A paid media landscape is a garden to tend to. And with any garden the weeds never stop trying to grow. Anyone who has worked in paid media long enough knows that there is waste. Keywords to be pruned, ads to archive and retire, redundant audience targets trying to sell you a second dishwasher because no normal person buys a second dishwasher...

Lean marketing is hard.

CMO's have an ongoing responsibility to answer the same question to the CFO and the board every day - "Where is our money going and is any of it being wasted?"

How can we combat Media Overgrowth? Ongoing discipline.

That discipline starts with a 3rd party Lean Marketing Audit.

The reality is that we can't trust marketing to tell us that the money they are spending is being spent well. The conflict of interest of grading your own homework is too strong.

The other reality is that Finance should not be doing the audit without the understanding of a balanced funnel. This leads to resentment and fear across the organization.

And Analytics always ends up in the middle of this exchange and the politics can be far reaching across the organization.

This is why bringing in a neutral 3rd party that isn't afraid to expose waste, isn't motivated by purely cutting costs, and doesn't have long term cross functional relationships to maintain is the best option.

3rd Party Lean Marketing audits provide the Marketing Org a clean bill of health on bloat and waste, provide Finance the insight and validation that the money is being well invested, and saves analytics the pain of appearing biased allowing them to continue to cross collaborate without fear of a hidden agenda.