse in step, because rising eCPMs absorbed much of the volume loss, which means advertisers are quietly paying more for less open-web inventory. Publishers themselves call it a structural reset, not a blip, and are culling low-value inventory while pivoting to subscriptions and apps. If your benchmarks, rate assumptions, or supply-path analyses were built on last year’s open web, this article explains why they may already be out of date.
Read the full article →
Models as Masters? MMM and AI-Driven Media Decision Making
The version of this item emailed in July carried the wrong summary. The correct one is below.
Marketing mix modelling (MMM) has shifted focus. CIMM’s argument is that MMM is no longer a retrospective exercise reviewed once a quarter. It has become operational decision infrastructure, shaping budget allocation, pricing dynamics and automated optimisation close to real time. That promotion matters, because the foundations underneath it are shakier than the outputs suggest.
Williams and Watts identify three interdependent weaknesses: data inconsistency across channels, interpretive instability in the models themselves, and structural asymmetries in who can access what data. Embed those in AI-driven workflows and automation amplifies them through feedback loops and scale, potentially entrenching distorted allocation with nobody moderating the drift. Television and premium video carry particular representation risk, since slower data delivery and less standardised inputs can leave them systematically under-valued.
Read the full report →
How Georgia-Pacific Rolled Out Its Own Programmatic Media Team
In-housing case studies tend to come from glamour brands. This one comes from a tissue manufacturer, which is exactly why it is worth your time.
Georgia-Pacific spent nearly four years building an in-house programmatic operation after concluding it lacked transparency into digital spend through its agency, and the article is refreshingly candid about the hard parts: recruiting ad tech talent to a paper company, and negotiating platform rates without agency leverage.
The end state is a pragmatic hybrid. OMD still handles strategic planning and traditional TV, while Georgia-Pacific runs programmatic, search, social, and marketing mix modeling internally, with log-level data access and regular audits written into its platform deals. Some channels, notably connected TV, proved genuinely harder in-house. An honest, replicable blueprint for anyone weighing the build-versus-buy question.
Read the full article →
A Field Guide to RFP Red Flags
It is always instructive to read what agencies say about us when they think we are not listening.
Drawing on 19 years in agency business development, Dylan Amundson catalogs the RFP warning signs that make good agencies decline to pitch: budgets listed as TBD, two-week response windows for extensive briefs, vague evaluation language, and committee structures where no one owns the decision. His advice to agencies is to walk away from misaligned opportunities and save their best work for well-run processes. Flip that lens around and this becomes a free diagnostic for your own sourcing practice, because every red flag he lists is something within procurement’s power to fix.
If your RFPs are quietly filtering out the strongest agencies and leaving you with the most desperate ones, this is how you would know.
Read more →
The Illusion of “Free”: Why the Measurement Funding Crisis Is a Century in the Making
Who pays for measurement determines what measurement says. That is the uncomfortable thread Darren Woolley pulls in this piece, tracing today’s funding crisis back through a century of industry habit: measurement systems presented to advertisers as free or near-free, but funded by the media owners and platforms with the most to gain from favorable numbers.
The piece sent, in Mumbrella’s words, a shockwave through the Australian market, prompting formal responses from the AANA and IAB, whose chief executives conceded that undisclosed conflicts risk undermining trust and urged marketers to look closely at the commercial relationships behind measurement products. That an op-ed forced industry bodies onto the record tells you how close to the bone it cut.
Essential context for anyone relying on currency-grade data in negotiations, in any market.
Read the article →
ICYMI: One Step Ahead, with The Brandtech Group
Our first Women in Marketing Procurement webinar of the summer brought The Brandtech Group, the company behind Pencil and OLIVER, in for a candid session on what AI-driven marketing production actually looks like inside the world’s best marketing organizations.
Their framing stuck with us: the demos are over, and the pressure now is moving from wow to how. Brands are consciously decoupling output from agency hours, and the operators are proving as important as the operating system.
Thank you again to Karen, Matt, and Tamara, and to everyone who joined and asked such sharp questions.
Read the full write-up →
Can you put a number on brand experience?
Experiential has always been the budget line that runs on belief: the CFO asks what the activation delivered, and the answer arrives as a vibe. Our next Women in Marketing Procurement webinar takes that problem head on.
De-Yan is the New York experiential studio behind some of the biggest brand moments in the business, working with the likes of Google, Meta, Louis Vuitton, and Uniqlo, and they have built something our community has been asking about for years: a brand experience ROI predictor and tracker.
Calibrated on hundreds of real projects over two years, the model connects direct event revenue, the digital halo an experience creates, and customer lifetime value into a number you can actually take to a funding conversation. We got a preview, and it made even seasoned procurement eyes widen. Come see it, interrogate it, and decide for yourself.
Reducing Media Wastage Is About More Than Cutting Costs
Media wastage is usually framed as media that fails to perform. This whitepaper from ECI Media Management and ISBA argues the bigger losses happen far earlier, when campaigns are optimized toward metrics that do not reflect the outcomes the advertiser actually wants.
The paper maps where value leaks across the full media investment lifecycle, from planning through measurement to agency governance, and dismantles a few comfortable myths along the way, including the idea that a lower price automatically means better value.
Most practically, it arms advertisers with ten questions to ask their agencies to surface improvement opportunities, which makes it less a report and more a meeting agenda. Download it before your next agency governance review.
Download the whitepaper →A focused discussion to understand your situation and determine the right starting point for your marketing procurement practice.
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