Marketing consolidation and insourcing
A second stakeholder, in a different business unit, saw the result and independently followed the same move. Between the two: both external agencies were let go, ad management moved in-house to my team, and the saving came back to the business with no drop in pipeline.
Vehicle — the practitioner
Vehicle — collaborators
Interface — what was deliveredAd spend was running through two external agencies. Nobody could confirm it was ROI positive — not the company, not the agencies. The agencies themselves had been asking for tracking access and hadn't gotten it.
I proposed a bounded, reversible test to a business unit stakeholder rather than debating the question indefinitely: pause his agency's spend for a month and watch for negative impact. He ran it, found none, and we killed the spend for his business unit entirely — still no impact. That converted an open question into evidence.
A second stakeholder, in a different business unit, saw the result and independently followed the same move. Between the two: both external agencies were let go, ad management moved in-house to my team, and the saving came back to the business with no drop in pipeline.
The business was healthy and spending on ads, so the two got folded together: ads must be contributing. Nobody was structurally motivated to test that. The agencies bill hours, not outcomes, so raising "you may not need us" was never in their interest. Internally, the same untracked spend had just become part of how things worked. The question wasn't hard to ask — it was that nobody had a reason to.
A negative result is still a result — "no impact" from cutting spend isn't a failed search for impact, it's the finding. Small, cheap, reversible tests beat months of internal debate, and they beat them specifically because they replace an opinion with evidence a skeptic can't easily wave off. The incentive design matters more than anyone's intentions: an agency's business model rewards hours, not proof of ROI, so the case for cutting has to come from inside the company, on its own initiative — nobody on the vendor side is going to build the case against themselves.
Engagements and outcomes, anonymized. Details on request.