The Fox Guarding the Henhouse
Here’s the open secret: in paid media, the fox is guarding the henhouse—and every fox is just a little hungry for chicken. The platforms, agencies, and marketing teams that should be controlling ad spend are also the ones who benefit when that spend grows. Everyone in the system has a subtle incentive to let the budget balloon. Efficiency, on the other hand, doesn’t pay nearly as well.
The issue isn’t malice; it’s structure. Platforms make money when ads run. Agencies make money as budgets increase. Even internal marketing departments gain perceived importance when the numbers swell. No one is incentivized to question the spend too closely. So inefficiencies—unseen or unchallenged—compound quietly over time.
That’s how a million-dollar media budget can drift into two million with only marginally better results. It’s how wasted impressions, misaligned targeting, and misreported results persist in plain sight. When every player in the system benefits from volume, waste becomes invisible by design.
At Media Audit Group, we come from a different discipline. Think of us less as marketers and more as forensic accountants. Our only job is to follow the money—to trace, test, and verify whether your paid media is doing the job it was meant to do. We don’t manage campaigns, we don’t take commissions, and we don’t sell ads. We simply make sure every dollar is working as hard as it can.
Because in a system where everyone’s a little hungry for eggs, someone needs to guard the henhouse.
For CFOs and finance leaders, media efficiency isn’t just a marketing concern—it’s a governance issue. A paid media audit can reveal how much of your budget is actually performing, and how much is simply feeding the system. At Media Audit Group, we help organizations gain independent oversight of their paid media investments—bringing transparency, accountability, and measurable financial discipline to one of the least-scrutinized areas of modern business.
About Media Audit Group
Media Audit Group provides independent audits of paid media investments for corporate finance and procurement teams. Modeled on traditional financial assurance practices, the firm applies forensic accounting principles to digital advertising—tracing spend, verifying performance, and identifying structural inefficiencies across agency and platform ecosystems. Headquartered in Ontario, Canada, Media Audit Group operates internationally through a network of affiliated partners.
