The High Price of Low Fees

Who doesn’t love low fees? 🙋🏻

Let’s be honest, everyone loves the feeling of getting a deal. That’s the human insight so many agencies use when creating new pricing structures with incredibly low fees.

But here’s the secret: When an agency promises a fee that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. They plan to make their money somewhere else, most often working media budget.

As a truly independent partner, we stick to one simple rule: You see the fee.

This is the critical difference between us and agencies that make money on the inventory they sell.

Those companies are structurally designed to profit from markups, not service. They will always drop the fee you see, because that’s not actually where they make their money.

This system creates misaligned incentives:

- Inventory Resale: They buy ad space and sell it back to you at a higher price.

- Ad Tax: Opaque markups on things like custom inventory lists, data partners,

- Proprietary Push: They force you to use their own tools which have a black box measurement or targeting approach.

- Dual Interests: Kick backs, margins and other unclear or unspoken fee collection. The final result? Your media dollar is worth less.

The ANA famously reported two years ago that only 1/3rd of programmatic dollars make it to legitimate inventory sources. Where does the rest go? Ad tech fees, margin mark up, made for advertising websites and so on. We’ll dive more into this topic in another post.

So what to do?

Find an agency partner where the fee is transparent and easily understood. An agency who:

- Is aligned to win when you win

- They focus on buying inventory as close to the source as possible

- Puts strategy over profit

The ultimate goal is simple: Demand complete clarity and confidence. Every recommendation must be about your success.

Stop accepting fuzzy answers and get to the truth with these critical questions:

- Are They Truly Independent?

- Do They Grade Their Own Homework?

- Do They Resell Inventory?

- Do They Have Hidden Interests?

- Are They Platform-Agnostic?

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