Smarter Media for Tougher Times: Why the Model Needs to Change

The phrase ‘do more with less’ has become ubiquitous across the industry. In fact, it’s become a cliché throughout lift during these uncertain times. But strip away the buzzword noise, and what it actually describes is this: your clients haven't reduced their expectations, they've just reduced what they're willing to spend to meet them. Because they have to. But in the same breath, timelines haven't gotten longer. Scrutiny hasn't eased. And nothing else has slowed down either.

I speak to agency leaders almost every day, and the pressure is real and consistent - showing up not just in budget conversations, but in team capacity, in burnout, in the quiet exhaustion of being asked to deliver more with fewer people and tighter margins. The IAB tells us 70% of UK advertisers say they're under increased pressure to prove ROI. WARC states that over 60% of marketers say economic uncertainty is directly affecting media investment decisions. 

This isn't a niche problem. It's an industry-wide condition. 

We've been building on the wrong foundations

What makes the current moment particularly challenging is that the media industry's response to pressure has historically been to add more; more platforms, more tools, more layers of optimisation, and more reporting. The result is a landscape that is more fragmented, more complex, and unsurprisingly, less efficient.

The social giants capture somewhere between 50 and 60% of global ad spend. Yet 61% of time online is still spent on the open web. We're concentrating investment where it's easiest to buy, not necessarily where the audience actually is, and that’s a bit worrying.

But the deeper issue isn't fragmentation. It's that the media industry has been built around a set of trade-offs that nobody ever properly questioned.

If you wanted high-quality creative, it came at a higher cost. If you wanted scale, you sacrificed control. If you wanted performance, it required more time, more resources, more optimisation. These compromises became so normalised that they stopped being questioned, and in doing so, they became the ceiling on what campaigns could achieve.

The cost we stopped seeing

There is a hidden tax sitting inside almost every digital campaign, and almost nobody is talking about it.

When a video ad buffers, stalls, or fails to load, the impression is still counted. The budget is still spent. The user sees a blank box, or nothing at all. And the brand pays for it anyway.

This is a delivery problem, and it's happening quietly across the industry. Legacy download technology was built for small and compressed static banners, not the era where expectations on creativity and attention are higher than ever. It struggles with the weight of modern video, the diversity of devices and connection speeds, the scale at which we now need to serve high-quality creative. The result is wasted budget that never makes it to a human eye, to the tune of over $10 billion globally every year.

That's not a rounding error. That's a structural inefficiency that sits at the foundation of how we deliver digital advertising.

We know the cost of everything. But the value of nothing

Alongside the delivery problem, there's a measurement problem that is equally significant.

As an industry, we've become extraordinarily good at measuring what things cost. CPM, CPCV, CPC - these metrics are precise, comparable, and universally understood. What we've been less good at is measuring whether the media actually worked. 

A viewable impression - 50% of pixels in view for display - was considered a meaningful standard in 2015. In 2026, that's not a human seeing your ad. That's a technical pass. It tells you the ad had an opportunity to be seen. It tells you nothing about whether it was.

The distinction matters enormously when budgets are under pressure. Because if you're optimising toward a proxy for value rather than value itself, you're making planning decisions on incomplete information. You might be cutting the wrong things, scaling the wrong formats, and measuring success in ways that don't connect to actual business outcomes.

This is what I think of as the value gap, and it's one of the most important conversations the industry needs to have right now.

Nailing the basics

Before a user can engage with a message, the ad needs to appear. Quickly. Without interrupting or frustrating the browsing experience. 

If those conditions aren't met, even the best creative in the world is working against the clock from the first frame.

In partnership with Lumen Research, we tested this directly. Comparing adaptive streaming delivery against traditional download-based out-stream video, across real campaign environments and independently verified attention measurement, the results were unambiguous. Adaptive streaming delivered 240% more attentive seconds and 45% more genuine human attention, with significantly greater scale for the same investment.

The mechanism is straightforward: attention starts from the very first pixel. No buffering, no blank box, no moment where the user has already scrolled past before the creative loads. Adaptive streaming makes this possible—serving video instantly, across any device, connection speed, or environment.

A future pinned by efficiency

The trade-offs between cost, quality, and scale are not inevitable. The idea that efficiency and impact are in tension is not a law of physics. It's a product of the infrastructure that we have come to accept.

Doing more with less doesn't have to mean working harder. It can mean working on better foundations.