The IAS Media Assurance Masterclass Series reveals 70% of procurement professionals are overwhelmed by marketing contracts while agencies quietly exploit the gaps.
In an increasingly complex and fragmented marketing landscape, contract compliance has become more than a legal formality; it’s a financial necessity. That’s the message from the latest Media Marketing Compliance (MCC) Masterclass, hosted by the Independent Agency Search & Selection Company (IAS), where marketing procurement professionals faced an uncomfortable truth: contracts are no longer keeping up with the pace of change.
Led by Stephen Broderick, senior partner at MCC, and Jane Dormer, client Services director, the session laid bare the sheer scale of the challenge.
“Contracts can be full of grey areas that aren’t always obvious at first glance,” said Broderick. “If you’re not actively monitoring them, it’s easy for costs to slip through the cracks.”
The perfect storm
Remember when life was simple? Back in the noughties, marketers typically worked with a handful of partners – media, OOH, creative, BTL, PR, activation. Contracts were often flimsy, sometimes not even signed.
Fast forward, and the ecosystem is far more complex. The 2010s introduced principal-based media, programmatic trading, social platforms and decoupled content production. The 2020s have added e-commerce, influencer deals, retail media and affiliate networks to the mix.
Now AI has arrived, raising fresh challenges around IP, data rights and third-party compliance. Contracts have skyrocketed – not just in number, but in length, growing from handshakes to 100-page tomes.
Dormer sums up the pressure: “Procurement budgets and staffing haven’t kept up. You now need specialists for everything from software services to programmatic, forcing teams to prioritise which contracts get attention.”
The margin squeeze reality
The traditional high-volume media cash cow is officially dead. Meta, Google and Amazon have disrupted the volume game, and retail media is increasingly cutting agencies out.
The pressure to extract margin has intensified dramatically. Agencies, often over-resourced and stuck in outdated models, still need to hit historical margins. The solution? Mine every contractual ambiguity and leverage client blind spots across the entire marketing supply chain.
Consider this jaw-dropper: a recent ANA study on programmatic media found that 70% of the total budget – including agency fees – wasn’t going to ads ever seen by human eyes. That’s not advertising; that’s an expensive game of digital hide-and-seek.
The wake-up call
MMC advertiser research shows 62% cite time pressure as the biggest obstacle to effective contract management. It’s a catch-22: the more complex the contracts, the less time teams have to manage them properly, opening the very blind spots agencies exploit.
The path forward
The solution isn’t complicated, but it does require a fundamental shift in approach.
Clients need to demand more. More clarity. More proof. And more compliance. That means shifting from ‘money back’ to ‘value gained’ thinking, appointing transparent partners, and investing in real-time compliance platforms.
Johanna McDowell, CEO of the Independent Agency Search & Selection Company (IAS), believes these conversations are long overdue.
“We commissioned this masterclass because marketers are haemorrhaging value through poor contract visibility. It’s not just about clawing back margin, it’s about building fair, modern partnerships that reflect today’s supply chain.”
The takeaway
Take a breath. Then take a long, hard look at your contracts. Because in a media world where margins are shrinking and agencies are scrambling, the real power may lie in the fine print. The days of treating contracts as afterthoughts are over.
The question isn’t whether your procurement team can afford to get serious about contracts, it’s whether you can afford not to.
The IAS (Independent Agency Search and Selection Company) in association with the AAR Group (UK) was founded in South Africa in 2006. IAS specialises in client/agency relationship management and helping clients find agencies.
International associate company AAR Group was founded more than 40 years ago in the UK and has associates and branches throughout the world.
The Independent Agency Search & Selection Company is committed to the international and local pitch guidelines as defined by both the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising UK) and the ACA (The Association of Communications Agencies SA).
