Angela Smith, Matt Batten and Bill Luu. Credit: AFFINITY.
Australian marketers are sitting on millions in wasted media spend and, in many cases, don’t know it.
AFFINITY’s leadership sat down with AdNews to detail how the problem of media waste has become so entrenched that many brands now see it as unavoidable.
In creating its new Media+ solution, built as a direct response to a system they argue has normalised inefficiency, the agency was able to uncover greater insights around media waste.
Media waste is not a fresh topic, but the scale outlined by AFFINITY is jarring.
Annual ad spend in Australia is close to $30 billion and the agency points to internal industry research showing an average 20% of that is wasted across channels.
This aligns with findings from Next&Co’s Q2 2024 Digital Media Wastage report, which audited 37 companies and found that 44% of digital ad spend was wasted in just one quarter, totaling A$123.1 million.
It’s a number they say matches the results they’ve uncovered inside client accounts and the catalyst for developing Media+.
Most marketers won’t be surprised that inefficiency exists, but the bluntness of the number could come as a shock to many.
AFFINITY points to a $5 million spender typically wasting around $1 million.
Next&Co’s report reinforces this scale.
Retail alone accounted for AUD$48 million of wasted spend, with finance (AUD$32 million) and real estate (AUD$16 million) also heavily impacted, highlighting how pervasive inefficiency is across industries.
Executive creative director, AFFINITY, Matt Batten, put it plainly.
“What could you do with that? You could decrease your media spend for the same results,” he told AdNews.
“Or you could drive that money into the right spots to increase results. Or you could buy yourself a private jet.”
AFFINITY Group Co-founder and CEO, Angela Smith, told AdNews marketers often assume such work requires econometric modelling or months of analysis.
The agency argues that it doesn’t.
But the bigger story isn’t the tool. It’s the claim that media waste is now systemic and no longer an occasional by-product of poor buying or sloppy reporting.
This is the part likely to interest agency stakeholders, how the system, not individuals, is driving the waste.
Batten said waste has become systemic and institutionalised and is showing up everywhere. In false impressions, in bottom-of-funnel overspend, in broken attribution and in platform-defined metrics that favour volume over value.
He cited one example that often infuriates creatives.
“A great ad that’s wasted is a waste of a great ad,” he said.
Smith talked through the four areas AFFINITY sees repeatedly inside client accounts, media waste, measurement waste, signal waste and operational waste.
Media waste, she said, comes from channel fragmentation and internal pressure to be on everything.
Many marketers feel pushed to add TikTok, gaming, OOH and emerging channels even when budgets can’t support them.
Next&Co’s data shows the platform-level dimension of waste.
Google accounted for AUD$55.4 million, Meta (Facebook & Instagram) AUD$52.9 million, Bing AUD$8.6 million, and LinkedIn AUD$6.1 million in wasted spend, illustrating how certain platforms drive outsized inefficiencies.
Measurement and signal waste are the quieter killers.
Smith pointed to tags built incorrectly, attribution that double-counts leads and tracking that breaks without anyone noticing.
One business, she said, was costing itself millions because it was double-attributing leads.
The people closest to the budgets, the agency planners and performance teams, are not the villains of this story.
Bill Luu, head of media at AFFINITY, said many clients rely heavily on agencies to interpret whether their spend is working, but the KPIs are often unclear and the incentives misaligned.
“Marketers and brands completely trusting agencies… they don’t question what’s happening,” he told AdNews.
“They feel like they’re getting what they paid for, but they don’t really understand what they’re being measured on or what effectiveness actually is.”
Smith said agencies are usually relieved when AFFINITY’s diagnosis uncovers what isn’t working.
“The system is broken, not the people,” Smith said.
Smith and Batten paint a picture of a market slowly boiling like the frog in the pot analogy.
Marketers are stretched, reporting cycles are relentless and teams lack the time or resourcing to unpick hundreds of small problems. Waste compounds over time until it feels normal.
Smith said small inefficiencies layer into large ones, for example, five percent from duplicated impressions, ten percent from wrong frequency settings and more from audience overlaps or poor channel sequencing.
Batten said Media+ was developed because the team felt they had to step into the gap.
“Someone needs to look into this,” he said.
“We’re trying to help. Not blaming individuals but blaming the system. Let’s fix the system.”
The agency positions Media+ as a strategic control system rather than a planning or buying product.
These outcomes echo Next&Co’s warnings that even high-spend, sophisticated brands can recover tens of millions per quarter if inefficiencies are properly addressed, reinforcing AFFINITY’s point that waste is both systemic and financially material.
They point to client results where spend was reduced while sales grew.
One key AFFINITY client was down 30% in media with sales up, another brand reduced waste by 29% and still increased sales, while another recovered 37% of waste and lifted sales.
The larger point AFFINITY makes is that recovering waste gives marketers political capital internally.
Smith said once CFOs and CEOs see the number in black and white, they want action.
She said the industry can’t get to zero waste but if marketers can reclaim even a fraction, they can fund the projects they’ve deferred, build brands properly and stop treating waste as the cost of doing business.
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