Can Marketers and Agencies Align Their Priorities When It Comes to Compensation?

A recent ANA study shows the need for greater transparency between the two sides

When Jared Belsky, CEO and co-founder of digital marketing agency Acadia, announced in February that he had returned rebates from publishers to 53 clients, he was sounding an alarm to the marketing and advertising industry. Belsky wrote an op-ed in Adweek calling out other agencies for not refunding rebates while launching a website to help marketers understand the issue.

The article was initially met with some skepticism, according to Belsky, but, days later, a whistleblower lawsuit revealed that WPP had received up to $1 billion in rebates annually that were not returned to clients. “This is an agency fraud problem, and candidly, a client undereducation problem,” Belsky says. “Agencies are stewards of their clients’ money. They should make a fair wage, but it should be negotiated upfront, and then everything else should be passed through. You should not need a law degree to understand how to write that into a contract.”

For marketers, it can be frustrating to lack insights about how their agency partners are spending their investment and expending on non-transparent practices — such as not returning rebates, selling principal media, or charging fees for “labor” carried out by artificial intelligence (AI) — which only adds fuel to the fire.

4As President of Member Solutions weighed in for this article, saying, “Many compensation structures have remained rooted in time-based models that don’t align with marketers’ business objectives. We’re now seeing a shift toward more flexible, hybrid approaches that better reflect the complexity of modern marketing.”