Who writes the report on how your budget went
It is the most normalised conflict of interest in marketing, it is almost never said out loud, and it is entirely solvable by changing one thing about how your supplier is paid.
Umer Ejaz Chaudhry, Cadral AI ·
We build and run advertising campaigns, and we charge a flat fee for it rather than a percentage of what you spend.
That is a deliberate choice about structure rather than a pricing quirk. The reasoning is worth setting out, because it applies to whoever you end up hiring and not only to us.
The structure, stated plainly
In the normal arrangement, the party spending your money is also the party telling you how well the money was spent. They choose which metrics appear, over what window, against which comparison.
None of that is fraud and we are not suggesting it is. It is simply an awkward arrangement that the industry has normalised to the point where it is rarely said out loud.
Plenty of agencies manage it well, with genuinely independent reporting and people who will tell a client to spend less. The structure is still there underneath, doing quiet work on which questions get asked.
It gets sharper where the fee is a percentage of spend. The supplier earns more when you spend more, so every recommendation to raise budget also raises their own invoice. Again: not corrupt. Just a thing worth knowing about whoever is advising you.
What a percentage quietly buys
Consider the sentences that become expensive to say under a percentage model. “This campaign is not working, turn it off.” “You are at the point where more budget stops helping.” “Spend less this quarter and fix your landing page instead.”
Every one of those is sometimes the correct advice, and every one of them costs the supplier money. You are relying entirely on their professionalism to say it anyway.
Most will. But you have arranged things so that being right is punished, and then hoped it does not matter.
A flat fee removes the question. Recommending you spend less costs us nothing, which is the only arrangement where you can take the recommendation at face value.
What to ask, whoever you hire
Ask how they are paid, and ask it early. Not because a percentage model means someone is dishonest, but because you cannot interpret their advice without knowing.
It is the same reason you would want to know whether a financial adviser earns commission on what they recommend.
Then ask a second question: who produces the report. If the answer is the same party that spends the budget, that is normal, and it is worth having at least one number you can verify yourself, from a source they do not control.
Both questions are entirely fair, and how someone reacts to being asked tells you more than the answer does.
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