The most expensive line item in marketing isn’t media, it’s the handoffs

This piece distils my learning from running marketing teams across large and medium size businesses, with tight budgets, headcount freezes and growing targets — and what I learnt when it comes to managing expenses and expectations.

See if this rings a bell.

Mid-week. Big launch being planned. The CMO has all the check boxes addressed — the strategy is finally agreed upon, the leadership team is aligned, the positioning makes sense. The ball gets rolling.

The CMO explains it to the agency. The agency turns it into a brief. The content team interprets the brief. The digital team adapts it for channels. Performance marketing optimises it for clicks and conversion. Sales receives the leads and asks what campaign they came from. Somewhere along the way, operations discovers that something promised in the communication isn't quite how the product works.

Nobody has done anything obviously wrong. Yet what reaches the customer can be several degrees removed from what was agreed in that first room. It is a little like Chinese whispers, except with PowerPoint, purchase orders and quarterly targets.

We spend enormous time scrutinising the visible costs of marketing — media, agencies, people, technology. Procurement negotiates another 5% off the agency retainer. Media teams push for a better CPM. Someone asks whether we really need all those MarTech licences. All sensible questions.

But there is another cost sitting quietly between the rows of the spreadsheet: the cost created every time strategy changes hands.

Every handoff takes a little something away

A handoff sounds harmless. Work moves from one specialist to another. That is how organisations are supposed to operate — right? Most of us know that is not how it actually pans out. Context gets lost, priorities get interpreted, questions travel backwards, approvals pile up, and teams optimise for different things. The strategy team is measured on the quality of the thinking. The agency on the creative. Performance marketing on conversion. Sales on revenue. All perfectly reasonable.

But who owns the space between them?

McKinsey's work on operating models makes an important point here: strategy on its own does not create performance. Organisations need operating models built around clarity, speed, capability and accountability. The issue is not simply whether every team is good at its job. It is whether the work survives the journey between teams.

Take a familiar example. Leadership decides the company needs to move from being seen as a "technology vendor" to a "strategic business partner". Marketing converts that into a brand brief. The agency creates a campaign proposition. Content turns it into messaging pillars. Performance marketing discovers that "reduce operating cost by 22%" gets better clicks, so that becomes the dominant message. Three months later, leadership asks why the market still sees the company as a technology vendor.

This is not incompetence. It is organisational physics. Every translation creates another opportunity for strategy to lose resolution.

We keep trying to make execution cheaper

This becomes more relevant because marketing budgets are hardly overflowing. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey found budgets essentially flat at 7.7% of company revenue, while a large proportion of CMOs said they did not have enough budget to execute their strategy. The same research found 39% planned to reduce agency spending — cutting underperforming relationships, consolidating rosters or renegotiating scopes.

Again, perfectly logical. But reducing agency fees while maintaining a system that requires five teams to interpret, approve and reinterpret every piece of work is a bit like negotiating a discount on petrol while leaving the engine running overnight.

BCG's research adds another useful perspective. In one recent study, 68% of consumer-goods marketing leaders cited organisational silos and weak internal collaboration as major barriers to more integrated growth. In organisations that responded by bringing functions together into cross-functional teams with shared objectives, speed and coordination improved.

It sounds almost embarrassingly obvious — put the people responsible for the outcome closer together. Yet many marketing organisations are still built around specialist functions rather than customer outcomes. Brand sits here. Digital sits there. CRM may sit with technology. Analytics is somewhere else. Sales is another organisation altogether.

The customer, inconveniently, experiences all of them as one company.

The most expensive handoff may be marketing to sales

Nowhere is this more visible than in B2B marketing.

Forrester found an interesting disconnect: 82% of C-level B2B leaders believed sales, marketing and product were aligned, while 65% of sales and marketing professionals reported a lack of alignment between their leaders.

I love this statistic because it captures something many of us have seen. From 30,000 feet, the organisation looks beautifully aligned. At ground level, somebody is still arguing about what qualifies as a lead.

Marketing says, "We delivered 1,200 MQLs." Sales says, "But none of them are ready to buy." Marketing says sales is not following them up. Sales says marketing does not understand the customer.

And somewhere, a potential buyer quietly buys from someone else.

This is rarely fixed by another dashboard. It is fixed when marketing and sales agree on the buyer, the commercial objective, the definition of value and the outcome they jointly own. That requires more than alignment meetings. It requires operating design.

AI is about to make the problem harder to ignore

AI is making individual marketing tasks dramatically faster. The important part is not simply that AI can write the content faster. It is that when production takes minutes, waiting becomes much more expensive.

If AI reduces content creation from three days to three minutes, but the campaign still waits eleven days for eight approvals, the bottleneck becomes painfully obvious. We have optimised the wrong part.

This is why I think marketing's next big efficiency frontier is not simply generating more with fewer people. It is redesigning how work moves.

What if strategy, content, demand generation, analytics and sales were involved from the beginning of an important growth initiative? What if they shared one commercial outcome instead of five functional KPIs? What if the person making the strategic call stayed close enough to execution to notice when reality contradicted the deck?

Specialists would still matter enormously. But expertise does not have to mean distance.

Maybe we need a red pen before another cost-cutting exercise

If I were looking at a marketing operating model today, I would start with one important piece of work — a product launch, a market-entry programme or a demand-generation campaign. Then map its journey from decision to customer. Every team. Every brief. Every approval. Every agency. Every system. Every point where someone waits for somebody else.

Then take out a red pen.

Not every handoff is bad. Some add expertise. Some reduce risk. Some genuinely improve the decision. But every handoff should have to justify its existence. Because the most expensive marketing problem may not be that your agency charges too much, your media costs are rising or your technology stack is bloated. It may simply be that too many people are being paid to translate the same idea for one another.

In a nutshell: marketing's next efficiency frontier may not be cheaper execution. It may be fewer translations between thinking and doing.

So, the most expensive line item in marketing isn't media, it's the handoffs.

---

If this rings a bell in your organisation, book a consultation or read about how CMO++ works.