The Cost of Keeping Quiet
- Feb 17
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 20
The marketing industry spends more than $4,350 per U.S. household each year. Some analysts estimate that over 20 percent of that spend is lost to waste and fraud, roughly $40 to $60 billion annually. With numbers like that, you would expect media quality to be treated as a serious business risk. Instead, it is often ignored.
A conspiracy is commonly defined as a secret plan by a group to do something harmful or unlawful. Conspiracies only work when people stay quiet. While not every instance of waste or misconduct in media is coordinated, the persistence of these problems depends on a similar dynamic. There is an unwritten rule that discourages those closest to the money from speaking publicly about what they see.
Most people working in media know the plumbing is broken. They see reporting on low-quality inventory quietly removed from client decks. They see platforms take away controls while promising better outcomes. They see partnerships continue long after they should be questioned. And yet, the buy side rarely speaks openly about these realities.
That silence is not accidental, rather it is required for the current system to function.
Why This Story and Why These Voices
This piece is based on the firsthand experiences of Sarah Caputo and David Nyurenberg. Both have spent their careers inside the systems. Between them, they have overseen and audited hundreds of millions of dollars in digital media investment, led in-housing efforts at Fortune 100 brands, built modern ad tech stacks, and been accountable for real business outcomes rather than vanity metrics.
What sets this perspective apart is proximity. They have been close enough to the money, incentives, and internal conversations to see where the system repeatedly breaks down and how often those breakdowns are ignored, rationalized, or quietly buried. This is not an abstract critique. It is a record of what happens when people who understand the risks are implicitly rewarded for staying quiet but refuse.
When Revenue Comes Before the Truth: David’s Experience
Agency holding companies operate under constant commercial pressure. Margins are thin. Revenue targets are aggressive. Success is often measured by how much spend flows through the system, not by how much waste is avoided. In that environment, questioning media quality can quickly become a liability.
David experienced this earlier in his career at the holding company Dentsu. After being promoted into a role with ownership over media strategy and buying decisions, he was told he now had real influence over how client dollars were spent. On paper, that was true. In practice, the role came with unspoken limits.
As he pushed harder on media quality, questioning heavy reliance on the open exchange, challenging low-quality supply, and advocating for a cleaner publisher ecosystem, it became clear those positions were supported only as long as they did not conflict with commercial priorities. Scale and margin still mattered more than quality.
Despite strong day-to-day performance and a recent promotion, David was placed on a performance improvement plan. The feedback was not about missed goals or client dissatisfaction. It focused on his continued internal criticism of the media being purchased. He was explicitly told that raising concerns about the media itself was creating internal problems and would result in his termination.
This experience is not shared as a grievance. It was formative. It clarified how incentive structures shape behavior. As Charlie Munger famously said, show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. Even high performers are expected to stop short of challenging the system that generates revenue. What should be seen as advocating for the best interests of your clients is instead labeled disruption.
The Web That Protects the System
The industry often talks about accountability, but its structure makes real scrutiny uncomfortable. Agencies, platforms, data providers, and intermediaries are tightly interconnected, frequently reselling one another’s technology, data, and access. Once a vendor is labeled a strategic partner, meaningful oversight often slows or stops.
When problematic and concerning issues arise with core partners, the fear of what could happen if we push too hard is all too palpable. Will access be restricted? Will future deals be affected? To avoid pulling on those threads, systemic problems are often reframed as isolated technical issues. The relationship is preserved, even when the underlying problem remains unresolved.
Over time, vendors stop being treated strictly as service providers and start being treated as relationships that must be managed. In that environment, silence is not just encouraged. It is enforced by the structure itself.
The Fog That Protects Bad Actors
Waste also persists because buyers rarely share findings across organizations that compete aggressively with one another. The result is a form of information isolation that closely resembles what military theorists call the fog of war. Decisions are made with incomplete visibility and fragmented information.
Each holding company treats its findings as proprietary. In practice, this secrecy does not create an advantage. It creates cover. Many buyers are seeing the same low-quality inventory, the same opaque supply paths, and the same vendor behavior. Without shared visibility, these patterns remain deniable.
This problem is compounded by technical imbalance. The people building the platforms understand the mechanics far better than most of the people using them. When one side controls both the system and the explanation of how it works, scrutiny feels risky, especially when confidence is lacking. Uncertainty discourages accountability, and silence reinforces itself.
The Problem with Convenience: Sarah’s Experience
On the brand side, convenience often replaces control. Platforms present themselves as all-in-one solutions that are difficult to understand and even harder to leave. Buyers accept the loss of data ownership because resisting requires technical effort, political capital, and time most teams do not have.
Sarah saw this firsthand while overseeing a media budget of more than $200 million at Allstate and leading the in-housing of digital programs. Despite being a Fortune 100 company, she discovered Allstate did not own its paid social ad account or the underlying data, assets that contractually belonged to the agency, a very well known and leading consultancy company.
When the relationship was terminated and the program brought in-house, the agency refused to release access. Recovering those assets required navigating procurement, escalating internally, and applying pressure through unrelated consulting contracts. What should have taken one conversation took weeks.
This behavior is familiar to many brand-side leaders. Convenience quietly becomes dependency. Dependency erodes control. Loss of control breeds unexpected consequences.
Breaking the Silence
Silence has allowed waste and low-quality media to become normal. The buy side is positioned as the last line of defense for clients, but that responsibility means little if it is not exercised.
The industry will not change because platforms launch new features or pretend to have the best interests of the industry at heart while only being accountable to Wall Street. It changes when staying quiet becomes riskier than speaking up. That does not always mean going public. It can start with talking to reporters “in background,” sharing anonymized patterns with peers, and supporting independent researchers who can publish without fear of retaliation.
That responsibility extends beyond buyers. Good actors on the tech side need to stop staying quiet, too. Do fewer vanity events. Invest in substantive education. Use real examples, not massaged case studies. Support neutral voices that can explain what “good” actually looks like across platforms.
Silence is not neutral. It protects the status quo.
The Cost of Staying Quiet
When waste and unethical behavior are ignored, the cost does not disappear. It compounds and becomes embedded in pricing. Those costs extend beyond media teams and marketing decks. They show up as higher prices for products, services, and subscriptions.
For people who never opted into this system, that hidden waste functions like an unspoken tax. Silence is not just a cultural failure. It is an economic choice that transfers cost from the industry to the public.
Until those closest to the money are willing to break it, the system will continue to reward silence over scrutiny, and everyone else will keep paying the price.
About the Authors
Sarah Caputo is a marketing strategist and independent consultant focused on eliminating waste and improving efficiencies. She specializes in auditing and optimizing large-scale investments, helping brands connect spend to real business outcomes. Sarah led the in-housing of paid media and tech stack ownership at Allstate, managing over $200M annually, and has built marketing capabilities across insurance, CPG, startups and agencies. She now advises brands and technology companies on GTM strategy, program audits, and media optimization, guided by a belief that the industry must take waste and unethical practices seriously.
David Nyurenberg is a senior digital advertising executive known for challenging legacy programmatic models and advancing privacy-forward media strategies. He is SVP of Digital at InterMedia Advertising, where he leads Connected TV, streaming, and performance media strategy with a focus on quality, fraud prevention, and post-cookie targeting. David has won three AdExchanger Awards for his work in CTV and is a frequent speaker recognized for his candid, data-driven perspective on the future of digital media.
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