What's a media management fee, and should it be 15%?

We were walking a client through a proposal not long ago, and he stopped us.

"Talk to me again. What's the media management fee? The 15%?"

Good. Ask. You should know exactly where every dollar goes.

Simple version: your ad budget goes to the platforms. The management fee pays the people steering it. A lot of agencies charge 15% of spend, which has been the industry standard for a long time. We charge a flat monthly fee instead.

What you're paying for

• Building the campaigns, the audiences, and the tracking
• Launching new creative and rotating out what's tired
• Adjusting budgets and bids every week
• Killing what doesn't work and scaling what does
• Telling you what happened and what we're changing next

The math

Say you're spending $10,000 a month on ads.

At 15%, the fee is $1,500, and the full $10,000 still goes to Meta or Google. Your total is $11,500. With a flat fee, our number doesn't change when your spend does.

That's it. No mystery.

That fee is supposed to buy results. When we ran Google Ads for the apparel line at Awaken with JP, the campaigns hit a 270% return on ad spend. That doesn't happen by setting it and forgetting it. It comes from someone in the account every week, moving money toward what's working.

Percentage or flat fee?

The case for a percentage is that bigger budgets take more work. The catch is that it pays the agency more when you spend more, whether or not the spend is working. We use a flat fee so the only thing we're chasing is results. You pay for the work: setup, management, four new ads a month, and a weekly report.

Three questions worth asking anyone

• Is creative production included, or is that separate?
• Is the fee based on what you planned to spend, or what actually got spent?
• If we part ways, who owns the ad accounts?

That last one should always be you.

Ad management is our Paid Growth offer. Send us your budget and we'll show you how spend and fees would break down.